Garden Centre

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Why have a garden?

Not a lot of people seem to ask themselves this question, which always surprises me. Of course, we don’t always get a choice, we buy a house and hey presto! it comes with garden attached whether we like it or not, and we have to make the best of it, but even so, understanding your purposes in gardening can help you gain pleasure and save money.

For me, gardening has lots of purposes – including stopping me going mad by pounding the keyboard all day. One of the other reasons I garden was inspired by one of my gardening gurus – Beverley Nichols. You might vaguely remember his name; he had a column in a women’s magazine for several decades. He was a complex, often unhappy man, and a keen gardener who could write about plants in the way other people write about food or sex, making the reader want some for themselves! He had a few advantages over me – like being a much more successful writer and being able to afford Georgian mansions and gardeners to do the dirty work, but one thing he said struck me so firmly that I’ve never forgotten it. He said there was no reason for a person with a garden to be without flowers for the house, no matter what the time of year. He was right too.

I’ve made it a bit of a crusade to have some kind of flowers in the garden all year round, and I’ll be posting pictures of what’s in my vases every few weeks. But it’s not just any old flowers – I added my own twist to this claim; I want most of my pretty things to be scented too, because I’ve never really understood why people want flowers that don’t smell as good as they look. So today’s offering is a native British posy: lungwort (known in posh as pulmonaria) and lily of the valley. The former is prettily shaded in pink and blue, and the latter has a heavenly scent. And the table – well, there’s a story to that which I’ll tell one day.

Labels: garden flowers, garden secrets, General

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:06 AM

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