Gardeners, take note
Keeping a journal of everything in the garden is both pleasurable and practical
It amazes me how much I forget. I should know by now that I cannot remember everything that has been planted in my garden in the past five years, let alone 30. Yet gardening, an optimistic occupation, mostly succeeds when you learn from experience. This is passed down in many ways – in folklore, books and by gardening gurus – but most importantly by reflecting on your own trial and error. After all, the conditions in your garden are probably unique, so the only way to evaluate your valuable findings is by recording them. As the American writer Tom Clancy said: “If it’s not written down it never happened.” Many great gardening journals have been kept all over the country. Some head gardeners I know still keep a record of everything done each week – temperature, rainfall, what has gone in, what has failed, flowerings, shootings and the like. Glancing back, they can compare years. The RHS has several notable journals at the Lindley Library and the National Trust has many. A recent one given to the RHS is that of Dorothy Whiddett (by her daughter) who kept a record of her suburban garden in Croydon from 1966 to 2000. Her entries include: “Cut back begonia ‘Dusky Maid’ and took cuttings” (April 3 1969); “Still no rain so dragged water from washing machine round garden” (May 6 1976); “Bill started work. Awful to see someone else in garden but must have help” (April 1 1985); “Got to bottom of garden – first time since last Sept” (June 14 1996). The RHS also has the diaries of George Ferguson Wilson, who owned Price’s Candles and developed Wisley from farmland in the 1870s. He bought Wisley because of the varied microclimates and used it to find out which plants flourished where. The National Trust’s many diaries include The Garden Flora started in the 1890s by Ludwig Messel, the owner of Nymans in West Sussex, with the help of his daughter Muriel. An interesting tip of his for growers of Melianthus major is: “This has been planted in the Quarry for four years, and needs a covering of ashes in winter. Frost cuts the old branches to the level of the ground, but new shoots spring from the base in May.” Keeping your own records, whether you have an extensive garden open to the public or a patch where you enjoy a few spare hours a week, will take relatively minuscule snippets of time, but will pay off more and more each year. First, it is fundamental to decide what information is most important to you and how elaborate it needs to be. Handwritten notes are fascinating to look through and are rather like a set of gardening fingerprints – extremely personal to the writer. The downside is their linear quality and, with no index or search facility, they are cumbersome to glean pertinent information from. As to what information you need, this too is personal. My essentials are: what I have planted where and when; plant failures (deaths and poor performers that were axed), vegetable and fruit varieties and performance, plus all the additions and trials of different products and weather records. Also important are the man hours, running costs and capital outlay involved, as I am trying to make my garden as efficient as possible. This is so that I can advise the increasing number of clients At the other end of the scale many gardeners simply keep spreadsheets of their plants, but an app called Evernote (evernote.com) is increasingly being adapted for use by gardeners and is the system I have opted for. The basic app is free but you can buy an advanced system for £30 per year. This is rather like a scrapbook that you can add to using your phone, computer or tablet, recording the information in notebooks with tags to allow you to search easily. So, for instance, for my “Serpentine Walk” garden I can enter my spreadsheet of plants, keep photographic records and related articles that suggest under-planting for dry, shady areas and a plan of the layout. This system should let me search and update my records too. My “Vegetable Garden” tab will take me to a series of spreadsheets for each year, showing varieties, yields, and pest problems. My “To Do” tab would be an aide memoire but also a useful record of when jobs were last done. Photographs of inspirational plants or design ideas can be filed under “Plants to Source” or “Design Ideas”. Professionals who look after several gardens are also adopting this system. Record-keeping is rapidly becoming easier, more exciting and much more usable. For a keen gardener it could become the most useful implement in your virtual tool shed – and you will never have the problem of not being able to shut the door. It is also stored in the Cloud, so will not be destroyed or get wet and muddy!