On the other side of the fence

In Carly Thomas’ column about the challenge of getting her garden open-tothe-public ready, she has some advice for others that turns out to actually be advice for herself.

Here’s something I do not recommend when you have said yes to opening your garden to the public. Do not go and visit a garden that is jaw-droppingly perfect. You will want to crawl under their sculpturally immaculate hostas and rock back and forth while letting out a wailing, possibly high-pitched scream.

Everything has its place, it has had real and actual thought put into it.

There are plants with long Latin names and they look like they deserve every last letter. There are colour schemes that murmur rather than shout and the absence of weeds is astounding.

In my garden? The last thing I planted was a perennial my mum gave me called ‘‘sunny side up’’, my colour scheme is partymix-lolly inspired and weeds jostle with persistent elbows.

Seriously though, their garden is wonderfully beautiful, so immaculate I felt like I needed to speak in reverent, sonorous tones while walking through its sweeping paths. And its owners are so brilliant to have created it from scratch.

It was a paddock before and for 17 years they have planned and sculpted, mapped out and made their imagings an actual thing. This is hard work translated into something that is anything but hard. This garden is soft and gentle, but it has a backbone of solid hours spent.

And now their garden shines. It has gone from paddock to painterly and it deserves to be oggled.

But here’s the thing, and it is the thing that gave me some hope, because I realised, somewhere between the Solomon’s seal and the heritage apple orchard, that Elizabeth and I are not so different.

OK, well, she actually knows what she is doing and I prune roses purely by instinct rather than sound knowledge, but when Elizabeth says to me: ‘‘Oh it’s far from perfect, there is so much to do’’, I recognised something in her that is in me too.

Even this woman, with this oh-my-gawd garden, felt the pressure of what could be, what might be and what she felt she should give it.

Gardeners are people who are creating something that lives and breathes and the more time you give to that living entity, the more it gives back.

And it can always be better and it can only get better if you work, work and work some more.

The real beauty of Elizabeth’s garden is that there are lots of little rooms you are led to by paths.

The walls are hand-picked trees, chosen for their form and colour, and the paintings on them are shrubs and flowers that look beyond natural, because they are just the right height, shape and texture.

In these spaces there are seats, just at the place where you feel like slowing to a stop. At one of these I ask Elizabeth a question I suspect I know the answer to: ‘‘Do you ever sit in these seats?’’

‘‘Not often and not for long.’’ I laugh and nod knowing I am exactly the same.

We gardeners are forwardmotion people, active relaxers who create places not just for ourselves, but for others, and if others can sit on those perfectly placed seats and gain something from just being there, then we have succeeded.

But perhaps, just maybe, we also need to sit, because stopping and looking with freshly opened eyes is when perhaps we will see not just what our gardens could be, but how wonderful they really are.