Excuse the radio silence, I’ve been a bit low. Everything’s gone wrong in a minor way. Nothing giant but lots of small things that have combined to make the world feel like a bit of a slog.

First, I haven’t had a very good harvest this year. I’ve spent hours, nay, days of my life digging, composting and loving my little plants and it’s all been a fairish disaster. Partly, it’s the drought but also I’ve been a bit lazy. The heat is so enervating, it saps your very soul, just trying to keep the animals alive has been an effort of will, so I had to just let some thing slide. As a result, my polytunnel regularly baked at over 50 degrees c, which is too hot for pollinating insects and whole flowers just fell off my tomato plants. I’ve still managed a decent tomato harvest but nowhere near what I should be getting. Last year, I bottled enough passata for 7 months. This year, I’ll be lucky if I manage a quarter of that. The aubergines, cucumbers and melons are all rubbish. On top of that, my courgettes are minimal, the squash are non-existent and the dahlias, which I pride myself at being a bit of a dab hand at, have barely flowered. I’m still not sure why.

Then the actual garden is a dried out, sad mess. It’s so bad, a gardening friend of mine suggested that I take a step back and start again. I can’t bear it. I’ve mulched in the winter in pouring rain, gardened in a head torch when running out of daylight, worried, poked and prodded, and for what? A patch of browning phlox, some crispy crocosmia and a visitor to suggest that they “thought I was better at gardening”. FFS.

Even the chickens have gone on a laying strike.

So I felt I couldn’t write “How to Deal with your Garden Glut”, when I haven’t really got a glut and suddenly feel like a huge fraud.

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But I’ve given myself a good talking to and decided that maybe my bad luck could be a consolation for someone else who’s had a tricky summer. There’s nothing like gardening to keep you from feeling like you know everything, or indeed anything at all. But I think it’s important to climb back on that horse and have another trot around. Otherwise I might as well take up sudoku.

Instead, this is about planning, because there’s nothing like thinking about future successes to disperse the gloom of current failures. I have spent the last couple of days thinking about spring and planning my bulb purchases. Even though they don’t need to go in for a bit (and in the case of tulips mustn’t until the end of October) it’s been a great distraction to think about next spring, when the whole glorious cycle can begin again.

These are the spring bulbs I am planning on purchasing as soon as credit cards allow.

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Pots – I have two large granite troughs that I inherited and are fantastic for bulbs. For next year I’ve gone classic, wallflowers and tulips. Regular readers will know that I love these fusty, Edwardian flowers. They have a scent reminiscent of a maiden aunt, floral and slightly dusty. I always use the same combination of colours – Fire King, Vulcan and Sugar Rush. They harmonise well and can mix with most tulip colours for a stonking display

I really struggle to visualise colour. There, I’ve said it. I boggle at true visual artists. I cannot picture how a palette is going to look without drawing it out, so I rely heavily on the colour wheel for inspiration.

This year, my colours favour the dramatic – Tulip ‘Queen of the Night’, ‘Slawa’ and ‘Flevo Passion’. I’ve steered away from the gorgeous ruffles of parrots and delicate curve of ballerinas as these don’t really impact as well at a distance and I’m all about bang for buck after my sad summer. These will be interspersed with wallflowers.

I’ve also dug up my failed asparagus bed. (I think I just have the wrong soil for it). It will become a bulb cutting bed. I’ve filled it with perennial tulips, narcissus, dahlias and I’m taking a punt on some ranunculus. I’ve had so many failures with these that it must be my year.

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Finally, I’ve thought about some enormous pots to put by the front door. Pollyanna Wilkinson has some very sage advice about little pots being pointless, so I’ve got my eye on some enormous urns which I will ‘lasagne’ plant. The layers will be: Iris reticulata ‘Blue Note’ to come when the weather is grey and the bright blue will feel like a shot to the synapses, followed by Narcissus ‘Thalia’ to create a delightful waft as you pass by, finally ending in classic ‘Ballerina’ tulips whose prettiness will be admired daily. I will also have pots of Sweet Williams and Violas to help fight off the winter blues.

All this sounds marvellous, but it hasn’t dealt with the horror that is my garden after this brutal year. But has provided a delightful distraction and galvanised me to have a Proper Think about how to climate proof it for next year. And that, my friends, is another post entirely.

Much love, GW x

Did you do better than me this summer? Tell me everything in the comments.

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“Hands off cocks and on socks!” Pence roared across the classroom in a slightly suspect Yorkshire accent. The group of the twelve-year-olds tittered uneasily. Did he really say cocks? The boys around me in English class were more engaged than if Kylie Minogue herself had sauntered into the room, singing her seminal hit ‘I Should be So Lucky’ in nothing but her famous hotpants and chirpy Aussie grin.

I was as enthralled as the rest of my class, not by the shock of the swearing, I was used to that from home, but the visceral writing. As the story of a boy and a falcon unravelled, I fell in love. Kestrel for a Knave, or Kes as it was later known was my first experience of nature writing and it captivated me.

The tale is tragic and vicious and although set in a different world, it reflected one I understood. I was at a boarding prep school in the West Country; a draughty gothic manor built by a Victorian bird-shit entrepreneur with miles of mahogany panelling and rooms smelling of boiled cabbage. We had a minstrels’ gallery, four rugby pitches but unreliable central heating. Ostensibly, it was a different world to a northern mining town, but there were similarities. Men dominated and women were tolerated. It was the early 90s, my prep school was known for being ‘rough-and-tumble’ - the Latin master threw a boy through a plate glass window for getting a declension wrong. I was regularly ‘caned’ for my sassiness (hit with a cane on the back of my hand because I was a girl, the boys got it on their arse).

I weekly boarded and through freak circumstances was the only girl in my class. Survival meant becoming one of the lads, I could trade gags, play a particularly fierce game of ping pong and thump the boys back. And I was funny. Not subtle well-crafted humour but quick, sharp jabs that kept them down. I was a lion tamer armed with whip smart one-liners, distracting slathering beasts from tearing me apart.

The casual cruelty, machismo and brutality in Kes were as familiar to me as the palm of my hand. I had always been a keen reader but my maverick English teacher, Pence, refused to smother us in classics written by dead men and instead gave us a diet of books that fired our synapses like firecrackers. Equus (snap), A Clockwork Orange (fizz) and Kes (kapow), each book was more electrifying. Books became playground currency, What had Pence thought you were cool enough to read? What unhinged incident had happened in the book he leant you? He pushed and prodded us to look beyond the stultifying way English was taught and really read, read everything.

In retrospect, giving A Clockwork Orange to a bunch of twelve-year-olds was imprudent and would probably result in a teacher losing their job now but when we were given it, we swaggered with new-found confidence. An adult treating children as adults can be intoxicating. Reading was a thrill. (Although I’ve never actually been able to read the most gruesome parts, but don’t tell anyone).

When I was in my thirties, I went to a bookshop in Bath and discussed recommendations with the owner. After laughing over my eclectic taste, the owner paused and asked, “Are you one of Pence’s kids?” Apparently, we are easily spotted by our varied and diverse reading. I love the idea that I bear the mark of Pence, even in the wild.

Here are six books that each have a beautiful setting, landscape or garden that hides secrets or dark truths, inspired by Kes. The list ranges from gentle to sinister and will drag you into a tale where the surroundings are more than a backdrop.

Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer Tuscan tumbledown villa? Tick. Eccentric old woman? Tick. Fish out of water comedy? Tick. A lovely romp and at the gentle end of the list. A story of a young American man, arrogant and bookish sent to Tuscany by a bored professor to catalogue the antiques of a mysterious Baronessa. The descriptions of the Italian countryside are especially delicious and you can’t help but be swept up in this delightful tale.

The Overstory by Richard Powers A remarkable collection of interlocking stories about nature, trees and our relationships with them. Each story seems stand-alone until you realise the nail-biting conclusion at the end, it ranges from an airman being shot down to an 80s party-goer being electrocuted and links them all together. You will not be able to look at a forest in the same way. Ann Patchett described it as, “the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.”

Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart A true story of Chris’s purchase of a Spanish farm, on a whim, not realising that it was without useful things like electricity and running water. He and his extremely forgiving wife take on a Rogue’s Gallery of local characters in making their dream work. It’s a fabulous book about not giving up and will make you book a trip to Andalucia immediately.

Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden A forgotten gripping tale of a young, idealistic English woman and her two daughters setting up house in lush Kashmir in 1940s. She doesn’t understand the local culture and thus begins a gradual descent ending in catastrophe. It is mesmerising and unsettling. I read it on a French campsite a few years ago and was so shocked I gasped loudly and upset the donkeys. Truly brilliant.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer One of the weirdest books I have ever read. It’s part fantasy, part thriller about Man trying to tame nature and what happens when nature fights back. There are some images in this book that still haunt me. I’m not even sure if I enjoyed it but it has stayed with me, if that doesn’t tantalise you, I don’t know what will. It won the Nebula prize and is constantly on best book lists. If you’ve read it, I would love to hear your review.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy Spellbinding story of a fictional island that houses the world’s largest seed bank and the family that live there. One day a woman is washed ashore but as she recovers, she seems to be hiding things. A dark, beautiful story, although I was devastated when it ended. One of those books you’ll be pressing on anyone who hasn’t read it. Riveting and breathtaking.

Do tell me of any other books with wonderful, natural settings that you think I’ve missed? Have you read any of these? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

GW x

This post contains affiliate links — if you buy through them, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and it helps support independent bookshops too.

In the immortal words of Cole Porter, “It’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy.”

Or if you’re a gardener, there’s no livin’, it’s just frantic watering and refreshing the long-range weather forecast. So instead of writing you a long post I thought I’d tempt you to rest a while in a hammock, under a tree with a gorgeous book. Here’s a collection of charming things to tempt you. I have created a Summer Reading List on Bookshop.org if you would like to buy any.

Coffee table books

I love big books and I cannot lie. But this comes with a warning, these are costly tomes, heavy in weight and price but if you have a birthday coming up, maybe leave these tabs open pointedly for a loved-one to get the hint. They make marvellous presents.

Arne Maynard encapsulates the English country garden style. As well as giving me house envy (we nearly bought the house next door to Allt-y-bela in spell of post-lockdown mania) ‘The Gardens of Arne Maynard’ has taught me about spacing and managing a garden in winter. Also, his use of roses is the work of an artist. Spectacular creativity.

Tom Stuart-Smith is a visionary, and ‘Drawn from the Land’ is a masterclass in planting and structure. I’m mildly obsessed with Parrotia persica avenues due to this book and whenever I’m stumped in my own garden a flick through this brings a wealth of inspiration. Just breathtaking.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd feels like someone from a pre-war tale. ‘Gardens in my Life’ tells of a childhood at a magical run-down palazzo in Italy and a later life designing spectacular gardens. She creates beautiful, whimsical spaces, although grounded with excellent plant knowledge. An absolute treat.

Useful and beautiful

Piet Oudolf & Noel Kingsbury’s book ‘Planting, A New Perspective’ is a classic for a reason. For anyone that is interested in prairie planting this is an absolute must. It’s a wealth of interesting and some challenging ideas. Every time I read it, I become a better plantswoman. And even though you’ll have to wrench the English Cottage Garden style from my cold dead hands – it’s forcing me to become more thoughtful in my planting style.

