Rained pretty much all day today, so I did what gardeners do and read books about gardening instead.
This book, "Cultivating chaos; how to enrich landscapes with self-seeding plants" is very attractive and thought-provoking. The aesthetic of the self-seeded garden does take some getting used to, mostly getting used to leaving seed heads and dead stuff on plants. We have become so used to a certain kind of tidiness in our gardens, that leaving things to seed and die seems to shout "A slacker lives here!" to our neighbours.
"Gardening for a lifetime" by Sydney Eddison explores another part of my thoughts on gardening. As I get older and creakier, the garden needs to become easier to manage. I don't have money to spend on help in the garden, so must garden smarter, doing smaller projects for shorter periods of time. I'm not a fan of the "just pave the whole lot and put in a few shrubs" type of garden. These fill me with visual boredom.
"Making a wildflower meadow" is a lovely practical book, explaining how the authors restored and re-sowed their small-holding in Dorset to highlight meadow flowers. Much of the detail is not applicable in New Zealand, as our natural indigenous groundcover tends to be grasses and tussocks. Our real flowering meadowfields are in the sub-alpine regions, and many of those plants require very specific conditions that are not replicable in a suburban lowland garden. It is still a fascinating book; the authors were so dedicated to creating a meadow that they stripped the fertile soil (achieved by years of grazing and fallowing) right off part of the farm to provide the necessary impoverished sub-soil for meadow plants. The creation of this garden as a "natural" garden seems a little counter-intuitive to me; it is still gardening, of quite an intensive kind, not just standing back and seeing what germinates. Which is probably one of my preferred garden management styles; the spectacular show of California poppies in the top photograph was one of the highlights of the early summer garden here.
LOVE those poppies.
ReplyDeleteHow I hear you. My garden has got away from me again. I need to garden smarter not harder but really, really don't like a 'garden' which is obviously easy care. And a few shrubs and lawn are not a garden to me.
I tend to go down the cottage/messy garden approach but the weeds distress me. And the work breaks my bones and sometimes my spirit.
I'm really sorry to hear that gardening is not giving you the joy it should. It would be so much easier if society had not created artificial "standards" for gardens (must be neat, must be tidy, etc). I think that perhaps we have created a rod for our own backs; those much-admired gardens that we see in the coffee table books are usually maintained by an army of gardeners and photographed at the height of their beauty, impossible to attain for those of us not blessed with large sums of money and full physical health.
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