Wow, what a weekend. Wonderful weather and kids happy to sit and play in the sandpit for several hours at a time. The element of gardening that I miss most since having children is ‘pottering’. I can make planned, strategic hits, usually 20 minutes or so long, or beg days of childcare for big jobs, but what I don’t get is that ambling from job to job, getting distracted from one task, not quite finishing another, leaning on my spade, thinking.
Well, this weekend I well and truly pottered. This included: tugging vainly at the lesser celandine that attempts to engulf the garden every spring; promoting a scrawny variegated box from broken plastic pot to posh terracotta one; cutting out the dead stems from my travelling case full of equisetum (pictured above); tidying up some herbs; moving a pot of fritillaries to the front door; arranging other pots into pretty little groups; and finally giving everything in the greenhouse a good watering, now that I am no longer terrified that every night is going to bring a biting frost. Nothing major, nothing earth shattering, the garden looks marginally better, but I feel great.This sort of slow, steady re-ordering of the chaos is the real appeal of gardening, for me. Garden tries to revert to wilderness: I straighten, pull out, pot up and rescue, and breathe contented sigh.
My mind feels slightly better ordered after a weekend like this. There are some encouraging signs that winter hasn’t been as harsh as I thought. The bananas were my main concern. I have written before that I left them uncovered for the first time this year, thinking they were big enough to stick up for themselves, and winter isn’t usually all that cold these days – well it seems I wasn’t such a fool after all. Yesterday there was one three-inch long, pale green square peeping from last year’s split, bleached out stem. Today it is six inches long and others have appeared. It is alive! And growing. In fact I seem to have killed only two things, my new blueberry (from under watering, partly on purpose: I regretted the ericaceous compost as soon as I bought it) and an aloe vera (from cold, my fault entirely, it should never have been left in the greenhouse). Two plants dead. I can cope with that.
Have you had any time in the garden this weekend? Pottering or a quick in-and-out? And what is alive and what dead?
