The big picture

While many hanker for a largely static, no-fuss garden, it’s the daily changes in his garden that give MICHAEL McCOY the biggest thrill

The goal of most professional garden design, and all low-maintenance gardening, is to achieve as stable and unchanging a result as possible. That’s a useful and instructional goal. But the intention in my own garden is for the exact opposite. What I’m after, more than anything, is joyous instability.

I love those moments, concentrated in spring and autumn by Nature herself in response to my climate, when each visit to the garden reveals something new. Daily change is ideal, though the reality probably averages closer to weekly. If I go a week without something new coming into bloom, or pushing up through the soil, or tilting into autumn colouring, I get a bit tetchy and cook up plans to avoid such bathos in the future.

This weighs into my thinking this month as I enter the longest, most stable, least engaging phase that my garden dishes up in its annual cycle. It’s like that boring bit at the end of every rollercoaster I’ve ever ridden, when all the fun and thrill is over, and you’re just winding your way, at low altitude, back to the starting point.

This month also forces a performance review. The question ‘Have you allowed your addiction to rapid change to override the necessary provision of permanent, evergreen elements?’ can’t be avoided, and the answer is terrifyingly evident. A balance between the two isn’t easy to get, or keep, right. The explosive seasonal growth of perennials can all too easily compromise – and make virtual compost of – young plantings of woody, permanent stuff. Many’s the time I’ve been cutting back drifts of decaying perennial matter only to discover a dead stick with a label at its base, with an ‘Oh, that’s where I planted that rare shrub I spent my birthday money on last winter’. But it’s patently clear at this time of year, that I’ve got to make sure there’s some blue chip investment among all this speculative thrill.

The quieter months are not without their own particular joys, of course. I love watching strong design lines and shapes in paths and hedges re-emerge slowly through the autumn decay. And when I’ve exhausted that pleasure, there’s a deep satisfaction in the restoration of order, cutting everything back, completing a proper weeding, and pressing the ‘reset’ button. If I’m lucky, that satisfaction might get a micro-boost from a family member making a rare positive comment. “Oooh, I like this. It’s so unlike you.

It’s so… tidy,” they’ve been heard to say, and I welcome their insipid affirmation. For the next few months, I’ve got to harvest and dine out on any small joy that comes my way.