A post about gardening...

Well, I can indulge myself if I want occasionally can’t I? It doesn’t all have to be about… well, whatever it is about, so today I’m going to write mainly about gardening.

I’ve been gardening all my life. As a very small boy I made landscaped gardens on the top vegetable plot. Scale models made out of dirt, a little like sandcastles, but bejewelled with pink roses plucked from the black trellis that enclosed the small area of concrete that joined the front and back gardens outside our back door (which was actually a side door). It is where our old dog Trixie used to play and sleep in the shade, it was there that her puppies jumped and ran for a while.

A few years later I was taken over by rockeries. I loved to weed and dig with my trowel, making the spaces between the buried rocks all neat and clean, moving the rocks around to make them as mountainous as possible. I remember turning over the stones and watching the spiders and millipedes wriggle away, the slugs just sticking slimily to the cold, grey stone. I love rockeries to this day, almost preferring rocks to plants.

I enjoyed it so much that I took gardening jobs at weekends and summer holidays throughout my teens, so when I eventually got my own garden I knew how to make things grow. Growing from seed and cutting is a joy when it works, a pain when it doesn’t - but generally I’m fairly successful.

For a while I was mad about bonsai, then aquilegia. At the moment it’s climbing half hardy annuals, the simpler ones – nasturtium, canary creeper, ipomoea, cathedral bells (if they take) and sweet peas. I’ve grown them in pots to train up my garden arch and to stand on the outside kitchen window sill. I’m hoping for a tumble of colour down the hand-made red brick of the Victorian wall.

My back yard at home’s a place of pleasure, the garden of my cottage in Wales a joy whenever I get there, but not as it has been in other years. Gardening takes time.

So, the fine weather continues and the plants in my little yard love it, growing visibly by the day. Over the next few weeks I expect great things, a mass of unthemed colours – oranges, reds, yellows and blues, deep green and light green and a dozen other hues. Even the sunflowers I save from the florist’s bin have sunny smiles and my seed-grown cucumbers are potted out in the cold frame.

I’ll keep you updated on my trailers. I’m hoping for a hanging garden of babble-on.