The Itinerant Gardener
International travel is an unavoidable ‘perk’ of my job. As I completed my most recent tax return it dawned on me that the year I got married I spent over 230 days abroad with work. On quizzing musicians today about how they survive the travel they all say the same thing: thank heavens for the modern technology that makes this lifestyle workable, connecting us from afar with those closest to our hearts. How did people manage before FaceTime? I can only agree. Toby has spent many hours patiently directing the video camera around the garden in the falling light as I profess that I am deeply homesick and can hardly bear to hang up. ‘Just one last look at the dahlias and then I promise I’m done’ I sigh before we make arrangements for the same time tomorrow.
The other great necessity, all my colleagues would say, is an understanding partner. In this I am extremely lucky. Toby was put to the test in the first months of our relationship when 90 perennial plug plants arrived at his doorstep on special offer from Thompson & Morgan needing potting on and tending until my return. I was abroad for 2 months and decided his were the safest hands for such a precious charge. Most of them are still happily blooming in our garden today, a living testament to his patience, although I suspect this is the kind of stunt one can only pull once and in the early, giddy days of a relationship. I spent the 3 months before our wedding in Berlin, during which time I was supposedly growing our wedding flowers. In effect this translated to many hours of Toby diligently watering our garden and deadheading cosmos while I gave close instruction over FaceTime. They turned out beautifully but I felt rather shamefaced when I was congratulated on the day for having grown them all myself.
Gardening might seem a passion incompatible with such an itinerant career but in fact the more I have travelled the more the garden has been my anchor. It is a wonderful thing to put a small plant in the ground, to know that it is busily growing in your absence as you knit and watch endless Netflix in a drab Aparthotel room, and to find it awaiting you with open arms, burgeoning and in bloom on your return. Whenever I get home I drop my suitcase at the front door and run straight to the garden to check on its progress. It is a great comfort at the back of my mind wherever I am to know that the garden is a constant, ticking along with its own steady rhythm regardless of how chaotic life gets.
This is not to say that our long distance relationship is easy. I find myself pining as the weeks pass, dreaming of its beds and borders with a frustrated longing which can only be expiated through hours online ordering seeds which I know will be waiting for me on the doormat. I lie awake at night with plans and plant lists for our future together drifting through my mind. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and I return with redoubled passion, full of good intentions, and find even the most mundane jobs a joy.
The most important thing to remember when leaving a garden is to part on good terms. The smallest of unresolved issues, if left, can rankle and take root even in just a few weeks. Before any trip away from home it is a good idea to put things in order. Green alcanet and dandelions plague our patch and a few weeks is enough time for them to take off and seed all over the place. An hour digging them out before you leave will save a lot of backbreaking work later on. The other two big issues I face with extended absences are snails and drought. Like Scylla and Charybdis, if one doesn’t get you the other will and navigating between them seems an impossibility. A few weeks of dry weather keeps the gastropods at bay but I return to a garden of dead plants and withered opportunity. Invariably if the heavens deign to water the garden for me in my absence the slugs and snails greedily consume everything the rain has nurtured.
You can get around the water problem for larger plants by focussing on things that tolerate or even thrive in dry conditions. Two years ago I returned to a garden that was 80% dead with small pockets of flourishing fennel, verbena and carpets of my beloved Erigeron. These have become the backbone of my beds which now include globe thistles, Eryngium, and the seemingly trendy Knautia massedonica. Oddly I have found my dahlias cope with neglect as well as their juicy tubers seem to be able to keep them going without watering for quite some time. Spring bulbs will generally sit happily through a dry summer and bigger more established shrubs and roses are mature enough to cope on their own. The rest of the garden consists of a lot of plants that are tough as old boots and will withstand rough treatment like Achillea ptarmica and Hesperis matronalis. Generally if it’s hard to get rid of it from the garden then it will do fine without you.
Pots present much more of a problem, so before travelling a good rule would be “if in doubt stick it in the ground”. My inner aesthete can’t quite bear to bung empty lemonade bottles in all my pots as a water supply (as some people suggest) and somehow splashing out on a timed watering system hasn’t been feasible yet. At a nursery I was once advised to fill the bottom of my plant pots with the stuffing of Arthur’s nappies which will apparently store water and then slowly release it. This seems a bit weird but might be worth a shot. For now I just collect my pots into a small area and try to inveigle friends and neighbours into watering them. A good soak once a week should suffice and is more useful than daily sprinkling so if you can find someone to do that for 20 minutes you should be fine. The exception to this is seed starting and small seedlings or cuttings which need pampering with conditions as constant as you can give them. Trips abroad in April are always the source of much heartbreak. As with bringing up children, experiences in the earliest days of a plant’s life go on to shape much of its character later on and in general you are better off planting seeds a bit late after a trip than putting them in before you go and leaving them to drought or being eaten. After such early trauma plants are often stunted for life (water supply in the juvenile growth stage permanently determines the shape, structure and habit of a plant as it matures).
After the heart break of anxious weeks apart one always wants to look one’s best on being reunited and the final job before I go is to give the garden a thorough haircut. With many perennials you can tweak and delay their flowering with a good trim and with pots of bedding this is even more important. Cut back and feed any plants in pots and before you leave and a fresh flush of growth and flowers will await you with a smile when you return.
All of the above may make the separation anxiety more bearable and the reuniting sweeter but parting is still painfully hard. Best of all would be to only travel in winter, in the cold months when the garden is sleeping anyway, and to tiptoe back in the spring to greet it as it wakes with hands full of seed packets and a head full of plans for the year to come.
