On my Garden

 I’m having a little trouble with my blog. It’s something to do with cookies and means that I can’t add pictures. I managed to sort it out the other week but only by clearing all the cookies on my computer, which has made it harder to access other stuff I want. It’s a pain.

Normally, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem because this isn’t a very picture heavy blog. I like to use one picture at the beginning and my dandelion signature at the end, but my intention for today was to talk about my garden and show pictures of it.

When I bought and moved into this house, the garden consisted of a cracked concrete path going up to an outbuilding (probably of asbestos) and, where grass might be, a sea of stones and gravel. On further inspection, this gravel was on rows of plastic sheeting and underneath that was compacted mud and moss. As I’ve lived there, various plants, weeds and ‘things’ pierced through holes in the sheet and through the stones. As Jeff Goldblum once said, life will uh, find a way.

Having created a cosy, dry and pleasant space inside (bathroom and stairway excepted), it was time to have a go at the garden. I am not not a rich man. Even less having bought a house and done it up. So I’m trying to create a simple, pleasant first-timer’s garden out of what is there.

With the help of my intrepid parents, I’ve moved the plastic sheeting over the cracked concrete path and then scooped the stones onto it, so now I have a gravel path up to my outbuilding. Then I’ve broken up the surface mud with a strange tool that looks like a milking stool on a stick. Today we plan to rake the mud back and forth, removing as many stones as we can, and making it as flat as possible. We are laying turf tomorrow, leaving a gap to put in flowerbeds and bushes - I’m hoping for as many fragrant ones as possible, to encourage birds and bees. It won’t be any grand garden, but should be a pleasant place to sit and read in the summer.

The only one of my eighteenth century pals to mention a fondness for gardening is Christopher Smart, who enjoyed the activity when he lived in a private mad house. This is probably because he has access to a private green space, something less accessible to Johnson, Goldsmith and others. 

Johnson would have been able to walk the gardens owned by the Thrales in Streatham, and the eighteenth century was a big time for grand garden projects. There was an emphasis on creating a perfected nature, not the strict lines of a Tudor garden but bends, turns, vistas - and the odd allegorical temple or folly. It was not yet usual for houses to include a small domestic garden, that was an invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I won’t be able to create a grand eighteenth-century vista in my little patch of mud, nor do I have the money or expertise to create a luxurious cottage garden (though I fancy giving a hollyhock a go) but I’ll be able to create something better than concrete and gravel. I’ll even be able to show it off, if I can get this site to allow me pictures again.