You have all the time and never enough time. The changing weather is a disaster, the changing weather can be an opportunity. The garden looks a complete mess, the garden looks beautiful. Opposing points of view that could apply to ours and I suspect any private garden (very different if you open your garden to the public, or choose garden design or landscaping as a career). Relative perspectives, which shift and flex in response to a hundred different prompts. As the years click past, season by season, month by month, and as a relatively inexperienced gardener, you learn to accept that some people will be very interested in what you are doing, some would be unmoved even if you single-handedly recreated Versailles overnight, and the majority will say something nice, enjoy the views and move on. As with any creative process, for those of us happiest elbow-deep in soil, the thrills and worries and joys and sadnesses over timing, planting, varieties, colours reside within, unknown to most people, and irrelevant inasmuch as a garden is not a book to be carried around with you forever, or a perfectly sourced and cooked feast to be critiqued and consumed in hours, nor yet a well designed house with its unshakeable obligations to functionality. The question of what makes a good garden is debated endlessly and subject to the widest range of interpretations from strict precepts honed over centuries of tradition to something which could almost appear untouched by human hand. Wherever you pitch your own patch of ground along that line between hyper-control and free-flowing wilderness, it is always worth stepping back and taking a moment, or ten minutes, or an hour, simply to look and listen and allow green to do what it does extremely well in allowing you to breathe. And with that typically comes some perspective, and the ability to reflect on the work you have done, and to accept that perfection is subjective, and not always attainable, or indeed desirable.
Easy to expound on the philosophy of gardening as I sit here back in the Gulf, far removed from fork and spade and secateurs. I am generally fairly disciplined about time, but when I am at Oaklands, I suffer from that gardener’s curse of going from A to B doing a very clearly defined job, but stopping mid-point to look at a bed/plant/feature, and thinking ‘I’ll just….’ Eternally able to justify the distraction (‘more sensible to do it now/closer to water/larger pot/new location, leaves me free to concentrate properly on main job’, etc, etc), I move on rip tides of greenery, never forgetting the original task, but accumulating more as I go, so that by the end of the day I feel immense satisfaction at having done so much while also having tripled the pages of notes and to do lists in my garden book.
I did clear and tidy all the raised beds in the potager, with only a brief detour into planting garlic and some winter salads. I did move the currant bushes from their temporary home by the long wall to the potting shed beds as per my original plans, but then decided the viburnum plicatum (now 2m tall) could be seen to its full advantage and get more light at the front of the house, so spent two hours and several back muscles lifting it, dragging it on a tarpaulin and replanting it. I was right, though, and it was worth the digging and lugging. I did also finish planting up the new herb beds.
All the roses are now assembled where they are supposed to be in the new front beds, with allium companions, and scillas and narcissi planted near the new amelanchiers and witch hazels. Tulips can wait until I’m back in December - it was as warm as a summer’s day up until late October so no harm in holding on for a few weeks. As the day of my flight approached, I was doing the kind of meditative reflection I mentioned above when it struck me that in all my happy, distracted A to B via X, Y and Z work, I had completely overlooked the dahlias, now numbering nearly forty with the plants I’d grown on from cuttings this year. That ended the peaceful meditation abruptly - by this time last year, I had lifted all the tubers and carefully stowed them in old wine crates filled with vermiculite. How could I possibly have overlooked this, one of the best-known jobs for an autumn garden? If I left them in the ground and we had hard frosts, it spells near certain death; the long-range Met Office weather forecast was non-committal even by British meteorological standards; I was leaving for the airport the next day. I know many people do leave them in the ground all winter and the plants are fine the following year, but they might not be so happy on a freezing, wind-whipped hilltop. I blame the warm weather lulling me into a false sense of security, but getting distracted was clearly the major issue. Time, or lack of it, settled the debate, together with assurances from my brother that with a good thick mulch they would be fine, so thanking the day I had decided to keep some bags of Strulch in reserve, I cut back the huge plants, and tucked them up in their mulch. Come December, when I’m supposed to be planting tulips, I may yet lift a few of them as an insurance policy, but for now, sitting far away, I can plan undistracted.
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