I celebrated the dawn this morning, if Marvin the Paranoid Android was around he may well have observed that the dew clearly fell with a particularly sickening thud. This all happened at 5:11am, the joys of a Northern latitude.
Gardening, why bother? What is it? Why the compulsion to control and exert order? I once remember reading that gardening was the earthly pursuit of paradise, from the Persian: پردیس, paradise garden is the term for a place of timeless harmony. Or it could read “this tattoo is being worn by a tasteless fool who does not speak Arabic”.
The Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace, and the perfect state that will be restored in the World to Come. Or to my mind, Palmira before the Abrahamic faiths started their recent bout of remodelling.
My personal reason for gardening is to take the very best that nature has to offer and to guide it to an unnatural enhancement which pleases me. My gardening hero, Gertrude Jekyll (Jekyll to rhyme with treacle) once said “In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.”
Miss Jekyll was one of a number of gardeners of her time who were highly critical of the dreary formulaic geometric flower beds of tender annuals so popular throughout Victorian England. Part of what was later described as the Arts and Craft movement of the turn of the twentieth century she used hardy perennials to create borders which appeared to be more naturalistic, plants were allowed to do their own thing to a certain extent. This is also the the way to do your gardening if you are lazy and would much prefer to clear an area in the middle of a garden in which to sit with a large glass of red wine and good book.
The garden evolves rather than being rebuilt every spring. With perennials coming back after winter rather than the tender annuals habit of turning to mush come the first frosts of winter. We have all seen them haven’t we? The husband and wives at the garden centre on the first May day bank holiday, pushing a double wide trolley to the tills stuffed to the gills with vile coloured bedding plants, nasty fleshy begonias, short stubby marigolds, kill me now busy lizzies. All that effort, all that money, only to be tossed on the compost heap in a few short months.
This is one border that I have actively tried to recreate a Jekylly effect. Stachys-byzantina, otherwise known as lambs’ ears, mixing with native ivy and stitchwort. A Phormium, a hardy native of New Zealand, giving form and mid level height. The ground cover is Alchemilla mollis, a herbacious perennial which looks amazing with tiny drops of rain on it, they somehow turn into tiny fortune telling balls. Creating the shade needed by the ferns are the overhanging medium sized trees Laburnum, Amelanchier lamarckii, which has early spring blossom which falls like confetti in the breeze and a pear. My soil type is heavy clay, so this shaded planting creates a cool corridor which prevents the soil from baking to a crisp in summer and no watering required.