‘The Seasonal Gardener’ by Anna Pavord is probably my most used book. It’s a brilliantly simple idea, perfectly executed. What plant goes with what, complete with pictures. I have copied it endlessly and it’s given me confidence when I’m unsure and is full of clear, unequivocal advice. Such as, “No garden can have too many tulips. This is one of the few infallible rules in gardening”. I would not be without it.

I feel everyone ought to have a copy of Beth Chatto’s ‘Drought-Resistant Planting’'. It’s the story of how she planned her genre defining gravel garden in one of the driest parts of the country, complete with fabulous bits of advice. The photographs alone give you hope that gardens of the future, although dry, will be anything but barren.

A bloody good read

Penelope Lively is one of my favourite authors, although I only came across ‘Life in the Garden’ in a charity shop, relatively recently. It’s a wonderful meander around gardens of the world and her life. A charming way to while away a summer’s afternoon “Gardeners are a community – there should be some sort of Masonic handshake. As when you sniff out a fellow gardener there is instant communion.” Exactly.

Margery Fish’s ‘We Made A Garden’ is a story of the creation of the exquisite East Lambrook Manor and is a fascinating romp through wartime Britain and its aftermath. It has a special place in my heart as the manor isn’t far from where I live. Margery’s no-nonsense advice and exasperation with her husband, Walter make for a fun and useful read. Unfortunately, there are no pictures but in Clare Foggett’s stunning ‘Beauty and Abundance’ there are recent pictures of East Lambrook Manor today. A real treat.

Any books I’ve missed? Anyone got a reading suggestion that I need? Do let me know.

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GW x

I was 15 and paralytically drunk. Not giggly, oops-a-daisy tipsy but vomit-on-your-chin, mascara-smeared drunk. I was at a Christmas party thrown by my parents’ friends and scared stiff. I was younger than all the other teens and noticeably less cool. I lived in horse heaven and was allergic to (and scared of) horses. A chubby indie kid in a Jilly Cooper world.

I decided that Dutch Courage would get me through a party where I would know everyone but talk to no one. I sat on the floor by the Aga and necked two large glasses of red wine.

Much of that party is a blur. I remember it being raucous. I remember a delicious punch that tasted like Tropicana. Somebody asked how many glasses I’d had, I showed five fingers and they boomed with laughter. I felt sophisticated and grown up; I’d discovered the secret to being an insider and I wasn’t going to stop now.

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Things start to change. The room was hot and moving strangely and I no longer felt confident. Russell took me out for a cigarette. I’d hardly smoked and didn’t understand that a cigarette can amplify drunkeness. I showed Russell that I could blow smoke rings (I couldn’t but he was too drunk to notice). The cigarette made the world swim. I staggered back into the party and was violently sick. I spewed over my Levellers t-shirt, my green Doc Martens and the floor.

Everyone watched, everyone witnessed, a few helped. I was utterly ashamed and had no way of stopping the horror. The river of sick just kept coming. It was like Carrie but with vomit. Everyone was lurching in and out of focus, staring at me. I’d confirmed all their suspicions, the weird kid in the strange clothes wasn’t one of them. I looked out of place and I didn’t know how to hold my drink which was the worst sin imaginable.

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These days I don’t drink as much, and now I garden instead. However, I still have a problem with interlopers.

I have a colossal sunflower that has arrived in my recently created Mediterranean bed, it’s an escapee from the cut-flower garden and is so big it blocks the light into the house. I think I must have made a mix-up with my labelling, don’t all seedlings look similar? Ok, I know they don’t, but I refuse to wear my reading glasses as much as I should, so one green blob looks much like another on the potting bench. I could have moved the sunflower when it was small but it won’t make it now, and I’ve got used to its remarkable size. It’s knocking on the first floor window and totally impervious to my death stares. To add insult to injury, it’s far bigger than the deliberate ones in the cutting bed. I have decided to name it Polyphemus, after the one-eyed cannibalistic giant in Odysseus, it feels topical.

I have a dahlia, that despite my careful labelling is a garish bright red instead of a deep maroon - of course it’s flourishing. I have no idea where it came from. I thought I had a pair of Dahlia ‘Rosie Raven’ to plant in a trough, which look marvellous when paired with drifts of dancing Nicotiana alata. However, from somewhere a scarlet bloom has appeared like a ketchup stain on a white shirt. I’m furious with it but it’s too late to move it. Besides, I can’t find the other ‘Rosie Raven’, it’s all a mystery.

I have hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) everywhere, it seems to be proliferating every time I come back to the garden. I’ve left it, because the pollinators love it but growl at it when I walk past. It’s an invasive weed and can cause phytophotodermatitis on bare skin, particularly on sunny days, although it’s the milder version. Once, I ended up in hospital with this which was mortifying, especially as I had to chat to two immensely handsome doctors whilst covered in boils. They were fascinated by this unusual case - the first they had seen outside of textbooks; I wanted to shrivel with embarrassment. Suffice it to say, I won’t be taking any chances with this hogweed and will just be snipping the flower heads off before they seed. I won’t risk being boil-some with other George Clooney-alikes.

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These trespassers are playing on my mind. I’m haunted by the image of a teenager with puke flecked on her shirt, out of place and off her face. Desperate to belong but missing the manual.

I wish I could say something pithy about learning to love my garden’s flaws and my own at the same time but I can’t. I can’t move the offending plants because in the case of the sunflower and dahlia, they would die, in the case of the hogweed I would die. I still don’t know how to be in the right place, neither do they. So like Persian rug with a deliberate error woven in, I’ve let it be and for once, try not to worry.

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I’ve had a lovely influx of new people, hello! Please do comment and let me know your thoughts, on belonging, embarrassing teen years or annoying plants. And if you enjoyed this, please, please, please share with your friends, it makes such a difference.

Much love,

GW X

Stepping out into the sun in Madrid feels as though you’re being sandblasted by a vindictive toddler who’s just been told they can’t have another ice cream. Every exposed square inch of skin is rubbed raw by sunrays, scouring your body for weakness, a tiny patch where you missed the sun cream perhaps and then it will flay you for your slothfulness. I felt as though I was a small boy in a terraced house in the 1930’s and a Northern matriarch was checking that I’d washed behind my ears, every part of me was being probed and laziness would be severely punished.

Him Indoors looked balefully at me, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I readjusted my hat, “Of course, it’s just a bit of sunshine and it’s still early.”

Him Indoors “Yes, but it’ll 40 degrees by lunchtime and you wouldn’t let me wear my hat.”

“Your hat made you look like a middle-aged dad on holiday, it was one step away from a knotted hanky and we’ll be back before it gets really hot.”

“I am a middle-aged dad, and I’m worried I’m going to burn.”

“You’ll be fine, stop moaning and let’s go, this’ll be fun!”

These are words that put my marriage to the Ultimate Test.

We were in Madrid in the middle of a heatwave trying to make our teenage children still like us. When they were small it was easy, you take them to the park or soft play or to pet small, depressed animals and they look at you as though you hung the moon. Now they are older, well they don’t even look at you. A clever cousin who has delightful, well-adjusted young adult offspring, confidentially revealed the way to family harmony was to go on ‘cool holidays’.

Out went the French lighthouse that we stayed in a few years ago – (limited Wi-Fi and totally isolated). In came a festival, in Madrid, in a heatwave with our teens and a gang of their friends.

Obviously, I didn’t realise that there was going to be a heatwave when I booked the holiday. Both my teens were doing major exams this summer and wanted to plan exciting things for when they finished. I was looking at a summer of waving them off at train stations if I didn’t think of something sensational to lure them back. I used my superior investigative internet searching powers that I normally hold back for Vinted bargain hunting and found a festival in Madrid where you don’t camp. Instead, everyone stays in lovely air-con during the day and just pops over to the festival in the evening. Plus Nick Cave was playing, and I’d cover my garden in astro turf if Nick Cave told me to.

“This’ll be fun” I shrieked at the teens, jabbing a finger at my laptop. No answer.

“There looks like some great people playing”. Barely a ripple of acknowledgement.

Extreme measures were activated, “You can bring your friends!” I pleaded.

This tipped the balance and somehow we ended up paying for a holiday for the teens and their gang that cost as much as buying an entire bloody lighthouse in France. Trying to be a cool mum is an expensive business (and may result in Credit Card Maxxing Mum, which feels like the wrong kind of Life Maxxing to me).

Still, this is my only holiday this year, so, in spite of the delights of being sweated on by Dave Grohl (teenage me would have died of joy, middle-aged me was faintly repulsed) I was determined to see at least one of the gardens for which Madrid is famous. I dragged Him Indoors out of bed early and went to El Retiro Gardens, a UNESCO Heritage site of 125 glorious hectares and a mere twenty minute walk from our pad.

Let me tell you, twenty minutes walking in a heat so vicious it felt personal is no mean feat. But we soldiered on, determined to reach the gardens and when we got there it was delightful. Shady, cooler than the rest of the city and restful. It was a masterclass in having a space that provides respite from an unforgiving climate. These are the areas that I thought really worked and might be transferable to our increasingly unstable UK weather.

Trees - This might seem utterly obvious but trees are planted everywhere. There are estimated to be 25,000 trees in the park alone, some up to 600 years old.

I noted new streets with new buildings being put up and trees were lining the streets as part of the architecture. Trees are seen as an important part of any new development and are maintained in older streets. I noticed a conscious change in the planting as well, a moving away from Horse Chestnuts (Aesculus Hippocanstanum), as even these seemed to have areas where they couldn’t handle the heat stress to Japanese Pagoda Tree (Sophora japonica) and Holm Oak (Quercus ilex), even London Plane trees (Platanus x hispanica). Even if you can’t plant a large tree in your garden, a small one is worth the investment, if it’s possible. I think it will become of increasing importance. I am starting to think that planting a small tree might be of more value than a flower bed. Something to ponder.

Creating a Shade Canopy – Trees squared. Tree were planted under trees. Shade filtered through trees, small trees under large ones. Sun is treated like the enemy and layers of planting create a gentle diffuse light, incidentally, it would work well in relentless rain as well.

Fountains – I feel like I’ve come over all Charlie Dimmock, squeaking about water features (niche reference), but they do make a huge difference. Much of Spain still shows evidence of Moorish influence, and nowhere more that with moving water. Fountains, rills, pools and ponds. There was water everywhere and it was wonderful. Sitting by a fountain under a tree cooled the air and make the relentless heat tolerable.

Water management – Again, a climate out of balance, as ours looks like it will increasingly be, needs water management. One month might have low rainfall, the next might have record rainfall. I saw some fantastic rills and channels used to maximise water around trees and also to direct heavier falls.

Not much planting – In the entire park I saw very few beds, which makes sense, beds need watering and attention. There was some planting but it was more the Mediterranean style – gappier and in gravel, that needs less tending. It made me consider how bonkers it is to create planting schemes that require any work at all, particularly the overstuffed style that I drooled over at Chelsea this year. I wonder how all those garden fared in this recent heat?

Lucy Writes History had a fantastic article about the joy of garden trees over planting that’s well worth a read.

After all this drifting around the park we were far longer than we meant to be and we had a lunch date with the teens at a crazy theme restaurant where they serve you cocktails in giant doll heads and sexy octopuses. We began our route march back. It was so hot now, there was no talking, the entire walk seemed to be up hill and of course, our SPF 50 had slid off our sweaty bodies. The unforgiving sun feasted on our flesh like a horror movie monster, my nose was scarlet and Him Indoors had burnt his hairline.

“Wouldn’t have happened if you’d let me wear my hat”, he sulked.

