Coming up roses
GARDEN MONOMANIA
(The voiceover above is me reading this out, so if you’d like to listen along while pottering - a little 8 minute podcast in my best Radio 4 voice - then please do!)
You know when you have a really good idea, and then decide to run with it, but running with it occupies your every waking moment for a several days, while you’re cooking, playing with the children or walking the dog, and it’s intensely frustrating that these mundane things take up your time, when you really are desperate to get back to your idea - uninterrupted? And then, lacking time during the day, you’re picking up your phone at 11pm and adding more ideas, and even though you’re exhausted and need to sleep, this thing, this really good idea is in your head, and if you stop thinking about it then there’ll be… nothing.
This week’s manic episode is sponsored by: a minor nursery drama.
A nearby landowner is getting cross - like, very cross - with parents churning up the grass surrounding the nursery carpark. There are allocated bays, but they’re often full up, the grass is quite unkempt, there are fly-tipped suitcases and empty crisp packets everywhere, and some parents (v much including myself here - guilty, m’lud!) thump their cars onto the grass in their collective rush to collect/drop off the children.
So now we’re on our final warning. A concrete bollard has been installed and any more grass breaches will result in our carpark use being RESCINDED. Fair cop - it’s their grass, and our collective haste has turned it into mud.
But that bollard! It’s so… concrete. Now, if there few daffodils along the verges, or a few species tulips - no-one would be so monstrous as to drive over flowers. There’s a nicer area, just away from the cars, where crocuses have come up en-masse - and interestingly, there’s no litter there. Popping a few bulbs in by the carpark kerb wouldn’t take that much effort, and it’d be something nice for the children to look at.
And really, since there’s quite a bit of space now turned to mud, why not add in a couple of sections of wildflower meadow? There’s actually a lot of unlandscaped, unused land around the carpark and beyond - just uneven grass, and a few trees. With permission from the landowner and the head-teacher, there could even be a sort of gardening club, for children and parents, turning a dull little walk from the carpark to the nursery into something rather nicer.
But then - why stop at daffodils and species tulips? A climbing rose or two against the fence - very little effort to prune, once in - some easy perennials, crocosmia, nerines. And why just stick to wildflower seeds, when one £2.50 packet of cosmos last year got me fifty young plants, about thirty of which I had to give away, for lack of space?
One should not, when having this sort of three-day fever dream, visit Horticulturalish and go on a David Austin rose pruning course. By the time I got home on the train, my initial ‘why don’t I suggest putting a few bulbs in’ had become… this:
Why, you might think, doesn’t she just use that moodboard for her own garden?
The problem with my (small) garden is this. This is just the rose map:
It’s full. There is no more room. Added to which, these bare roots arrived in December:
They’re currently heeled in a nursery bed (formerly a veg patch) ready to plant out when the tulips are done. (No, I don’t know where either.)
Thing is, the intellectual exercise of planning my garden has been done, in my head and on paper. It’s finished, now it’s just the execution, and that’s only physically, not mentally challenging. I have an overwhelming feeling of wanting more, horticulturally - to chew over in my brain. More space, more light, a chance to work with a new palette of colours and transform a patch of ground from nothing to something beautiful. A challenge! I need a goddamn challenge!
There was a brief respite from this fantasy community garden last night, ordering dahlias for my own garden after enjoyably reading both Clare Foster’s Gardening in March and Jo Thompson’s How to Garden in March. These dahlias are to go into giant pots by the house, because I do not trust the slugs (they ate four out of my nine dahlias within SECONDS of planting them out last year, down to the bloody ground. I’m thinking several layers of fortified defences around each pot this year, maybe paying local mice to train as archers, dropping thimbles of boiling oil from pot-ramparts against attackers, etc etc.)
Anyway, you’ll recognise the palette: these are arriving imminently from my favourite Riverside Bulbs:
The minor issue that I hadn’t considered in the fantasy garden plan, just the tiniest setback - no, no, it’s not just getting the permission from the landowner, or getting the head-teacher on board - the main thing which I really hadn’t considered with all the excitement of colours and shapes and scents in my grand garden plans was… water.
WHERE WILL I GET THE WATER FOR THESE PLANTS? For this fictional garden on an unloved piece of land, this floral wonderland of epic proportions, labelled, so the four-year olds can say - ‘Mummy - look, the agustache is out!’- a Chelsea installation grade garden, for children to enjoy on their way to and from: a carpark.
…
In next week’s episode, Mini retrains as a plumber, all the better to pipe water to her completely fictional multi award-winning garden. STAY TUNED! (And stay sane, people.)
Do you have experience setting up a community garden (with or without adequate hydration)? I would love to hear from you if so!
We are very nearly sold out on tickets for my event at The Kitchen Table in Dorset this Thursday! Hurrah! There might be one or two left, so do come along!
I have something very, very exciting1 to share with you this week, and if you don’t mind the midweek email, I’m going to email you as soon as we announce on Tuesday evening, so you will be the very first people to get the news, hot off the press!
And I wish you a wonderful, less manic rest of Sunday, leaving you with this gorgeous, restful photograph by Horticulturalish. Do hit the ❤️ emoji to share the garden love, and hopefully find more community gardeners who can offer tips to get us from fantasy to first trowel in the ground?! xx
Not garden related! Not pregnant! WHAT COULD IT BE?
Salvias and a few big plastic jugs of water in the back of your car. They survive an awful lot!!!
Could you get the parents walking the route or dropping off at nursery to bring a bottle of tap water each day and empty it on the flowers - they could get those little kids watering cans and keep them in the car and get the kids to do it en route? Or is the area too big? Also nurseries usually take the kids out for a walk each day - could the older kids (presumably 3 or 4) come with water bottles and water the plants? Good luck it sounds like a lovely idea 🥰