Wild gardening a year on

 
It's the last day of May and I wanted to make a record of our garden because it's bringing me so much happiness.














I'm a lazy gardener - my greatest pleasure is admiring someone else's gorgeous borders instead of sweating over my own. I grow vegetables because they're much easier than herbaceous borders and you can eat them, but the rest of the garden is down to my husband (pruning, path-laying, pond-digging, rock wall-building). Also, I've a strong feeling that much modern gardening is about control and fear of the wild, beyond us and inside. Just looking at all the brightly coloured strimmers and choppers and plastic grass makes me very sad inside.

Until last year we had a lawn. It was a hassle and boring to look at. We wondered what would grow if we didn't cut the grass, so we left it to do its own thing - our own No Mow May but for a whole year. We mowed paths through it partly so that the garden still worked for us and partly so that the untidiness looked intentional, and then because we found that the mown paths grew different wild flowers as long as we didn't mow them often.

The result was a complete joy.




This year it's even better. We have more flowers, far more insects, and more birds too. The newts have been joined by frogs, and a huge toad jumped over the path in front of me yesterday.

House martins are exploring our eaves this year for the first time, and a bat nightly circles the garden. Swifts have gathered overhead, and though they're fewer than we used to see, last year there were almost none so we were overjoyed to see them return. Goldfinches are everywhere, alongside the usual bluetits, blackbirds, magpies, collared doves, jackdaws, dunnocks, wrens and robins. And the bees are in their element. In the quiet of lockdown, we can hear them buzzing, the chicks in their nests, the swishing of the grass in the breeze.

On 18 April I surveyed the wild flowers in the garden, and found 26 species. It's not a fancy garden and it's not huge - maybe a third of an acre, with a chunk of it used for growing vegetables (and drying washing) and another chunk paved - but it was packed with variety. Today, some of those flowers have died back and others have taken their places. I'll survey them this week, but today I'll sit at the grassy table at the top of the garden and enjoy them.

Things I'm not growing out of

A little while ago my Mum and my hairdresser laughed at me (we've known each other a long time).  They thought I was mad because I was excited about going camping in Cornwall.

My Mum said she grew out of camping long ago. My hairdresser loathes all thought of it.

Fair enough, but this summer I've been rediscovering the things I love to do, and they're making me quite inordinately happy. (I wasn't well last summer. Being confined to the sofa made me realise how much I missed these things.)

They don't seem childish to me, and I wonder why we're supposed to grow out of them? Who on earth wants to be grown up if it means no more ...

waking as the sun warms your tent and a robin is singing only three feet above your head

taking your canoe down the river on a sunny day and watching the world float by

lying in a meadow among the flowers and butterflies, hearing nothing but grasses and bees

swimming in the river before breakfast, swallows in the air just above me, fish invisible in the water below.

 If that's being grown up, I think I'll take my time getting there. It's time for a swim ...

In which I lose my appendix and find a flurry of flowers (and a chilli)

OK, so this isn't my appendix - when I came round from the anaesthetic a couple of weeks ago and the surgeon thrust a photo in my face of what they'd just chopped out of me, I wasn't entirely with it. All I remember is  something blurry and alarmingly multi-coloured. Various people have expressed their disappointment that I didn't ask to keep the offending gangrenous organ in a jar. I'm sorry. I hope this half-mouldy chilli from the bottom of our fridge is an appropriate substitute.

Since my surprise visit to hospital, I've been convalescing. What a splendid word. For the first time I can remember, I've lain in bed or on the sofa doing absolutely nothing. I didn't really have thoughts either, just vague observations - it's raining again, there's the starling in the roof above my head, I wonder what's for dinner. And once a day I'd walk slowly round the garden, stopping every few steps to gaze at the unfurling leaves on the dog rose, the frog spawn wiggling and then hatching, the blue tit starting its nest in the tree by the kitchen. Then I'd head back to the sofa.

I'm recovering now, and yesterday I went for my first proper walk. I  headed out along Burrswood drive and here's what I found along its verge - spring flowers exploding into action, all at once, an awesome display of what's been waiting all these weeks. They're not great photos - I took them on my phone - but I just had to record finding sixteen different flowers in a few hundred yards.

 

If you're wondering what they all are, here's a list, reading from left to right, top to bottom: wood anemone, cuckoo flower, daisy, violet, daffodil, dandelion, dead nettle, wild strawberry, ground ivy, fritillaries, cuckoo flower again, hawthorn, stitchwort, bluebell, lesser celandine, marsh orchid, primrose, and one final shot of fritillaries, dandelions and violets.

I think I rather fancy being a Victorian lady who reclines on a sofa and sketches wild flowers all day. It won't last, but I'm making the most of this strange and luxurious disconnection from my everyday life.