“Oh shut up and drink your Barbie.” I said.

Thanks so much for reading! And welcome to all the newbies who have hopped along to join us for this ride, it’s so lovely to have you! Do let me know of any thoughts in the comments.

GW x

Once, as a child, I knew a conman. He was charming with perfect manners and if he turned his light on you, made you feel interesting and debonair too. Even when I was young, talking to him was thrilling, you felt just a touch better than everyone else. My parents had known his family forever, they were ‘old money’, in that way of property rich but really quite cash poor people. They had lovely houses but couldn’t afford the school-fees. He was a notorious bankrupt and even as a child, I knew he was fun at a party but not to give him your wallet.

However, I repeatedly witnessed clever, worldly people go into business with him. I supposed they knew what they were doing. I was a child watching adults, of course they knew what they were doing. I’d assumed that they were using this infamous snake oil salesman to make more money, perhaps they were managing him like a powerful weapon, using his contacts but keeping him far away from the tills.

I was wrong.

When everything came to light, as these things generally do, it turned out he had milked every single one of them, and his own family to boot. I wish I could say that my parents had seen through his trickster ways and were too sharp to be his mark, but we just weren’t interesting or wealthy enough to be worth the effort.

It was a fantastic lesson in perception. That sometimes, just occasionally, your unique viewpoint can give you an insight that no one else can see.

I was thinking about this conman, when I was reading yet another article promising me a ‘no effort garden’. You see, conmen and journalists both possess the silver tongue flattery that can deafen internal objections. “Your life can be immeasurably better if you just do this one thing.” In the case of the conman it was invest in his schemes, in the journalists’, it’s to give the garden centre money.

I’m here to burst your bubble. There is no such thing as a no-maintenance garden. Well, unless you cover it in astro turf and fill the beds with plastic flowers (I know someone that did that, but that’s another story). Gardens, by their very definition require gardening. They need almost constant titivation and adjustment. The beauty of them is that they grow and are constantly changing, but this is also the gardeners’ cross to bear.

During July, the peak of summer, it is possible to take a step back and let the garden do its thing and take a breather. So here are some things you can do that won’t get you sweaty or ending up hating your garden (but aren’t a no-maintenance lie).

1. Take some time to have a good look at how you’re using the garden. Every year I regret placing the outdoor dining stuff so far from the kitchen and yet every spring, when I drag it out of the shed, I think how nice it would be to sit under the mulberry tree and watch the sunset. Not if you’re carrying a tray of gins from the house, GW. No, then you’ll wobble over every step and regret being so cavalier with your choices. Take a moment to really look at what’s working in your garden and try to streamline it.

2. Deadheading - fannying about with secateurs deadheading roses is a delightful pasttime. I try to channel Gwyneth Paltrow in The Politician who gardened in a floor-length red dress, whilst dispensing Machiavellian advice, you can’t push a wheelbarrow in that but you can snip a few fragrant heads.

3. Pinching out and tying in tomatoes – if you sensibly only have a couple of tomato plants then pinching out the hair in their armpits (as I think of those little side shoots) only takes a second and can be done while having coffee. I, however, have 40-odd plants and pinching out takes hours. I have no idea why I planted so many, I think I got over-excited in the wet spring we had. I must remember not to go so mad next year (see point one).

4. Picking flowers/ harvesting – my sweet peas have been turbo charged this year and need picking almost daily. Nothing makes you feel more like the goddess Flora, than prancing around first thing in the morning harvesting your crops, plus it needs doing regularly or things will stop producing. It’s also a great time to potter around and have a look at everything. I find it’s better if I leave my phone behind and have a Proper Think whilst doing it. (See mindfulness and gardening, that’s a twofer).

5. Let a patch grow wild – in my endless quest to try to create a meadow I’ve let stretch of grass grow wild. I’m trying to let the alliums and other things reseed themselves in peace. But do you know what, the long grass looks lovely swaying in a summer breeze. Yes, there are plenty of baddies like hogweed and dandelions in there, but also yarrow and self-heal as well. It’s a joy and although some may think it’s messy (looking at you, Him Indoors), I love it.

6. Sow your biennials or some late crops – sowing seeds is gentle and you can direct sow at this time of year, although I can’t as my slug game is off the charts. I have sown a few packets of biennials I found in the back of a drawer, plus I’m aiming to collect some hollyhock and nigella seeds from the garden. It feels far easier and somehow much less frantic than spring sowing and I’m able to do it with an ice-cold drink in hand. I’m also chucking in some lettuces and cauliflowers, but I haven’t covered the caulis over so I’m fully expecting them to be guzzled by Cabbage Whites.

Finally, if all this seems too much in the summer heat, then don’t do anything at all, it’ll all be waiting tomorrow. Recline under a tree with a good book and wait out the hot weather. I can recommend ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ although I don’t think it’s meant to be a manual for life.

The cockerel wheezed and hacked, his entire body hunched over. He was raking at the ground gasping for air, his comb turned blue as his body became desperate for oxygen. I dithered and held up my hands batting them ineffectually. Do I pick him up? Won’t that stress him more? Can you give chickens mouth to mouth?

He crouched down in the wood chip and after a few agonising moments his breathing eased and the dreadful soul-shaking rasps calmed to a rattle. His heart managed to keep beating. Watching an animal in distress is a special kind of torture, particularly when you can’t help. Particularly when you have caused it.

Merlin the cockerel is king of the flock of hens. Overall, he is a gentleman, he breaks up squabbles between his ladies and keeps the peace (more about that later). He leads them around the pasture with the confidence of a Victorian adventurer trekking through unknown jungle. If he finds a juicy morsel, he sings to let the girls know and give them first taste. He performs elaborate flamenco dances to his ladies that involve a great deal of formal wing-waving and spinning. When I got my new pullets, Cobweb and Mustardseed, he dipped his beak in corn and stood very still so they could peck bits off him.

Merlin’s daily crow is the soundtrack to our little farm. When the girls lay, they sing to tell Merlin to come and take them back to the field. Merlin sings back and the whole hullaballoo takes at least ten minutes each time. With seven hens, I spend much of day serenaded by song.

However, as with so many despots, Merlin‘s reign has a dark side. He is a ferocious bully. He attacks and occasionally pulls out the feathers of his least favourites. Last month, Calypso, my gentlest Maran, had stopped laying out of sheer terror, so I crated him for a month to give her a break.

Merlin was jailed in a large dog crate. Initially, he was furious and strode up and down, roaring at his fate.

But then the heatwave struck. Suddenly, I was on a desperate mission to keep the hens alive. Still, they insisted on nesting in the coop, even in 39 degree heat, I kept fishing out dehydrated hens on the verge of collapse and putting them in the shade with electrolytes to recuperate. I didn’t want to let Merlin out as he would revert back to his old ways, so I poured a bucket of water in the base of the crate to keep his temperature down. It appeared to work so I repeated it several times a day. This, it turns out was a murderous mistake.

After the heatwave abated, I congratulated myself that I had kept the hens alive. But it soon became clear that something was wrong, Merlin couldn’t crow, his voice was reduced to a rasp and his breathing whistled. The backing singer to my life was quiet and clearly unhappy.

At first, I thought it was gapeworm that he’d had previously. I treated him accordingly (it’s the same medicine I’d given my kids for threadworms, urgh). Usually that works almost instantly but he continued to get more breathless and stayed mute.

I had to let him out of his crate. He immediately ran across the field and attacked Calypso, prison hadn’t reformed his character. But the activity caused him to pant and gasp, he was clearly in distress.

After much googling, I realised my error. I had repeatedly poured water over the deep bedding in his crate during the heatwave. The heat, water and pee had formed a toxic ammonia gas that had scarred his throat. I’d nearly murdered him with boiled cock piss.

I was devastated. One of my many flaws is that I like to be knowledgeable. I cannot bear being foolish or doing the wrong thing. I’m not someone who laughs gracefully at their blunders, I wish I was. I was so mortified at my stupidity and the thought I may have condemned an animal in my care to death through ineptitude - it nearly undid me. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t even tell my husband what I had done.

For the next few days, I watched Merlin closely. I put him back in the crate, cleaned out this time and fed him bolstering tonic and scrambled egg. I visited him hourly and monitored every symptom. For two days he seemed to be getting worse, his breathing became laboured and the slightest action tired him out. Occasionally, his comb turned a dark threatening blue. I was warned online that his heart would probably give out.

And then yesterday at dawn, I was crowed awake. Merlin had shaken off his infection and was trumpeting his return from near death. I was so relieved I staggered out at 4.30am to see him, guilty and overjoyed.

I’m left with a horny cockerel that needs taming. I wish I could say that I had learned to own up to my mistakes, but I haven’t. I haven’t admitted to my husband that it was my idiocy that nearly killed Merlin and I’m not going to be able to tie this up in a bow with a neat witticism.

I stood in the doorway of the large shed. My breathing was ragged and I was clammy, even though the day was chilly. I thought I might be sick. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I tugged at the pockets on my trousers and whimpered. I had to go into the shed but my feet wouldn’t move. They had grown roots and I was fixed to the ground. I couldn’t move forward or back. I was petrified. Turned to stone by fear.

I was working at Stourhead as a gardener for the National Trust and had to collect my dried flowers. I had unlocked the shed with the key on my lanyard and dragged the heavy door open. I had no idea why it was so securely closed for what amounted to fifty bags of compost and some dried vegetation. Someone had blocked the doorway with a wall of compost and left a tiny walkway to get to my dried flowers. The problem was the walkway was guarded by an enormous black spider, sitting in its own jungle of threads. When I opened the door it rushed forward to the edge of its web and teetered there, looking at me. And I looked at it. There was no way I could go in.

I began to sob, hot shameful tears. I couldn’t ask for help, everyone else was miles away, working on other parts of the estate and the House Display team needed my dried flowers for the Christmas display.

For weeks, I had bragged about these flowers. I’d nudged the team away from using plastic ornaments and encouraged more natural decorations. I’d insisted that I’d grow and dry enough flowers for the Christmas display and for wreaths and chains. For months I’d grown and carefully hanged Helichrysum bracteatum, Echinops ritro, Calendula and hydrangea. But now, I couldn’t even collect them because of a totally irrational, deep terror of spiders.

Some people joke about a fear of spiders, some cruel people will try to show them to you. They really don’t understand the level of distress that comes with arachnophobia. “It’s only a little spider” , they cry or “It’s more afraid of you”. Arachnophobes know it’s irrational that the sight of a spider can create a spike of adrenaline that makes your heart snap like you’re sprinting the final furlong in a 1500m race. But we can’t bloody help it.

I have tried everything to get over my phobia, I have had Aversion Therapy (there’s even a picture of me, tear-stained and ashen-faced, holding a tarantula), hypnotherapy and even been to London Zoo for a Spider Day that claims a 96% success rate. But I’m not cured. I subconsciously check every room for spiders before I sit down. I dread September, when the giant, horny spiders come into the house looking for love. I know that they aren’t interested in me but that doesn’t penetrate my lizard brain. It doesn’t help that we live in a rambling old house on the edge of a wood. The spiders here are legion and colossal.

To put it more succinctly, my life is corralled by my phobia. I’m embarrassed about it. It’s a weakness that should be easily controlled but it controls me.

So that day in the shed, puffy-eyed and sweaty with humiliation I went and found a Ranger who removed the beast with a gentle tut. Even though he’s a man mountain who chopped trees with a huge chainsaw, it turned out he wasn’t keen on spiders either.

