Moving forward – Rest Less

There’s something so exciting about the expectation of spring in the garden, though I confess, it’s always tinged with a little disappointment, as – inspections over – myself and the sausages count our losses.

The wet weather has compounded the losses over the last two years as the frost has rotted some of my giant agapanthus (again!). It seems I can’t win with these lovable plants, their giant purple heads bigger than my own when they’re happy. I’ve tried putting them away for the winter in a greenhouse, leaving them in the garden (which is sheltered) and doing nothing except moving them to the most protected spots or wrapping them up, all with limited success. Maybe I’ve just gotten my timing wrong: when to cover them up and pop them back out! All I know is I’ve lost at least one. Last year, I lost three, and the others didn’t flower, which broke my heart.

I pootle about, inspecting pots for signs of new growth: tiny green shoots emerging, cutting back all the old dead growth that they’ve been hiding underneath.

Of course, I’m no gardener, and I never have been. Growing up as I did, with only a balcony at the top of a block of flats, I had no garden history, but I’ll never forget the first time I lived in a house with a garden. It sowed seeds in me; it amazed and delighted me so that, moving forward, I knew I simply couldn’t live without a garden. 

Okay, having started with a lawn, I quickly learned that when owning dogs, it wasn’t ideal. In my first house, my three German Shepherds and one Jack Russel turned our small lawn into a re-enactment of the Somme in a matter of weeks. That said, being outside where I can sit privately and watch the world go by is incredibly precious to me. Though I have two small beds of hardy shrubs and a small tree, my garden is full of pots of panicled hydrangeas, scented roses, peonies, agapanthus and hardy geraniums (cranesbill). 

Then there are the pots and wall tubs, which I love to fill with a riot of colour; perennials and annuals grown and bought locally, which I plant every year. Precious to me is my slow-growing Ginkgo biloba tree in a large pot that was given to me as a leaving gift by my neighbour, a kind, serious young man whom I befriended in those final years in London and who worked as a nurseryman at Kew. It’s actually bequeathed in my will, so valuable is it to me as my own tree of life and new beginnings, brought here where I knew nothing and no one, my first tentative steps into a new life alone. 

Six Ginkgo trees, scorched and stripped, survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima to produce new buds the following spring, a symbol of resilience and survival despite the death and destruction caused by mankind. Who wouldn’t treasure their own Ginkgo, given as a gift?

My garden is quirky; not neat and tidy like some, more higgledy-piggledy, some might even think neglected, though plants growing in paving cracks are carefully tended and loved. I have antique coffee grinders filled with violets and trailing lobelias attached to the fencing, and a tree mural on the house wall with hedgehogs, butterflies, magpies and a fox, which I painted during the pandemic.