Return to the wild
Most gardeners probably face the same fate in August. Returning to a garden that has spent much of the summer without you. Like parents who have bravely left their teenage kids at home for the first time, you return to find they have had a wild time in your absence, with pizza boxes and empty beer cans strewn across the floor. The lawn is shaggy and unkempt, flowers have gone over and the ‘fridge’ is full of stringy runner beans and enormous marrows left uneaten.
After a wonderfully busy summer (we took our old camper van to WOMAD, I spent a week singing in the Prague early music festival and we then had 10 blissful days with my parents-in-law in France), we have returned to find the garden in chaos. I think the effect was exacerbated by some unwise planting on my part. I like the garden to look a bit wild with a lot of tall plants, but the result was that our garden path was an impassable and hazardous maze of echinops and eryngium. Only Arthur was small enough to pass underneath unharmed.
Once we had hacked our way into the garden there was plenty to do. The first step was to deadhead everything in sight and pray for a new flush of flowers. With a good water and some tomato feed we should be in business. Then there was sorting out the state of ‘the carpet’. Mowing a lawn that has gone a bit wild is always scary, and it can be hard to trust that it will recover when you first see it shawn. Cutting it back by a third to begin with gives it a chance to recover before you gradually bring it under control.
Saddest of all are the dropped tomatoes and our apples which are early to ripen and many of which had fallen to the ground. Toby bravely tackled the very bedraggled windfalls and we have a freezer full of apple compote for Arthur. Once all this had been taken care of things began to settle down, but a week in and we are still turfing out unwelcome houseguests in the form of annual weeds, deadnettle and the dreaded Ranunculus repens. It always amazes me how fast weeds can grow when left unchecked.
Although there was a bit of work to do on our return, there are some wonderful positives to leaving the garden to flex its unruly independence. As with children, living with a garden day to day sometimes it is hard to see how much it has matured and, having left it for a while, it was a wonderful surprise to see it burgeoning on our return. As with children, it can be hard to acknowledge that they can grow without our aid and need some independence. Seeing what your garden does when left to its’ own devices is always eye opening. Plants often have more vigour and confidence than I give them credit for, and whilst they are now back under my careful control, I will endeavour to give them a bit more room to express themselves from now on.