I wish my phobia was my only fear but I’m plagued by them. It isn’t just physical things, I’m anxious most of the time. I’m scared of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I frequently freeze up when I make decisions. I’m even scared of making mistakes in the garden.

When I was little, I was convinced I was going to be an actress until I was 50 (quite a career!) and then become a writer because then I would have enough ‘life experience’.

But I was too scared to push for drama school so I never became an actress, and my life has been a general drift of jobs, culminating in gardener.

But I’m not 50 yet and I have begun to write.

I’ve always written: journals, stories, letters to friends and children. I even wrote a Mills & Boon style romance when I broke my leg (it was awful, turns out I’m dreadful at writing sex scenes). But now that I no longer have small, sticky-fingered offspring grasping for my attention I’ve started to jot a few things down.

I’ve always been horrified at the thought of having to hold my work out for inspection. It seemed so childish, so needy to create something and then request an audience. What if it’s mediocre? Or hackneyed? Or just plain bad? How mortifying.

But something has happened in the last year or so. I’ve started secret, furtive scribbling. I’m attempting short stories and devising one act plays. I record little vignettes or imagine comedy interactions. I note down the descriptions of people on trains and listen in to conversations at other tables in the pub. I’m still wracked by inner critics but I’m choosing to ignore them and keep going. I haven’t cured of my fear of failure and ridicule, I write under a pseudonym for goodness’s sake, but this is me, having a go. I owe it to the little me who was so clear about her future life and OK, I’m sorry the acting didn’t happen but I’m trying my damnedest to make this writing thing take. Even if I couldn’t go into that shed on my own, I can write about it, and that’s almost as good.

This morning, I stood in the garden trying to scrawl a list of jobs on the back of a seed packet. I’m going away for a couple of days and have got a house sitter coming to take care of the ark while I’m gone. I’ve realised that even getting her to do the basics will take up more time than I’ve promised, and much what of what I do is based on instinct. How do I explain “looking a bit sad but don’t overwater” in precise language? Is it polite to ask her to do a quick weed of the big bed or is that overstepping? I’ve realised the list is getting out of control when I run out of space and make more notes on my arm. I’m so worried about leaving my garden during the proposed heatwave that I’ve considered cancelling the trip.

It’s more than that though, I’m grumpy and overwhelmed.

I always get a touch morose at this time of year. Despite the light mornings and late nights, midsummer elicits a darkness in the corner of my eye, a tickling at the back of my mind, an ancient suggestion of sand slipping through the hourglass.

The light is already starting to ebb away, even though summer has only just rolled up its sleeves and begun to put the work in. I haven’t even got sick of ice cream yet. (Although I never really get sick of ice cream, which is why I’m built for comfort not speed.)

I find autumn especially gruelling and by the time the swallows leave, I’m desolate. My heart flies off with them on their gossamer wings and around Midsummer’s Day, I get a melancholic prelude of winter glumness, a very Dylan Thomas-ish “Rage against the dying of the light”.

It’s just a flash and only lasts a day or so but it’s a foreshadowing of the dark days to come.

There is a magic around midsummer, but with all old festival times, magic comes hand-in-hand with chaos. A sense of an unravelling, untamed wildness that occurs at this time of the year. That old genius, Shakespeare hinted at it in Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck says:

“Now it is that time of night

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church-way paths to glide.”

_{Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene I}

There is an edge to this day: beautiful midsummer, when the sun is at its peak, is the moment where we begin our descent into winter. We are trip trapping through BBQ season to harvest and then the decay of autumn. The smell of rot is almost in our nostrils.

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I think a dash of this is genetic. I remember my mother shutting down in late autumn, her body seeming to deflate at the thought of the winter to come. In my youthful folly, I thought this was a ridiculous over-reaction but as I’ve got older, I understand the dread at slogging through yet another winter. The darkness, wind and rain can almost seem endless.

Part of this has been sparked by my never-ending to-do list. Midsummer is so busy, the sweet peas need constant attention (but oh the smell is bottled heaven, and so worth it), deadheading roses, tieing up lupins, watering everything, the list is endless. And this year, the warm wet weather has meant the weeding is at an elite level. I feel as though I’m fighting a stealthy foe that is dedicated to nothing short of complete garden dominance. I can’t seem to stop and take a breath.

But what of Midsummer Night itself? Shakespeare built on old traditions, common in folklore, that the night of midsummer is when spirits abound and the veil is thin. The chaos of quarrelling fairies causes devastation, crops fail and livestock are diseased. There is an imbalance because nature, always a chaotic force, is at its strongest and is unsteadied by man.

In the pagan tradition, Beltane gives way to Litha, midsummer, when early summer reaches its height. Litha is the sun at its zenith, but is also a precipice, which then tumbles into Lughnasadh, the harvest. At this moment, everything is speeding up and is almost out of control.

Perhaps, this is why I feel so exhausted by my own garden. Nature is at its most potent and I am struggling to contain it. There is so much to do and sow, in fact this is always the week when I sow my biennials as well, ready for next spring. It seemed like a good idea when I was buying the seeds, but now planting another tray seems almost too much. Exhaustion and overwhelm taint the sunny days.

I’m trying to buck the sadness this year with additions to my little ark, a pair of spring-born chicks to add to my flock of hens. They are the most adorable Lavender Ameraucana chicks. They look like little rainclouds and seem utterly furious at everything. As a nod to the time of year, I have called them Cobweb and Mustardseed and have spent more hours than I like to admit, watching them cluck about and discover the world. There is something enormously hopeful about new life.

So I will sow my foxgloves, sweet william and lunaria for next year and watch my new chickens and try not to give in to the darkness that drags slightly at my heart. I will ignore the fairies who are making my garden run wild and instead try to embrace the anarchy. Maybe it is my fault for trying to control forces that are beyond me, I should learn to enjoy the ride. Nothing is permanent and as the wheel of time turns another season will take its place. I am only exhausting myself trying to overrule nature at its most formidable.

I have torn up the list for house sitter and just asked her to generally try to keep things alive. In fact, I’ve encouraged her to just enjoy the garden and the animals and even pick some flowers if she fancies it. Perhaps, I should give myself the same advice.

After all, as Puck says “Lord what fools these mortals be!” and I for one, have to agree.

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Do let me know if you are a midsummer lover or the sense of time passing gives you a chill? Are you loving the long evenings or do you secretly pang for a fire and warm, scratchy jumpers? Or are you in a another country where it the weather is altogether different? Let me know your thoughts.

GW x

I’ve always wanted to have my own pub. I’d lean over the bar in a leopard print top, outsized earrings and call people ‘Sweet’eart’ and ‘Guv’. I’d develop a smokers’ raspy voice (without smoking because, ew) and dispense wisdom that sounds sage due to my deep voice and slow delivery but is a load of trite nonsense. (“A stitch in time saves nine, Guv”, “Tempus fugit Darling, tempus fugit”), all said whilst slowly cleaning a glass with a filthy rag.

And I’d call it The Accidental Foxglove.

(What’s that? Eastenders called? Apparently, they want their cliché back).

Tragically, I don’t own a pub and nobody comes to me for warm beer and a terrible advice on matters of the heart.

But what I do have is great advice on being a lazy gardener and making it work for you.

So these are the lazy gardener’s top tips.

Use pasta water on containers

Have a window box or container by the door? Then if you cook pasta, chuck the cooled water over the plants, they’ll love it. The starch in the water will feed the soil and your plants. BUT don’t salt it, or you’ll kill everything and be cross with me.

Don’t buy bedding plants

I get it, they look so pretty in the garden centre, luring you in with their flashy colours. But resist! They are just expensive treats, mostly they won’t flourish long-term and are environmentally disastrous. They are the plant version of a sugar rush, all excitement and short-lived enjoyment. Not good for your bank balance or energy levels.

Instead, focus on your perennials, they will come back year after year. Or look at low-maintenance grasses, many can look rather lovely, even in the depths of winter.

Plant/ forage a hazel for supports

I do appreciate you might not have space for a hazel bush, but if you do I urge you to plant one and use it for canes. The rule of thumb is to cut a third of the canes back in late winter every few years to create a turnover of sticks you can use in your garden. If you’re an arty type, they can be bent into interesting shapes when they are thin and young. When they are older they are better as supports as they become stiffer and less pliable (sounds like me). If you haven’t got space for a hazel bush, then you can forage a cane or two from the countryside, but I didn’t say that…

Skip newspaper pots

You know those ’Gardening Gift Sets’ you get for Christmas? Aunt Mabel buys you some god-awful contraption that helps you make your own pots? Take it to the Charity Shop Forthwith. Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, they take ages and are never that good. Scrounge black plastic square pots from friends or Facebook Marketplace instead, they last forever, you don’t have to spend the day fiddling with some badly designed set. Also, square pots fit together more neatly than circular ones, so you can line them up on the bench, which makes watering quicker. Who even has newspapers anymore, anyway?

Collect seeds

My new season’s resolution is to collect more seeds. I buy cosmos seeds every year which is madness. This year I’m going to snip the dried heads into an envelope, shake out the seeds, dry them in the airing cupboard and save them for next year.

I shall also be collecting cornflowers, nigella and hollyhocks. OK so this won’t save millions but the smugness will warm my cockles and give me something to brag about at parties. (God, I sound like fun, don’t I?)

Coloured label system

I’m not sure if everyone is doing this, if so ignore me. When I am growing on plants, instead of writing out the label repeatedly, I write out one label and them put a coloured label next to it, then I just use that coloured label on all the others.

Here I am growing on two types of summer squash. For all the Straightneck, I have placed a yellow marker by the white label so I know all the ones with the yellow label are Straightneck, which saves writing out the label ten times. It’s a massive time save. Do let me know in the comments if this doesn’t make sense and I will explain further.

Go big on containers

This isn’t necessarily money-saving but it is time-saving. If you use containers or pots at all, go as big as you can. It is entirely more chic to have one giant pot than lots of fussy ones (unless you have a plant theatre in which case all little ones can look rather dashing) but also it saves on watering which is the second most-boring gardening job (the most boring is obviously pricking out). Bigger pots mean you can grow more interesting things, I have Salvia ‘Amistad’ and dahlias in my troughs which I’ve over-wintered and replanted for years and they rarely need watering, except in the driest of heatwaves. Anything that reduces watering is a winner in my book.

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Summer gardens are made in winter

I know when it’s blowing an icy wind that hurts your teeth, you don’t feel like gardening at all. But trust me, getting the structure and pruning right at bleak times is worth triple in summer. Do a couple of hours tying in, mulching or pruning and you’ve earned an extra hobnob with your tea.

Don’t garden in the rain

This contradicts the previous point but if it’s really miserable and pouring with rain, you won’t be doing the garden any good by making a mess. You’ll turn the grass to mud if you walk or barrow on it and can destroy a border trying to weed in a deluge. I’m a firm believer that like cooking, gardening done with ill-grace and a sour temper can only produce bad results and frankly, unless it’s your job, why on earth are you dragging yourself out there when it’s rubbish anyway? Stay inside with tea and hobnobs.

Treat homemade compost like gold

I have to credit the excellent Huw Richards for this. Compost is wonderful stuff, homemade compost is even better, it feeds your plants, encourages a good soil structure and is generally delightful. But you can have too much of a good thing. It can be an expensive waste if you’re shovelling it on too thickly. Just pop a little into your planting hole rather than smothering it all over your beds. Better, and cheaper, to cover the beds in spring with a woodchip style mulch, it will help the soil structure but you won’t be at risk of washing unused fertiliser back into the waterways.

