The allure of gardens!

The spiritual presence of my father was vividly present today. Given that we are trying to sell the house, presentation is all important, so the winter denuded pots in the entrance have had to be rejuvenated. Rejuvenated suggests that what I have done is, in some way, to have encouraged the existing plants to flower suddenly and out of season, to bring them on so to speak.

I have not.

I am my father’s son and if he taught me nothing else (and I assure you he taught me lots, he was, after all, a teacher) he taught me that the only gardening is instant gardening. If you need colour in a garden, buy it in. Let it thrive. Take the credit.

He took his inspiration from Capability Brown who was well known for giving nature a helping hand. If Nature had not placed a lake and mountain in the requisite position then Brown would rectify God’s mistake and provide them exactly where the client would have wanted them if they had had the sensibility of Brown himself.

I feel it incumbent upon myself to continue this grand tradition and go to the garden centre and buy established growing plants and use my aesthetic sense to place them in intriguing juxtapositions causing the eye to rejoice in the exciting collage of shape and colour that is a well planned garden.

Or, to be more truthful, working erratically through trays of potted plants and putting them wherever a blank piece of earth presented itself.

It is amazing how much colourful vegetation is swallowed up in quite a small space in a garden. I am almost convinced that I need to purchase a small greenhouse to start some of these plants from seed or bulb. If following the Rees Family is so ruinously expensive, then god knows how denizens of country houses ever managed to fill their gardens!

For all the expense though, it is amazing how a blank space leaps into life with the addition of flowers, especially as they all now look as though they have grown there naturally and not been located there less than five hours ago!

I even remembered to scatter mini slug pellets on the freshly turned earth (all of which is in pots and baskets) though I’m not sure that this is the season for slugs. Do they hibernate or lurk elsewhere; this is after all is winter and the pickings for slugs in the form of luscious greenery should be limited. Global warming makes me less confident that the slimy devourers of my delicate plants are disinclined to obey the past definition of the seasons and stay away from the garden – so I erred on the safe side and spread snail death with reckless abandon.

Tomorrow a reassessment of what is to be done to compensate for the lack of colour in the rest of the garden. I discovered in my enthusiastic ploughing up of old pots that I was actually destroying growing plants – but growing plant bulbs beneath the surface of the earth! No good for me; but for the sake of honest decency I re-covered the nakedly exposed bulbs and hoped that I replaced them the right way up!

Ah, the wonders of informed horticulture!