The joy of gardening

Buying seed packets at 1am is like totally normal, no?

A bit of the garden - and Pepper - photographed by David Loftus for the Green Cookbook. Some food too.

There’s a very large gap between my expectations and my ability when it comes to gardening. For several years, I had a column in BBC Gardener’s World on growing vegetables in a small urban garden, with recipes on what you might cook with your harvests. I had the nagging feeling that I’d rather grow flowers, but that no-one in their right mind would give me a column in which to experiment (and therefore send crumpled garden centre receipts to my accountant. Vegetable seeds and a new watering can for the column - yes. Pepper’s vet bills, on the basis that she’s an Instagram dog? A kind but firm no. Should have gone for an ornamental duck pond.)

But this year, with a little more time on my hands and inspiration by way of Jo Thompson and her spectacular Gardening Mind Substack, I decided claimable expenses or no, it was time. I made a plan of the garden, as Jo suggests in her Small Design Course, by using Google Maps to get a scale photo of the garden. I used Freeform to draw all over it, sticking on links and screengrabs and playing around with shapes indoors before heading out, spade in hand. I took the precaution of marking out wide, curved borders with sticks and string before digging like a maniac, just in case it ended up like an at-home haircut, where you neaten each side to the point where you start out like Lassie, and end up like a labrador. (I speak from experience as a veteran of at-home haircuts. ‘I’ll just cut it myself, how bad can it be?’ The answer: very bad. A few years back a well-known influencer invited themselves to my house to shoot a video, which I found so stressful that I cut a fringe that afternoon. The funniest thing is when their name comes up, people in the industry inevitably relate their own stress-related incidents relating to the same person. Who is it? I couldn’t possibly comment.)

Photographs from BBC Gardener's World magazine, taken by David Loftus. Pre-fringe.

Anyway - the garden! I bought hellebores, snakes head fritillary, camellias, deutzia, tiny ornamental prunus, a magnolia, two amelanchier lamarckii and a taller cherry tree, added in a Cardinal Richelieu (purplish) and a Gabriel Oak (a wonderful hot pink) to go with my existing Vanessa Bell rose. Varicoloured lavender and scabious have gone in, and in a fit of baby related insomnia, I bought 37 varieties of ornamental seeds from Chiltern Seeds, blown away by the success of my vegetables from seed. So far, two types of tomato and two types of pepper indoors, with sweetpeas, regular peas, nigella and salad leaves in the cold frame outside. I started the peppers off with a blast of heat from a recently turned-off oven (nothing if not on-brand) and it seems to have worked beautifully.

(The vegetable seeds are all from the Real Seed company, which I love - everything always germinates beautifully.)

The girls have got their own seed table too, with beans in a jar with wet kitchen roll, so they can watch the roots grow. (Mum said she did this with me when I was younger, and Alba is just the right age to find it interesting.) She was delightfully engaged by her afternoon activity planting seeds, particularly as I let her use one of my Sharpies as a dibbler. Mia mostly tried to eat the compost.

This year’s enthusiasm for gardening hasn’t happened in a vacuum - along with her Substack, this, Jo Thompson’s latest book, ‘The New Romantic Garden’ is a delight. I love Mark Ridsdill Smith’s Vertical Veg: Container Gardening, and I was so taken by Lucy Maxwell’s Substack, Horticulturalish, that I asked her over to my house last week for lunch and our first foray into podcasting. Mostly so I could chat with her in person about everything from tulips (she planted 1000!) to Nancy Mitford to our favourite gardens to visit - it was an absolute blast, starting with her patiently helping me to figure out the podcasting software (I am horrific with tech) and ending with us stealing Alba’s ice lollies to eat in the garden in the sunshine in lieu of pudding. (Alba did get one after nursery too.)

I’m editing the podcast (‘At the table with…’) this weekend, and hope to share it with you next week in lieu of or along with a short written post. Listening back to the recording, it turns out either I speak really loudly all the time, or my face was closer to the newly-purchased fancy mike (my accountant is going to love this one). Lucy sounds measured and I sound like a honking - if enthusiastic - goose. HONK! (I’ve now taught myself to split out the tracks on the recording and turn myself down. Also edited out many of my annoying laughs - HONK! - isn’t listening back to oneself torture?! But otherwise I think it sounds like what it was - two people sitting in a garden, having a lovely chat about gardens and dogs, and only occasionally interrupted by Pepper, glaring at us if we stopped throwing a ball for her. I do hope you enjoy it, if I don’t manage to delete the recording before finishing the edit.

Let’s hope Lucy didn’t cut an stress-fringe after her visit.

I’m running off to cook now, because a very old friend of mine is popping over for lunch - he very diplomatically* said he’d be happy with some of Alba’s buttered pasta, so as an elaborate joke I’m going to use my KitchenAid pasta attachment to make macaroni from scratch. And now I have an hour to do that, throw the children’s toys into a cupboard (or the bin?) and wash my hair. Wish me luck!

*He is in fact a diplomat, and trying to get back to the embassy in Oslo, but detained thanks to Heathrow madness. I expect life in an ambassador’s residence is probably quite good practice for lunch with a three year old, a one year old and a border collie, so would be surprised if he ends up with a stress fringe this evening too, but who knows - maybe it’s just my kitchen?!

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Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend! My replies to your lovely comments on last week’s Liz post imminent, post pasta lunch. Mini xx