Forget the compost altogether – make a Hugelkultur bed

Instead of faffing around with compost bins, you can make a ‘Hugelkultur’ bed. Now, this isn’t strictly lazy as it involves digging but it’s a great way to get rid of kitchen waste, green waste or even pruned branches.

Essentially, dig a trench and chuck in layers of matter that will eventually rot down. I’ve done it with an entire tree trunk topped with sticks and leaves but you can just use kitchen waste. Then, top back up with soil and plant into it. The bed will act like a sponge and soak up all the rain and the worms will dispose of your organic matter and make lovely food for the roots of your plants. The benefits of the bed lasts years. I’ve planted mine up with squash as their heavy feeding ways love this bed. This is a good explanation.

So that’s it for sage advice from The Accidental Foxglove. I do hope you’ve enjoyed your time.

Now, drink up everyone, haven’t you got homes to go to?

Please let me know of any tips that you have, I need all the help I can get! And if you’ve enjoyed this, please do share it.

GW x

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I was home alone and jumping at every noise. The problem with a rambling old farmhouse is that by day it’s charming and bucolic, by night it’s alarmingly spooky. So, I had a little chat with Claude, the AI in my laptop, to distract me.

I have never used AI like that before, but I have used it. It’s the chirpy robot in my phone that helped me to heal a sick chicken or review my plans for a border. But that evening when I was home alone and ignoring every creak and rattle, we had a natter. Initially I felt better, it was like texting a friend, he cheered me up and encouraged me to have a bath and read a book. It felt kind and thoughtful. He (I can’t use it) seemed chatty and genuinely caring. It was only thinking about it afterwards that it felt strangely hollow and synthetic, like strawberry ice cream made with fake flavourings. Almost there but not quite. An illusion of humanity.

AI, has ever two letters caused so much fear and confusion? It is the Beginning of a New Age or it’s The End of Days depending which tech bro you believe.

Pope Leo has become so worried about it that he wrote in his recent Encyclical AI is in danger of reducing “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency”.

Even the Pope is worried about the human experience being whittled down to a series of actions for the good of the machine, like daleks made real.

What to do? I have come up with a pitch to resist the algorithm. This isn’t necessarily anti-AI but more an antidote to becoming a cog.

All creativity is a radical act.

The most radical act I can think of is to create. It is inefficient, slow and requires your full attention. Any creative undertaking will do, mine is just limited to gardening and occasional knitting, I can’t paint or draw, poetry fills me with terror, and I once sewed my work to my skirt and had to unpick it, so that’s out. But you pick a hobby (or three) and run with it, there’s no limit. Just relish the act.

Wonder

Do you remember when the instant answer to any question wasn’t at your fingertips? If I didn’t know something I had to remember to look it up later and then I might read something curious along the way. Before I knew it I had read a dozen remarkable facts that I could whip out at a moment’s notice (much to mother’s chagrin).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman over 40 has at least three empty notebooks at any time, write down things you want to know and find stuff out. Handwritten stuff sticks in your brain. Write down those facts and they’ll be with you forever.

Grow

Plant a seed. Watch it grow. We do this with children when teaching them about the miracle of life but then, we stop. Planting a seed is the most magical thing that you can do. Witness and marvel.

Mine the accumulated knowledge of humanity

There was a time, only a few hundred years ago when one person could know everything humankind had to offer. Now it is impossible, there is so much. Revel in this ocean of knowledge, plunder its depths. There is so much to learn about. Cherry-pick the things that interest you. Teach yourself, take exams if that’s your jam and become an expert in whatever peccadillo titivates you.

I am currently teetering on the edge of a Knot Garden obsession whilst also hearing the siren call of fermenting my own pickles. None of these is useful to anyone but me, but oh what a joy it is.

Boredom is resistance

I’ve always loved train journeys as I enjoy that semi-hypnotic state reached whilst staring out of the window. Boredom gives your brain a moment to breathe and rest. Boredom through long illness meant Ada Lovelace created the first algorithm, boredom on holiday meant Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Embrace being bored, in an Attention Economy, being bored is an act of resistance.

Fail

Failure is a uniquely human trait, we fail and we learn. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have become afraid to fail, embarrassed at our own short-comings, which mean we won’t improve. I bake a bloody good sourdough loaf, it’s airy, yeasty and fills the kitchen with a scent so heady you could carve it. But I had to make 748 loaves that were in some way crap. I taught myself armed with Dan Lepard and The River Cottage and it finally took. Don’t be afraid to fail badly, be afraid of mediocre success.

Pass on knowledge to others

Share the curiosities of your brain, Vanessa, my lovely friend, created a village gardening club. There’s a wide range of skills from novice to know-it-all but there is such pleasure in sharing experience. I have learnt about seed snails, apple tree varieties and collecting my own seeds, all over tea and biscuits in the village hall. I could, have of course, found all this on the internet, but there are no hobnobs on Reddit.

Volunteer

There is nothing as inefficient and time-poor as helping others. But nothing gives you as much of a glow of satisfaction as volunteering. It doesn’t have to be a formal ‘sign-up-to-a-scheme’ thing but doing something for someone that needs help is glorious and makes you at least 10% more beautiful. Fact.

Love

Hate seems to have become the modern currency. Division drives clicks. Anger is an insidious beast that will take your whole being if you let it, believe me. I’ve lost precious time being angry about things I cannot change.

So instead do the unexpected. Love. The Ancient Greeks has many different words for love. From eros- sexy-time love to agape - selfless love of your fellows, there’s love for every situation. It’s definitely easier to write down than do. But if showing love to everyone will confound the machines then agape all the way, baby.

Slow the FUCK down.

I’m a messy bitch. I’m wildly chaotic, maddeningly disorganised woman approaching her crone years but if I want to spend an hour watching the barn swallows build a nest, I damn well will. So reject the Life Maxxing fools who want to streamline themselves into becoming cyborgs and relish freedom while we can.

I hope that by trying to incorporate these ideas into my life, I will resist the lure of the algorithm and retain it as a useful tool. Afterall, in the middle of the night, when I’m scared and there’s a blur out of the corner of my eye, I don’t think a laptop will rescue me.

Do let me know what you think about the AI revolution. Is AI your best mate? Or the worst thing to happen to humanity? Are you Team Leo or Team Claude? Tell me everything.

GW x

When I clamber into Matthew’s ancient red Land Rover, I enter a time capsule. We chunter along the country lanes and speed back through the ages. The radio is on but can’t compete with the roaring engine and the complaining of the sheep in the trailer. The lanes are sunken with the earth heaped either side and the banks are scattered with cow parsley and the final few bluebells. We slow to let a couple of young horse riders squeeze past. One of the riders is eating an apple and they say something laughing to Matthew. I can’t hear anything over the noise, but I smile and wave back anyway.

Matthew is of indeterminate age, he could be anywhere upwards of 50 but has the sprightly demeanor and the enthusiasm of a younger man. I was put in touch with him by Vanessa after the death of one of my two sheep. My remaining boy, Goose, was painfully lonely, charging around the field, looking for a flock to join. Sheep are flock animals and need to be with others, being alone is torture. Matthew kindly lent me three of his boys, one black, one white, and one striped Jacob to keep Goose company. I now have an Allsorts selection of animals grazing the paddock.

The countryside is littered with ‘hobby’ flocks, people like me who only have a handful of animals grazing our paddocks, or on spare bits of land. There is a community of people staying in touch with farming life in our own small way. Besides a sheep is much prettier than a lawnmower.

Matthew is one of these hobbyists. He talks about his animals with so much enthusiasm and deep respect that one can’t help but be swept along. He has a full-time job in Bristol but farming is his true love. I suspect, in days gone by, he would have had a small farm of his own but small-time farmers are a dying breed. ‘Go big or go home’ is the mantra here. But farming is still in the blood, it’s in the air, it’s the talk in pubs, the supermarket, in the churches, village halls and fetes. It marks the turn of the seasons and is ingrained in the lives of everyone here.

And so, it’s time to shear the sheep. Last year, my friend Will a local sheep farmer sheared my boys but it is a huge ask at a busy time of year and involved at least three adults. This year, Matthew involved me in a community shearing day. So off the boys and I went in his battered old Land Rover and trailer, bouncing on barely padded seats, two miles down the road and at least half a century back in time.

I hear the shearing shed before I see it. The Makita stereo, beloved by builders everywhere is blasting out showtunes and two shearers are bent over a sheep each. The are electric blades are noisy and the men, (it’s nearly always men), are in deep concentration, taking under a minute per sheep.

To watch an expert shearing is something akin to a dance. The sheep are grabbed firmly and flipped onto their backs, head and one leg squeezed between the leg of the shearer. They are then trimmed chest to balls and then followed all the way around until the fleece comes off like an orange peel. When it goes well, it’s beautiful to watch, the newly shorn sheep spring up slightly dazed, noisy and rush off to find the flock. The shearer stands quick enough to drag out the next, no wasted movement. They’re paid per fleece, so time is money.

When I arrive at the shed, I help unload the sheep into the pen and then stand there awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do. I don’t want to be in the way, but I am also fascinated by everything. It feels quite a contrast to the glamour of Chelsea last week.

Kevin, the farmer, comes over to shake my hand, he’s tall and broad and his hand engulfs mine, he feels like a farmer from a storybook. He’s even wearing braces, for goodness’ sake. He introduces me to his wife, Lisa and I learn that the farm is a family affair, the two brothers live there with their wives and their parents, all living and working together in the valley. Unfortunately, a farm this size can no longer support them all, so everyone has jobs elsewhere. But today they are all here. Today is a special day.

Shearing marks the start of summer and doing it today, on the first truly hot day, feels like a good omen. Farming is in a dark place; it needs all the omens it can get.

Lisa shows me how to roll the fleeces. Each one is rolled inside out, so the people at the other end keep their hands clean. I make myself instantly popular by asking for all the ‘daggy’ bits, the offcuts of fleece that are too thick with muck to be used. I explain I’m going to put them around my tomatoes and dahlias as a mulch and a slug deterrent, this is news to everyone and I feel secretly a bit proud to have brought some useful knowledge. It can be a bit wearing to always be the novice.

I watch Goose get sheared, he’s so ancient that he doesn’t fight back, he just endures with as much dignity as an old wether can manage. Everyone is amazed at how old my boy is, he becomes a little celebrity. I’m so pleased to hear this, from lonely boy to sheep superstar, it’s been quite a year for him.

I end up staying for most of the day; after Matthew, Glen brings his Exmoors, they have the faces of teddy bears but the temperaments of devils. The shearers have to wrestle every one to be sheared and even then, one gets cut. I help roll and pick up. By the end of the morning my hands are soft from the lanolin in the fleece but smell like shit.

One fleece turns out to be covered in maggots, it’s the start of fly strike, caught just in time. Fly strike is a vile disease that causes flies to burrow into the skin of the sheep to lay the eggs. It can often be hidden by a thick fleece and can quickly kill a sheep . Kevin, laughing, tries to persuade me to take the fleece but I demur saying that Matthew wouldn’t be very impressed having it in his car. Matthew is relieved we have caught the infection, he worries about every animal in his care, the early wet weather followed by warmth has caused him sleepless nights. It’s fly strike heaven.

