Category: Gardening

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Ten First Flowers

I had a garden dream: an overflowing mass of flowering abundance, red and orange and yellow at one end of the front garden; blue and purple and white at the other.

But as the saying goes, the only place where success comes before work is the dictionary. At the end of autumn (i.e. May) I summoned my energies, such as they were, and built two garden beds in the front garden.

The results, it must be said, are not entirely what I had hoped for. For one thing, a heavy layer of cardboard and a few inches of garden mix were not enough to put off the weeds, which have grown back in profusion: creeping buttercup, convolvulus, dock…

But some plants did manage to make their presence felt despite the weeds. I therefore present you with the ten best blooms from late winter to early summer.

In the early days of expanses of bare soil relieved mostly by weeds it was a comfort to have the freesias (a thoughtful gift) spring up and give the impression this was actually a garden.

A cheerful cluster of small six-petalled yellow blooms rises above green foliage.
Freesia (Golden Giant? Golden Melody?)
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Three Good Books on Low-Maintenance Gardening

Not, I hasten to clarify, the kind of low-maintenance gardening that consists of blanketing everything in a layer of black plastic and piling grey stones on top. That kind of garden is low maintenance because there’s nothing living in it, no growth, and no change. (At least until the weeds arrive. Which they will.)

Rather, these books look at how to create a garden that doesn’t need a lot of intensive and continuing effort on your part, because the plants in it are functioning together the way plants function together in nature, and therefore they can, for the most part, manage just fine without you. Working with nature rather than against it.

A lush permaculture garden backed by a line of row houses.
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Compost Your Enemies

Readers possessed of a better memory than mine may recall the post I wrote 2 1/4 years ago, about the garden patch and what turned out to be a Gestetner stylus found therein. I say a better memory than mine, because I had forgotten that I wrote it.

It refers to an “enormous black bag of weed roots – now too heavy to lift” and when I say enormous, I do not exaggerate. It looked like this:

A large black plastic bag, full, with a white bucket lid on top.
That revolting brown thing is a fallen camellia flower. Why do they do that?

Do not be fooled into thinking that this is your common or garden black rubbish bag, vol. approx 60L. No, no. This black bag was about a metre by two metres when flat, and when full it was, as previously mentioned, too heavy for me to lift. I can lift a ten kilo sack and carry it on my head. In a previous job I used to lift twenty kilo sacks of popping corn (though I was not foolhardy enough to put them on my head). I can lift and carry a large tub full of hardwood logs for the fire. I could not lift this bag.

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