(sublinhados meus)
Hell is a rented garden
For the past few years, I have been a joyful Chelsea Flower Show attendee. Every May, my phone’s photo album usually becomes stuffed with pictures of plants: variegated borders in shades of white and purple, hostas bursting from decorative pots, cornus trees providing shade over ground cover of miniature geraniums. I obsess over dahlias, clematis and roses, not to mention the mini greenhouses, chic she-sheds and pretty pergolas.
A couple of years ago, I had recently acquired for the first time my own garden and was embarking on filling it with gusto. I was drunk on possibility when it came to what I could fill my little patch with. Climbing roses! Strawberry beds! A fig tree!
I spent accordingly. It was impossible to pass a garden centre without dropping a ton every time. I started hiding new plant purchases from my husband, digging them in furtively as soon as I got home before he enquired how much I’d forked out. I began reading the gardening pages in the newspaper for the first time. Gardening books stacked up beside the bed.
This year, the tables have turned. Last summer, I had to leave my lovely garden behind (my husband’s job requires occasional erratic moves) and I find myself 200 miles away in the north of England, living in a rented house with a garden that’s not a patch on my previous one.
Where before I had a sheltered, south-facing lawn surrounded by pretty borders and facing on to wilderness, now I have a north-facing strip of weed-strewn turf. The house is a new-build and the garden is accordingly rubbish. It is uneven, with no planting to speak of and surrounded on three sides by a blank wooden fence. It overlooks similarly uninspiring gardens. The only thing that seems to flourish in it is weeds, of which there are plenty.
The last week has been a particular kind of torture. Not only did I not attend the Chelsea Flower Show, but the acres of online coverage have felt like a kind of personal torment. On Instagram, everyone seems to have posted pictures of themselves there, their floral dresses blending in with the foliage. Mark Zuckerberg’s mysterious algorithms mean that all I am shown are endless pictures of gardens.
But my new garden is so dismal that I no longer want to read about the best shade-loving plants or what to grow up the side of a house. The fact that we are only set to live in our new-build paradise for about another year means it feels pointless to spend lots of money on something I’ll have to leave behind. Even my feeble attempts at pot gardening have seemed futile in the face of the weeds, and the fence, and the squelch of mud underfoot, and the endless shade.
Last weekend I did, admittedly, rouse myself. I mowed the grass, tidied up the barbecue area and planted a small tree. It lifted my spirits briefly. I flirted with the idea of raised beds and veg. I started to dig a border. I looked at fence paint samples. I bought a couple of shrubs.
But then I tried to dig the buggers in and hit scree about 20in below the turf. This is a common issue in new-build gardens, which are often created cheaply and hastily at the end of the building process. Where I started the border, there is a small lake developing by one part of the fence.
My problem is that I am both lazy and impatient: the exact wrong qualities for a gardener. I ignored the garden in the winter because it didn’t look nice, and now that the summer months are here it still doesn’t. As every good gardener knows, you need to spend that dull time preparing and planting.
Which also happens to be the cheaper option. There’s a reason garden centres make all their money in the summer, or that companies like Garden on a Roll, which provides ready-made garden borders with established plants and a planting guide for the ignorant and unconfident (like me), are booming. I love the thought of creating a garden from scratch with seedlings and propagation. I even bought some rooting hormone powder. But the reality is that I’m too idle. I also tend to kill things.
The truth about a rented garden is that it is very uninspiring. My seductive dream is to have a team of medal-winning Chelsea gardeners cart their award-winning plot from SW1 200 miles north for me. Forget forest bathing and biodiversity. Let’s make a new Chelsea category: the new-build garden designed for impatient, lazy gardeners.
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