How I (finally) Got Into Gardening
Unearthing my green(ish) fingers
I feel like us millenials were always destined to become slightly obsessed with being gardeners thanks to an unhealthy relationship with 90s movies like The Secret Garden, Goodnight Mr Tom and A Little Princess. I think even Ferngully got under my skin. My youth seems to have been punctuated with an unrealistic amount of visuals of women in floppy hats casually pruning hydrangeas into straw baskets (Babysitter’s Club anyone?) which, despite now being in my late 30s and running a full-time business that keeps the roof over our head, I still feel compelled to try and embody.
When we were searching to buy our house, having a private, quiet (for London) garden was high up on our wishlist. I claimed it was for the dog but I think the aforementioned floppy hat trope alongside growing up on a farm with endless green right outside my window has always made me aspire towards recreating that, even in a city. It’s no small feat trying to find a cottagey garden in London but we were really lucky and managed to find exactly that (south-facing no less). The garden was much-loved and very well cared for before we started but needed some rethinking due to the extension we added to the back of the house. We roped in the brilliant landscape designer Butter Wakefield to help us create a garden we’d love spending time in and was (relatively) easy to maintain and she delivered us exactly that. I felt relaxed and contemporary but with traditional planting and reclaimed york stone and brickwork to frame the lawn.
Technically, green fingers should be in my DNA - I come from a longline of farmers and apparently I’m a descendant of the famous botanist William Curtis who founded the world's longest-running botanical magazine no less. But alas, I could barely keep a weed alive. Gardening was aesthetically aspirational for sure, but the reality just felt like a chore. I’ve always appreciated being in a beautiful garden surrounded by flowers but the work needed to maintain it felt beyond me. I did a good job of buying boxes of dahlia tubors and packets of seeds with grand intentions but shamefully, the boxes would still be sitting in the shed com late November and it was too late to get them in the ground. I’d have a good go in the garden one weekend and then barely step out further than the terrace for months until it felt overwhelming again and something to delay, delay, delay.
Like a true cliché, something finally clicked in me at the start of the year after I watched the Martha Stewart documentary on a flight. I didn’t grow up with Martha (my mum was more of a Delia Smith aficionado in the 90s) so I was kind of late to the party with the documentary. Aside form the endlessly iconic soundbites (my favourite anecdote was the random snogging of a stranger in the Duomo on her honeymoon), one thing she said really stuck:
If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. And if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make a garden - Martha Stewart
It finally rang true that if I wanted the abundant garden I loved spending time in, I was going to have to learn how to look after it. Ignore the metaphors in there for life and love because quite literally if you want your garden to grow, you’re quite literally going to have to water it. I either needed to admit defeat and be the person with a square of grass (which I didn’t want), or learn how to garden properly. I’m the worst at daydreaming over Rightmove and fantasising about ‘one day’ renovation projects and forever homes, all of which would, of course, involve a big, wild garden with cut flowers on hand from April - October. And while I’m a big believer in outsourcing help if you need it and could afford it, but for us I knew that fantasy of a big ‘one day’ garden was useless unless I was prepared to get some dirt under my fingernails and learn the ropes once and for all.
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