One thing I love about a garden is that you can leave it alone. It won’t sit there doing nothing till you return to it, reproachful, arms crossed, waiting. It just gets on with what it was going to do anyway – growing . OK so everything will carry on growing – things you don’t want as well as what you treasure, but one can weed, or not depending on how you feel.
Then, when I do go out to potter I can enjoy what I’m doing rather than see gardening as tasks. With no lawn to mow I don’t have anything that HAS to be done weekly. The big jobs, wisteria pruning, hedge cutting, I don’t do myself. I have a brave man with a ladder.
Wisteria in mid summer
I guess with edibles, jobs do have to be done – nature doesn’t wait. But with mostly perennials and shrubs they pretty much take care of themselves. The price I pay for doing less work than people with other styles of garden is that I have the more common and robust plants, one could say more native plants, rather than choice specially chosen ones.
I like climbers that don’t need wires to climb up, scramblers that scramble without my help and self-seeders which don’t need transplanting.
My aim in having a garden is to have something lovely to look at, to sit in and to lift the spirits of passers by.
I do work a lot in the garden. All the year around I’m out in it fiddling about as much as I can when weather permits. One of the joys of a new year is that first early Spring day with a blue sky when I find myself out there thinking how lovely it is to be outside again.
A cottage garden is certainly not a low maintenance style but I want working in it to be a relaxing enjoyable hobby, not feel it’s an overwhelming task like homework. I want to avoid seeing gardening as something “to be done” which gets put off and then done resentfully.
Jobs for the weekend? Take my mug of tea and a gardening magazine into the garden and sit. Read. Drink Tea. Heaven
