It was the hedges that did it. Standing back to admire my afternoon’s work, they seemed straight and crisp, and I was rather proud of the job. It was only as I went upstairs and got a bird’s-eye view that I saw the true details of my handiwork. The hedges were anything but straight. A dog’s hind leg would be too kind a description. Precision and perfection has never been my thing in the kitchen, but now, it seemed
that lack of perfection extended to the garden.
Later that week a postcard came through my door. Normally flyers go straight into the recycling box, but this one was interesting. An offer to take on clipping any hedges or topiary sounded like a gift from heaven. I jumped at the offer. That was 15 years ago. Now Katie not only keeps the hedges looking smart but deals with many of the larger garden projects and much of the maintenance too.
Ever since my first patch of garden, a strip given to me by my father when I was 11, I had expected to tend to my garden myself, including the design and upkeep. When I moved into this house, the 35m-long garden felt manageable, something I could indeed handle myself. That was before I planted the long ivy hedges and box borders, before I had thought to plant trees that would need regular pruning, and back when the wisteria was just a twig no taller than myself.
As the garden has evolved, so has the list of tasks for which I was not capable. Anything involving heights has always been a no-go job for me. I am clinically allergic to any task involving a ladder. My vertigo (actually basophobia, but let’s not get too technical) means that cleaning gutters, pruning that now-mature wisteria and taming the wayward climbing rose outside the kitchen are all beyond my abilities, so we have formed a sort of agreement that anything that involves precision or a ladder is best done by Katie. And not only that; because of a spot of minor surgery, I can no longer lift heavy weights, so Katie’s presence has become more crucial than ever.
You may also like
- Why gardeners are highly skilled creative professionals
- What top gardeners wish someone had told them
It is no secret that I had some help with the initial design of the garden, and again a decade or more later, when a new design was needed. What I thought was a manageable rectangle of grass soon became intimidating. I didn’t know where to start. A lunch with Monty Don led to his back-of-an-envelope plan that inspired me and set the garden on the path to what it has become.
To say I am grateful for the help I have received in making this garden is an understatement. Without the wisdom of others, the help and advice, suggestions and ideas, this garden would probably be a rather different space, but it is still very much my space. I am in there each morning, secateurs, hori-hori
and twine in hand, come rain or shine. It is where I spend my evenings too, tinkering, fussing and occasionally doing something practical like deadheading, potting or planting.
My tool-cupboard is of the capsule variety, so I must rely on others when there is a specific job to be done. Katie’s ‘dolly’ has saved many a back injury when a heavy pot or planter needs moving, likewise her box of tools when a tree needs uprooting. There are major jobs that have required not only specialist
equipment, but experts, such as hanging two heavy gates, uprooting the gravel and laying down York-stone paving. But I am the one who sweeps those paths, daily in summer and autumn, who wheedles the dandelions out of the cracks with an old kitchen knife and who washes the splatters of fallen figs from that stone in high summer. As any gardener knows, there is never a day when something doesn’t need doing.
You may also like
I could never be the sort of gardener who hands everything over to others. To do that would take away one of my greatest pleasures. But could I have put the trellis up myself ? Well, no. Would I have been able to fit the hydroponic system on the kitchen roof ? I can’t even untangle the wires under my desk, so how those of a watering system would fare in my hands, I cannot imagine.
When it comes to planting, the choice will invariably be mine and mine alone, because choosing a plant for a particular space is a task of almost unequalled pleasure. I am literally a kid in-a-sweetshop in a plant nursery. Also, placing a plant in the garden is a decision I must live with, so when a perennial sulks or an annual withers, I have only myself to blame.
There is, of course, another helping hand, and that is nature. Sometimes, decisions are made for us. Nature alone can decide whether a plant is in the right place, and no matter how much love and attention, plant food and sweet music we offer, nature will sooner or later do as it wishes.
If having help in the garden is going to work, the chemistry must be right. Before taking on another pair of hands, it is pretty much essential to check out their previous work. I remember the horror on my late aunt’s face when she realised that her new gardener had done away not only with the weeds as requested, but virtually every other plant, including her precious whorls of London pride that had been growing for decades. She was lucky he left her the stone bird bath, so draconian was his ‘tidying’.
Regardless of professional designers or gardeners, or just having a helping hand, it is essential to keep the jobs we love for ourselves. I will admit to getting a vast amount of satisfaction from pruning roses, pinching out dahlias and ushering sweet peas up hazel hurdles. But I can only do that if someone has made the hurdles, a job that is more artistry than horticulture. Katie is a first-class hurdle maker, even if one year the twigs were coppiced too young and all burst into leaf – they turned out to be really rather beautiful. And while Katie and I have a pact that any task that involves heights is hers, if there’s a chance it might involve a lurking spider, of which she is not a fan, then she is happy to leave it for me.
