My neglected garden is as pleasing as it's ever been
Three summers have passed since I tore up the garden, three weeks post-partum, and started again. There were practical reasons for this: the baby was sleeping in what used to be my office and I needed somewhere (a Posh Shed) to work; after two summers of rogue and rookie gardening, I wanted to streamline my beds into something coherent and I wanted somewhere to sit. Thus, what had previously been my sunniest flowerbed was given over to a Posh Bench (technically known as 'an arbour', but we're in Brixton, not Belgravia), which is such a pleasant spot to sit that I had to lever myself off it to write this – in the Posh Shed.
The Posh Shed is now filled with cobwebs; the arbour cushions carry the stains of al fresco toddler teas. But the garden? The garden is gorgeous. This autumn the perennials that have spent the past three years chunking up will need some fine-tuning, some lifting and dividing, some editing and pruning, to maintain the balance. I may yet have to reseed and replace those that were lost to the wettest and warmest winter on record. But for now, sitting on the Posh Bench, it is lovely. Soft grass heads and nodding roses and tangling clematis stems entwine, and all in a year when I've never done less gardening. It feels as if it has conjured itself.
The bit I'm most gratified by is the grandly titled 'gravel garden' (bit of gravel beneath the Posh Bench and the Posh Shed, which exists because we were too hard up to do hard landscaping). The soil here is Lambeth loam posing as clay. When we moved in nearly five years ago, during that first, sweaty lockdown summer, I remember rubbing the hard little pellets between my fingers and wondering whether they contained any nutrients at all. The gravel was deployed to create a path up to the shed and as something to put a table and chairs on, but it also allows for growing in a drought-tolerant way. Beth Chatto's former car park-cum-dry garden in Essex is a prime example of how well this can work on a big scale.
A few autumns ago I had the privilege of visiting the landscape designer and consultant Jo McKerr's garden near Bath. It was planted almost entirely into substrate on a former brownfield site, and showed me how much better plants grow if you take away such luxuries as topsoil and staking. The Royal Horticultural Society gold-medal holder Jo Thompson, meanwhile, generously shared garden designs through her Substack The Gardening Mind during lockdown. If she could make something beautiful in a small clay-based plot, I thought, then perhaps I could too.
This year, the coral reef poppies (Papaver orientale) I sowed four autumns ago have offered up more than 30 blooms from two plants. The generous gardener roses, which David Austin tells me need feeding twice a year, have smothered the arbour and have lured in hoverflies and ladybirds to deal with the aphids. (Meanwhile the Desdemona rose planted in a mulched pot is tragic.) Most pleasing of all, the Meconopsis cambrica, lovingly transplanted from my childhood home, have started to self-seed – in the gravel, yes, but also elsewhere – along with hollyhocks and buttercups. All these flowers that I didn't plant, turning up to surprise me.
It's been a complicated spring, all told, in a year that is vanishing. And I've not yet managed to do what I vowed to at the end of last year: find a bit of time to garden every week. But I have found the time to sit and be. To let go of fussing and worrying and fighting with the snails, and instead marvel at what appears regardless. I don't know how long this will last, but it's very welcome. Sometimes that's all we need to turn a day around: a few minutes of relishing what the garden is giving us.
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