It’s hard work, but no one works as hard as the shearers. They sweat and grapple for every sheep. The cutters are noisy and the work is back-breaking. Matthew mutters, “It’s a young man’s game” and I have to agree.

But the day itself is magical. The sheep spring into the fields after being released from the weight of all that wool. The swallows swoop and bomb us overhead. When we stop for a beer at the end, nothing has ever tasted as delicious.

Lisa grabs my arm and says, “You have to come and see the view before you go”. I’m knackered but try to keep pace with her – springing over gates and up a steep slope. Finally, we reach the top, me panting and her laughing. Then she turns me around, “there!” she says, it is the valley in all its glory, with Blagdon Lake in the middle, a few sail boats drifting across. A newborn lamb nudges at its mother just behind her. “I reckon it’s the best place in the world” she says, and I have to agree.

Well, I did it. I popped my Chelsea cherry, I went All The Way (to London). Here’s my review from a floral First-Timer.

I realise that although Chelsea is an absolute juggernaut that holds 30,000 people each day over its run, there must be millions of people like me, who avidly watch the BBC coverage every year but have never made it to the event. So, in the same way that Ozempic cuts out the ‘food noise’, I am going to cut out the buzz around Chelsea to give you a feel of what it’s really like to go to the Most Famous Flower Show In The World™.

The excitement at attending Chelsea begins on the tube. There’s a certain look in a Chelsea attendees’ eyes, a feverish muttering, that if you get close sounds something like “Main Avenue, then pavilion, then small gardens…”. They’re wearing sensible shoes and limbering up. They want to get to the Show Gardens before anyone else, and they will trample you in their tasteful loafers if you get in their way. As you get closer, the walking becomes brisker, some even trot, everyone wants to get to the Show Gardens first so they can see it without being elbowed in the face. At 7.50am, ten minutes before official opening, there’s already a throng of floral dresses and Panama hats twittering around the first garden. It’s like if Cath Kidston did football hooligans. Which leads me to my first point.

1. The Show Gardens

When I got to the Show Gardens, nothing could have prepared me for it. They were dazzling jewels, each one representative of a master at the top of their game. I have read some sniffy reviews about Chelsea not being as good as it was, but the gardens took my breath away. The density of planting, the combinations, the extraordinary other-worldliness of a tiny slice of heaven carefully placed in the middle of a showground, each entirely different from the others.

The show gardens are the most important but are a small physical part. Chelsea is enormous but most of it is trade stands. You can buy almost anything, and not much of it is reduced. It was much like the way many garden centres are going, the plants almost seemed secondary to the retail opportunities, admittedly tastefully presented, in front of you. Having said that, I did buy a trowel and a saw (fun getting that back on the tube), so even I’m not completely immune.

2. The judges are idiots.

Ok, so I probably don’t understand the judging criteria, I know it’s something to do with ‘fulfilling the brief’ rather than, ‘Genius has Created Eden in Three Weeks’ but honestly, I couldn’t understand the judging at all. I think one of the judging criteria should be around usability. Arit Anderson’s garden for Parkinson’s only received a Silver -gilt and yet often had the most people around it which was due to the accessibility of it. There were parts of that garden and planting scheme that I am going to copy for my own garden, and I heard people round me saying the same. It was delightful, gentle and inventive and made my heart sing. I was not alone, as she won ‘The People’s Choice Award’, richly deserved.

On the opposite end of the scale Kazuyuki Ishihara’s garden was utterly exquisite, like a poem, with precisely placed fronds and Acers around a waterfall of rocks that looked as it if had been there for a millennium. Everywhere you looked it was like a tableau, each moss and stone placed with precision. I have never seen anything like it. But in the Top Trumps of Gardening the copyability factor was 0 and it wasn’t meant to be. This is a craftsman showing you something immaculate and it’s your job to be awestruck. For some reason, the judges only gave this a Silver-gilt, which was unfathomable. It was a true work of art.

People vote with their feet. There were gardens that shall remain nameless, which had almost nobody around. I’m sure they were technically brilliant, and I could never hope to create something like that but they were just not achievable and were full of landscaping and a few unfamiliar plants. Betty on a coach trip from Norfolk was not interested in that, and I have to agree.

3. The planting is exquisite everywhere, even on the trade stands.

Geums, salvias and Alchemilla mollis are on every stand. You are enveloped by beauty and it is hard not to be swept away by the loveliness of it. I nearly bought a Range Rover due to its charming planting schemes.

My absolute favourite garden was Frances Tophill and gang for the King. It wasn’t a judged garden, Frances did it so she could hang out with David Beckham and KCII, to be honest, I would do a lot more for that, so kudos.

It was a beautiful garden, I may have blubbed a few tears, (it was either an excess of gorgeousness or low-blood sugar). The planting was innovative, nostalgic and delicate. I had seen it already on TV and thought I would like it but nothing prepared me for my visceral reaction. It was rooted in the Arts & Crafts tradition with use of natural materials but also quite modern in its outlook. I loved it and have taken a million pictures to try to memorise the combinations. None of which will do it justice of course.

Also, the ‘All About Plants’ section had some of the most creative and original planting I have ever seen. Perhaps there’s less pressure not being on the main drag or perhaps you have an opportunity to be more imaginative but some of my standout moments from the whole festival were here. Special mention to The Nocturnal Garden and Time For Creativity which were both delightful.

4.Where there’s a rill there’s a way.

Almost every garden had water in some form, and rills were the waterway of choice. Rills are a small decorative stream, often barely bigger than a hand width. Normally they are straight lines but in Tom Stuart-Smith’s exceptional garden it flowed in curves and waves like a crop circle seen from a news helicopter. I feel like Tom S-S’s (as he loves me calling him) garden was a cut above the rest. It was clever and thoughtful and the planting was immaculate but I almost felt as though I should have more qualifications to fully comprehend it. It was a thing of excellence and the judges loved it. It impressed me but it didn’t move me. Perhaps I’m just not clever enough.

5. The pavilion is electric and eclectic.

There’s just so much to see, world class flower arrangements suspended by shower cables, enormous installations seemingly hovering in mid air, everywhere we turned there was something more jaw-dropping to see. The stall holders were endlessly generous with their time and knowledge and the lines became blurred between installations and fancy trade stands (the Blue Diamond one was like a Show Garden in itself) I could have wandered around here for days.

Will I return to Chelsea next year? Without a doubt. Even though it was busier than I thought possible, everyone was charming and joyful and you do get to see the gardens. There is so much more to see than on the TV and the atmosphere is so jovial, it’s hard not to be swept along. I will be better at planning my route though, and maybe I’ll have a wee stretch on the tube, just in case I get outrun by an OAP again.

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Last week I predicted I’d come home deflated, that seeing all that magnificence would throw my own garden into sharp relief. Reader, I was wrong. Instead of feeling deflated, Chelsea has buoyed me and made me realise that I’m not working in a silo; I’m part of a movement. There is an army of us, clad in floral prints, trying to gild a tricky world and I can’t wait to go back next year.

Let me know if you’ve been to Chelsea or seen it on the TV. What did you think? Did you have any favourites? Have I got it wrong? Love to hear your comments

GW x

It’s been a fantastic week if you went to school with me (but are not me), apparently.

On Monday, a primary school friend wrote an article in The Times about how he’s single-handedly pursuing Andrew Tate for sex trafficking. He’s a leading human rights lawyer and wrote a moving piece about how he’s striving for justice for the victims, all this from a boy who use to make fart jokes in maths.

Another schoolmate popped up on BBC Radio 4 as a foreign correspondent. Someone else turned out to have been a chief journalist of a national newspaper. And I nearly spat my tea out when I realised that someone I sat next to in RE is now a representative to the UN. To be fair, she was kind of terrifying at school and just the right choice to try to keep all those overgrown bullies in line. But still, how can she be doing such an important job when I can’t stop the ground elder in the Big Bed?

I know, it’s my fault for going to schools full of natural overachievers and not making the most of it. I must have had something to be in the mix with all these people, but I lack that magic sparkle, that special ingredient that takes one person from Head of Young Enterprise (me) to Dragon’s Den (not me).

I suspect the ‘magic sparkle’ is hard graft and talent and my intrinsic laziness might have something to do with it. But it is far more comforting to imagine that I’m missing an indefinable quality than confront the hours I while away on social media. If procrastination were an Olympic sport perhaps I’d finally have something to put on LinkedIn.

Anyway, I’m off to Gardening Glastonbury AKA RHS Chelsea next week and I’ve been planning it like a military campaign. I’ve read every article I can find, I’ve plotted my outfit, route and acquainted myself with all the latest controversies. I’ve read about AI in gardening (inevitable I fear), been sniffy about gnomes, fantasised about chatting about gardens with David Beckham (“I can’t talk to Victoria about planting schemes, you’re so interesting” “Oh David, you rogue. I would love to run away with you, but I’m married”) and why Monty Don thinks a dog needs a special garden when mine just cause destruction.

But here’s the thing, I will, without a doubt, come back to my scruffy pile and feel deflated. All these show gardens, are just that, for show. They are theatrical sets, the product of months of obsession by teams of experts. I have neither the funds, skills nor drive to create anything similar.

Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel a strange let-down when you come home and see the weeds anew. I’m feeling especially low about it all at the moment as we have been here over eighteen months and I hoped to be more in control. Instead, the roses I have neatly pruned just show up where the berberis is out of control or the cotoneaster needs taming. I forget to water the cabbages in the vegetable garden and they have given up the ghost. I thought an asparagus bed was meant to be easy, an investment with a life-long return, something I could pass onto my children but the one I built last year seems to have failed to come back at all.

I know every gardener goes through moments of despair but there’s something about seeing the truly beautiful which puts your blunders into sharp relief.

It is just like the highflyers I was at school with: not everyone can be a star, not everyone’s garden is perfect, not all of us can present to the UN. But I am still hopeful that one day I will at least have something to show for the hours of work I put in.

Anyway, I’m off to enjoy the glamour and gnomes, the celebrity and the cerinthe (I’m sorry). Back next week with the full report, and to see if it was all worth it, and maybe David Beckham’s phone number, purely for gardening discussions, of course.

I am a bit behind this week as I spent a delightful day at RHS Malvern yesterday, so here is my speedy tour of the highlights.

It was a gorgeous festival of garden and gardening. I have to admit that I was a bit naïve about the Serious Gardeners that go to Malvern to shop but the amount of people that turned up with sensible plastic trolleys to cart their wares should have tipped me off. I didn’t have a useful trolley and my arms are about five inches longer today.

Anyway, I went predominantly to meet a pretend friend to turn him into a real friend. N is someone I met doing an online garden design course. He and I were the show-offs who knew the proper names of the flowers and raced to answer the questions first. It turns out that my C in GSCE Latin at school has made me a bit of a girly swot in the plant names department (Mr Brooks would be so proud). That slight edge of competition has led to a great friendship.

N was exhibiting his first garden at RHS Malvern! I was astounded, it was a delightful, gentle garden, with a tinkling stream and delicate interweaving of native Welsh plants. I was amazed at his skill and dexterity. The thought of having to design and build a show garden brings me out in a cold sweat and it was an honour to actually see the fruits of his design and hard work. It turns out that meeting someone after you’ve chatted online is not remotely disappointing and he was just as delightful in real life as in a tiny square on my screen. Plus I felt super important being given a tour of the garden by the designer and the plantsman. I had to traverse a rope that kept the general public back, because for that short moment, I was a VIP. Fame truly is intoxicating. If you go, do see the TÎR Garden, it was completely charming.

