Using the garden as an escape from a stressed world
I don’t know about you, but I find that my love of gardening ebbs and flows, the peaks and troughs presenting themselves when I least expect them.
Sometimes, and this isn’t even weather-dependent, I’ll look out at the garden and think ‘nope, not today!’
This spring, though, has been very different and I’ve felt almost compelled to spend as much time as possible in the garden, maybe because the glorious spring and start to summer were such a joy after the grey drabness of the past winter.
Or maybe it’s because with all the horrific news inescapably circling around us, it feels wonderfully grounding and healing to be outside in a safe space of our own creation, helping things grow and thrive.
And not just the plants either. This spring, sparrows moved into the nest box and raised their first (so far) brood, the garden has become the avian equivalent of a skatepark for a raucous mob of adolescent starlings, and a pair of great spotted woodpeckers are taking it in turn to pillage the nut feeders.
On evenings warm enough to sit out, the air rich with the scent of philadelphus and our Clematis montana ‘Wilsonii’, peace has been rippled by the delicate fluttering of bat wings and the huffing and crunching of hedgehogs as they trundle their way out of the hedge and across the wildflower lawn.
Incorporating AG advice
While we may not have frogs in the pond, its clear waters are teeming with beetles, water boatmen, pond skaters and the nymphs of dragonflies or damselflies.
The garden is as much theirs as ours – more so in fact – so it feels incumbent on us to keep it as healthy and diverse as we can, as naturally as possible.
In recent issues of AG, Anne Swithinbank and Toby Buckland have written respectively about ‘chaos gardening’ and natural methods of weed control.
Chaos gardening is a way of creating a tapestry of different plants growing alongside each other, edibles and ornamentals, by mixing and scattering seeds in prepared soil.
Toby’s idea of natural weed control is to sow annuals, biennials and a few easy perennials that will out-compete the unwanted varieties.
To be fair, our garden is already pretty chaotic but I am all for encouraging this, boosting its biodiversity, so I’ve been prepping the soil and sowing a mix of seeds.
An added bonus of this, of course, is it gives me the chance to get up close and personal with plants and the soil, letting me keep an eye on how everything is thriving and step in if anything is going awry.
That way, pests are kept in check (though the garden’s predatory inhabitants are doing a stirling job this year) and diseases such as powdery mildew and black spot thwarted by the removal of leaves and any other plant care needed.
Four quick jobs to keep the garden smiling
1. The warm and then wet weather created an upsurge in weeds so keeping them under control has been a daily job.
2. Keeping the pond’s surface clear is another job. Leave weed on the side for a few days so trapped critters can return to the water.
3. Keep picking off faded flowers to encourage more buds. Every year I forget just how sticky petunias can be!
4. June drop is almost over so over the next couple of weeks, pick off any rotten or shrivelled fruitlets to give healthy ones space to grow.
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