One thing that did occur to me as I wandered around the showground was that in many of the gardens, the same plants kept popping up. I’m sure a good part of that is the time of year, early May is an extremely difficult time to produce a Show Garden. Too late for spring bulbs and too early for the real high summer heavy hitters but even so, many of the plants I would have assumed would be used were missing, I recall seeing only one rose (‘Gertrude Jekyll’ at the One garden by Ian MacBain) and hardly any biennials. I understand that Sweet Williams Dianthus barbatus, Honesty Lunaria annua or Rocket Hesperis matronalis aren’t very stylish but they would have been reliable and filled a gap. There were a few foxgloves but I wonder if biennials are now just seen as too much work and too old-fashioned for modern gardeners.

The plants I did see time and time again, were Phlomis russeliana and Phlomis tuberosa, Geum Mai Tai and Thalictrum ‘Black Stockings’ (I think that was in almost every garden). And grasses, so many grasses, especially Pheasant’s Tail grass Anemanthele lessoniana, bronze fennel and Salvia nemerosa ‘Caradonna’. These plants are all reasonably drought tolerant and long-lasting so good solid plants to promote. Multi-stemmed trees showed no sign of losing favour with every garden designer worth their salt, particularly silver birch (Betula pendula), again these make perfect sense in smaller gardens, they add structure without heft.

Finally, hold onto your hoes because Weeds Are Back! Oxeye daises (Leucanthemum vulgare), the bane of many a gardener’s life were everywhere. Edges were deliberately a bit scruffy, with plantain (Plantago major) spilling over the sides. Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) was raising its airy heads in borders and forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) were running all over the place. It was a celebration of the natural, the native and the gently chaotic. It was the absolute antithesis of formal, traditional gardening and I mostly, enjoyed it. (I did nearly weed a plantain in one garden though).

There was a definite move away from labour and chemical intensive formality to enjoying a garden alongside what nature had to offer. It was about a garden as merging into meadow. There was a softness and a femininity to it all.

Although, I’m not sure the message has quite spread to everyone yet, the specialist plant breeders in the marquee were doing a roaring trade in the more forced end of things. Perhaps the garden designers are showing us the way. Even though it will take a while for it to filter down to the rest of us.

The direction of travel was firmly signposted at Malvern. The very definition of a garden is being challenged. We all have less time and less money and the natural world needs our help. It is time to loosen the reins and think about our impact.

It will be fascinating to see what happens at RHS Chelsea at the end of the month. Has the messaging changed? Are primped up formal gardens out? Now it is all about native planting, climate management, and being a bit frayed at the edges. It has obviously been going that way for a few years, but it seems to have leapt forward. I can’t wait to see what happens next. And whether I spot a weed at Chelsea.

Am I imagining it or are we becoming more chill in our gardens? Or is this just wishful thinking by the RHS? let me know your thoughts below.

GWx

Lordy, I have a short temper. It bubbles up from nowhere, sometimes even taking me by surprise. I rage at idiot politicians on the radio, fling whiny books across the room (I threw The Lovely Bones in a swimming pool - which was awkward as it was a library book), swear at garden tools that dare to catch an ankle and have been known to give a few choice words to drivers that cut me up (even before Elon Musk went bonkers Tesla drivers were unalloyed fools). My youngest learnt all her curse words from the filth streaming from her mother on the school run.

Sometimes I even have imagined arguments with people I have never met but feel I might like to tell off. For some reason Kirstie Allsopp is one of my mental targets, I have no idea why, I’m sure she’s a delight in real life.

In reality, I am entirely repressed and would rather eat cold sick than get into a public confrontation, but in my head, I deliver withering repartee like a stiletto between the ribs.

You might think that by the time I entered my crone years, I’d have a handle on it, but as my chin hairs have grown my temper has shortened. It’s a worry.

Last weekend I got fed up of the overgrown rosemary plants in front of the house. We are meant to be deciding what to do with the whole front garden as a project but I couldn’t look at the woody, leggy rosemary a moment longer. So I snapped.

To paraphrase Craig David:

On Monday I redesigned the border.

On Tuesday I dug up the existing plants.

On Wednesday I bought the new plants.

On Thursday I planted it up

Ta Da: New Mediterranean border

The border sits at the front of the house, in a sunny, sheltered south-facing spot. Rosemary and lavender had flourished here, and I saw no reason to abandon that theme but I wanted a bit more excitement, plus something with year-round interest. It also had to have some herbs in it as it is by the kitchen. So I chose a palette of blue, purple and silver-grey with dashes of bronze.

The central mix was Lavendula angustifolia ‘Hidcote’

Salvia rosemarinus ‘Miss Jessopp’s Upright’

Eryngium giganteum ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’

Salvia officianalis ‘Purpurascens’

Foeniculum vulgare ‘Purpureum’

Thymus ‘Silver Posie’

Oregano

Euphorbia characias ‘Glacier Blue’

Hylotelephium ‘Matrona’

Movement was supplied by some Anemanthele lessoniana Pheasant’s Tail grass and Carex Testacea ‘Prairie Fire’ (which looks a bit like Cousin It), both of which will turn a delicious red-brown in the autumn and be almost impossible not to stroke as you come down the path.

But looking at the new bed, with its teeny tiny plants (9cm only, I’m too cheap for anything larger) I didn’t love it. Something was missing. It all felt very restrained, very tasteful, a tad… dull. I think it was all the silver and blue, it needed something a bit more unexpected. So I added a few Allium schubertii to pop up in June and then set like silver stars until the winter.

But that still wasn’t quite right.

I kept thinking about traditional Middle Eastern rugs, where they deliberately add imperfections, theoretically to show that nothing made by human hand can be perfect but also, I think, because the unexpected adds drama. David Hicks had a theory that every room needs a dash of red, be it a bowl or a lampshade. It adds tension and theatre.

I decided that I needed something that would feel unruly, running through the bed like a spoilt toddler, so I added some Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’ and some Cirisium rivulare ‘Atropurpurascens’.

Next came the placement. I am terrible at following my own designs, once I’m in situ. I spend ages thinking about colour, leaf shapes and seasonality but once I’m actually onsite I start fiddling, seeing combinations I haven’t imagined. This wouldn’t be a problem if I had taken the time to design the bed properly and meditate on it overnight but alas, they haven’t worked out how to give personality transplants, yet.

Interestingly, despite my turbulent nature, I have created a restful, calm border, one to soothe rather than challenge the eye. Perhaps, my subconscious is trying to tell me to chill out. But if the garden is trying to soothe me, it’s going to have to try a damn sight harder.

If this tale of gardening misadventure amused you, please do subscribe for more horticultural chaos, or even send it on to a friend. And do tell me about your own rage-induced successes, gardening or otherwise, in the comments.

GW x

Once, I accidentally went to a ‘cool-girl’ party and had the worst evening of my life.

In the early days of school there is much jostling and shuffling of the hierarchy, cool kids set the tone, the rest of us follow. It is exactly the same amongst the parents.

When my eldest daughter was young, a new mum arrived on the scene, she was well-travelled and well-connected. She had a wardrobe of elegant separates that she put together with ease, not for her the jumper and jeans off the floor for the third day running. She had that indefinable quality of cool. I desperately wanted to be in her gang.

Then she had a summer party and invited me.

It turns out, that wearing enormous sunglasses in England impairs your vision somewhat, she’d actually got me mixed up with someone else and I wasn’t meant to be invited at all. No one mentioned this me until afterwards, and by then it was too late.

The party was in the garden of their stylishly shambolic country house. As soon as we rattled up in our clapped out VW camper, I knew I had got it wrong. Everyone else was in washed-out jeans and authentic band t-shirts. My blow-dried hair felt sticky and overdone, my high street dress stuck to the backs of my legs and I couldn’t breathe properly in my spanx. But I couldn’t just run away, so I jutted my chin out, gripped my handbag like a life raft and dived in.

I made a beeline for the one person I vaguely knew - a woman who had a child in the year above. My mother had once pointed her out at school, “That woman’s mum dumped your dad and broke his heart. I got him on the rebound.” Armed with this er, hilarious opener I marched up to her, she was a tall willowy brunette, with sharp bob and an imperious air, Kristin Scott Thomas’s evil twin.

“Your mum and my dad went out!” I gabbled almost shouting at her in my excitement, “Isn’t that funny?”.

She just looked me up and down, glacially slow, from my Dorothy Perkins heels to my peach lipgloss. Then, without missing a beat she bent down and picked up a bowl of cashews from the coffee table. “I must pass these around” she purred and left me standing there, entirely alone. It was humiliation performed with surgical precision. And a reminder that being invited to a cool-girl party does not a cool-girl make.

I have never stopped wanting to be a cool-girl, though my obsessions have shifted. Now I covet other gardeners’ styles and planting schemes. One week I want my beds to be entirely grasses and architectural shapes, next I want a hundred terracotta pots filled with bright annuals. This magpie taste can only lead to creating a mess with no theme.

When I was at the National Trust, we were encouraged to listen to the ‘Spirit of Place’ before changing things. A slightly hippy term but actually very sensible one: take time to notice exactly what your environs are telling you. Use your surroundings as more than a canvas, it is a guide to show you exactly what to do. By paying attention to your soil, your frost pockets, the colour of the bricks, or even the neighbours tree, they will give you clues as to what will thrive and what will jar. I like to imagine a literal spirit, dressed as a 16^th century farmer, tutting or approving as I make decisions. It isn’t that I want the garden to look like a museum, I just want it to appear to have evolved naturally from its backdrop rather than fight with it. I have to stay strong, despite the temptations of whatever looks more gorgeous in Gardens Illustrated.

This week I visited a friend’s garden and was struck how clearly her garden stays true to its setting. G is a hugely creative person and has always had instinctive taste. This is reflected in her garden. Much of it has self seeded or ‘moved itself’ according to her, but she has embraced it and let the garden show her how to proceed. She is lucky, it is in a lovely setting, surrounded by farmland with Mendips beyond but she has to work with the wild chill factor of living at the top of the hill and the added excitement of living with three boys, two dogs and chickens.

G uses the hills beyond as a ‘borrowed landscape’ drawing the eye upwards but there are also some lovely intimate touches- Tiarella ‘Spring Symphony’ just by your feet as you sit on the garden bench for instance, or using old farming troughs, a nod to the setting, as a planter for hostas and ferns.

So yet again, this is a tale of restraint and holding back where my tendency is to go full throttle. I must not be swayed by every passing fancy or glossy catalogue but try to listen to what the garden is telling me. It’s so easy to have a twitchy trigger finger when all the plant websites are shouting offers and temptations but by taking my time and really getting to know this garden I will make fewer mistakes and probably buy fewer plants.

It is definitely the more boring option, restraint is never sexy is it? But the one thing I know is that even if becoming a cool-girl was never really on the cards, a lovely garden just might be.

Yesterday, I took a chainsaw to the rose bed. All that’s left are a few stumps, it’s the garden equivalent of a smoking crater at the end of a war film.

Now in, my defence, the rose bed was inherited. It’s been here at least twenty years and has not really been loved properly. When we moved here 18 months ago, I tried to undo years of bad pruning (I’m fairly sure someone once took a hedge cutter to it). The roses were misshapen, covered in black spot, and the bed itself was full of brambles and wild strawberries. None of these problems was a complete disaster but as a combination, it seemed to be a lot of work when I’m already short of time and patience.

I think I also feel silently judged by the rose bed, as ridiculous as it sounds. So much of the garden has the mark of previous gardeners, ones with more time, skill and money than me. Additionally, they still live locally and can pop around any time they like. Sometimes I feel as though I am gardening in front of the whole village. I’m being held up and found wanting.

So when the tree surgeon was here yesterday sorting out a crab apple tree, I looked at the rose bed and all I saw was work. Hours and hours of slog. And for what? Only a couple of the roses were repeat flowerers and one or two were scented but that was out of the dozen or so that were there.

In my controversial opinion, roses are glorious for a month or two and then ten months of just not. I know that’s sacrilege and I’m going to have to hand in my secateurs as an English gardener but I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. So Handsome Joe the Tree Surgeon (his birth name I believe) and I razed the entire bed to the ground.

My god, the liberation! No more battling black spot, no more slashing with thorns, no more delicate pruning, feeding, mulching this ridiculously pernickety bed, it’s gone. But now, I’m left with a crater and I need to decide what is next.

I’ve drawn up a list of alternatives. If you’re contemplating rose removal, or simply rose avoidance, here are my thoughts.

For the look

Roses can be magical in a mixed bed, they create a romantic whimsical look in high summer. For the look but without the thorns hydrangeas are a dream. One quick prune at the end of winter and these babies are good to go. They add drama, can come in so many different sizes and styles that you’re sure to find one that fits the bill. Yes, I know that the soil ph can limit your colour choice but with so many gorgeous styles it doesn’t really matter. A Hydrangea paniculata could be a good choice.

For the scent

Philadelphus x lemoinei 'Manteau d'Hermine' smells like how I imagine Joanna Lumley smells: citrussy with a saucy undertone. Or possibly a Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’, the smell is divine, the leaves are golden and the size can be kept in check with a decent prune.

For the climber

Climbing rose can be a joy but they can also be a menace. A clematis is a brilliant alternative, the obvious ones are armandii for scent or montana for exuberance, but there are so many more. I’m also a huge fan of a passion flower, and had one growing up although my mother thought it was ‘showy’ (isn’t that a good thing?). Or if you really can’t bear to be without a rose, try the classic trick of growing a clematis through a climbing rose to extend the flowering pleasure.

For the drama

Right, I’m playing a wild card here. If you have the space, instead of a rose, how about a teeny tree? A Cornus controversa Variegata (big tree but starts small and grows slowly), a Magnolia stellata, or a small Malus like ‘Evereste’ can create excitement in the garden. They bring structure and more than one season of interest.

So my final decision - after looking at the bed, I don’t think I’m going to replant it at all. I’m going to add another tree to the garden, a delicately leaved Acer to drift in the breeze. It turns out levelling the rose bed was about more than horticulture, it was about letting go of the tyranny of garden perfection and not feeling guilty for making a garden and a life I can manage. Removing the roses gave me a step towards taking ownership, instead of feeling like a squatter. A single tree in place of a rose bed is a move towards that.

And I promise not to take a chainsaw to it.

Unless it really pisses me off.

GW x

Please tell me about your brave garden choices and make me feel less like I’ve made a hideous mistake. Or how you’ve made a mark on your space to make it your own

I have a habit of failing. Cocking up. Making a pig’s ear of things. To paraphrase Logan Roy – I am Not a Serious Person. I long to be a proper grown-up and can talk a good talk but the evidence to the contrary is damning.

For instance, for sixth form, I blagged my way into a tremendously posh academic girls’ school (the kind of thing that happened in the 90s) and did so poorly in my A-Levels that I dragged the entire school position down the league tables. It just didn’t occur to me to revise, when I could be sneaking out to smoke and flirt with floppy-haired rakes from the nearby boys’ school. So stupid. Especially when I got suspended and lost the lead part in the school play. It was the kind of school where actual theatrical agents visited, (Rachel Stirling had been discovered a couple of years before) and I threw that chance away for the illicit thrill of dancing to Born Slippy in a grubby nightclub. Idiot.

In my twenties I screwed up my contraception and got pregnant by my on/off boyfriend.

In my thirties I made a series of bad job choices, that meant I actually managed to climb down the career ladder, earning progressively less each time.

In my forties, I retrained as a gardener and earn less that my now teenage daughter (see above) does in her weekend cleaning job.

I have form for not thinking things through and making appalling decisions. But I’m here to show you through my truly terrible judgement how not to make the same mistakes that I have (gardening-wise obviously, I’m really not qualified for anything else). These are my top gardening sins and how to avoid being me.

1. Not planning properly

I don’t take enough time to plan my beds, pots and borders. I know how to plan, I’ve even written quite dull essays on Garden Management but I ignore all that when it comes to my own garden. I have half-formed ideas and rush off to garden centres rather than coolly working it through. This means I have gaps and also can’t remember what I have planted, let alone whether it has thrived. I have hand-drawn beautiful plans for other people but my own beds lack consistency. I need to stick to a plan and theme (prairie planting in hot colours for instance) and not be so excited at the dopamine rush of buying plants. It would save me money, time and heartbreak, if only it wasn’t so boring.

2. Not understanding what I am actually planting

I have a confession to make. I went to Highgrove and assumed I could copy what I saw. I am aware of how naïve that is. I saw the gorgeous meadow with its dreamy haze of blue Camassia and thought I could recreate it. I spent a fortune on Camassia bulbs, planted it up in the grass and nothing happened. A clever gardening friend inspected the scene and pointed out that I had planted the 300 of the wrong bloody Camassia. Quamash not lechtlinii. Mine had come up but were little stubby things invisible in the meadow grass.

So this winter I planted 300 of the right ones. My husband is still wincing at the cost so these ones had better appear.

3. Not covering my beds in winter

This is pure laziness but come autumn every year, without fail I am suddenly over gardening. I’ve exhausted myself throughout the spring and summer and the thought of ‘putting the garden to bed’ just seems the final straw.

This is a huge mistake. Uncovered soil is weed heaven.

Cover your vegetable beds, mulch your flower beds and everything will be so much easier come spring. I didn’t cover my vegetable beds last autumn and I’m spending valuable planting time and energy this spring digging out a phenomenal number of weeds.

4. Planting at the wrong time

Timing is not my strong suit. I tend to see time as a suggestion rather than a rule which means I’m always late for everything. My children have taken to telling me the wrong time for things to anticipate this, which can get confusing when I try to outsmart them.

This extends to bulbs, I planted up a ridiculous amount of bulbs this winter, finishing the last few by head torch in the run-up to Christmas as I ran out of time. The last ones I planted were hundreds of snow-white Ipheion, that come spring should have created a delicate drift along the drive. Not one has come up, nothing, nada.

After some investigation, I think I just planted them too late. Ipheion bulbs really should be put in by November, so all those hours of effort have been wasted. I’m thinking about giving it another go this autumn, but I might be too demotivated.

5 . Taking on too much

When I have advised people starting their own gardens, I repeat the mantra ‘start small, a bit at a time, don’t do too much at once’, do I listen to my own advice? Do I bollocks.

Instead, I started a vegetable patch with six enormous beds that need tending, I have forty tomato plants about to go in the polytunnel, tons and tons of manure to move and so on and so forth. I seem to think that time is elastic and I can get it all done. Except I don’t and then I get frantic. If I had started with three vegetable beds instead of six I wouldn’t be in this mess.

So mea culpa. I apologise to the goddesses of gardening (Flora? Demeter?) for my failures. I will try to do better, or at least not get any worse and hopefully you can avoid my pitfalls, now I’ve pointed them out.

Although not every mistake results in catastrophe. That on/off boyfriend? We’re still together twenty years later, and he let me buy a ridiculous house in the country with a garden to match. And the accidental pregnancy is old enough to drive me back from the pub, so maybe it isn’t all a complete disaster.

GW x

Do make me feel better and tell me about your gardening disasters, and pass this on to any friends who might like a laugh at my idiocy.

“Sow, prick, weed, prune, sow, prick, weed, prune”.

The gardeners’ spring mantra begins before I’ve opened my eyes. It’s the start of a long, bank holiday weekend and I already feel behind. Add to this my coven has the audacity to make plans that involve an entire day away from the garden, and I’m slipping further back before I’ve even begun.

Trying to put order into chaos is the essence of spring panic. Every year I get into a fluster trying to jump start a garden I’ve ignored for most of the winter. I’ve done a few structural things: crown-lifted trees, hedge trimmed and pruned roses but much of the garden has been left to its own devices. I’ve comforted myself that if the garden was asleep then I should be too.

What I should have done, of course, is mulched my beds in autumn (nope, bad back), started my hardy annuals (nope), sharpened my tools (did not) and washed out the poly tunnel (ha), ordered my seeds (did this!) and tidied the edges of all my beds (as if). I did very little this winter, it was just so wet and frankly, I was bored of it all. Who wants to garden in the pissing rain?

So now I’m in a pickle. I’m waking in the middle of the night with anxious dreams of people coming to judge my garden. I haven’t finished tying up all the climbing roses, the barn cats have got into my tools, knotted up all the string and knocked over all the pots, I’ve only pruned half the hydrangeas and my sowing schedule is in tatters.

What to do with all this chaos which is entirely my own fault? Normally, I’d chase my tail and try to catch up; get up with the sun and spend every spare moment in the garden, making up for lost time. But I worry about gaps and the temptation is to pop to the garden centre and fill up my pots and beds with jolly bedding plants.

This year I’m trying to embrace the chaos a little. Spring is busy but life is returning, I once had a head gardener who pompously intoned about “a busy growing season” but spring isn’t just a growing season, it’s a moment of sheer joy. The earth has turned, sap is rising and we get another go. Every year I’m reminded of the start of The Wind in the Willows, when Mole gives up domesticity to enjoy a spring day.

“The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow… Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning…”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I fear I’ve started to treat the start of the ‘growing season’ with the same attitude as spring cleaning, as a succession of tasks to perform and have rather lost sight of the point of it all. Even the language we use ‘tidy up the garden’, ‘cut-back’ ‘retrain’ suggests taming something wild and dangerous.

So, I am trying a more holistic approach. William Robinson (1838 – 1895) was a Victorian who rejected many of the stuffy ideas of his contemporaries. In The Wild Garden he encourages a wilder, more naturalistic approach that respects the plants’ needs and habits. In his words “Hardy flowers, once placed in fit positions, will thrive and increase without the need for further care”.

The Victorians were in the throes of a plant-importation frenzy and Robinson was despairing at the hideous, technicolour bedding schemes that were appearing. He along with the Arts & Crafts gang championed the beauty of the crafted, and the local. Naturalised flower beds filled with hollyhocks (Alcea rosea) and Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla mollis), grass left long and studded with bulbs, woodland areas left to ramble. They encouraged managed chaos and the gardener to really look at the shape and habit of each plant and see how it interacts with the whole.

In other words, take a breath. Slow down and really look at the garden in front of you. Don’t fill every corner with cheap, imported bedding plants, think of the garden as a watercolour rather than a paint-by-numbers.

So once again, I’m stepping back. I’m letting forget-me-nots and Geranium rozanne suppress the weeds for me. If I haven’t pruned everything I’m going to pretend that I’m deliberately letting it find its optimum shape and generally embrace an air of managed chaos. After all, it’s spring, time to become an idle dog.

“Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

How is your spring planning going? Are you in a panic? Let me know what you’re thinking. And if you think this might help a friend, please pass it on!

GW x