I’m determined to learn how to tell weeds from plants

MANY years ago, I had a brief stint as the gardening correspondent for the Nottingham Evening Post. The sum total of all I knew about gardening could probably have been written on the back of a primrose leaf. To compound matters, I lived in a flat.

But I say yes to everything and so I waded in on top of my day job with my notebook and wellies.

Each week, I would find someone with an extraordinary garden and interview them about their plants and their green fingers. I loved it. My favourite was the man who had 90 pots in a yard about the size of my front room, filled with roses and peonies and irises.

You see, I know nothing about gardening. I am fascinated by Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don and their ability to commune with plants and gently share their horticultural expertise with their millions of fans. But I’ve always been clueless.

And suddenly, I have a garden. It’s a beautiful little garden that’s been dearly loved and curated over several decades. And the responsibility to keep it from turning into a jungle is weighing heavily on my shoulders.

Before we moved in, I leaned over the fence one evening with an app that identifies plants and snapped a picture of the woody climbing tree that stood as the centrepiece in the garden. A plant so mature and so well thought of that someone had built a bespoke wooden frame around it. The app told me it was a Russian Olive – highly invasive and a species that should be removed from all gardens immediately.

Several weeks later we moved into the house.

‘What a beautiful wisteria!’ exclaimed my friend who knows about gardening. Good job I hadn’t got around to hacking this cherished tree out of the ground.

My expert gardening friend came round a few nights later and instructed me that this time of year was perfect for a glass of wine and some gentle gardening in the long evening sunshine. And so, Wine Wednesdays, which were once borne in my house of the weekly newspaper deadline that necessitated a glass at the end of a stressful week’s production, have now become Wine Weeding Wednesdays.

The thing is, while my clever gardening friend taught me a little about pruning and tidying and set me gardening homework on her first visit, I’m still struggling.

I can just about identify a rogue dandelion clock, but, otherwise, I have no idea how to distinguish between weeds and plants.

And so I headed out in the garden this week, glass of wine, gardening gloves and a small fork in hand to finally make some progress. The one plant I knew I could tackle was the mint. There were huge clumps of it everywhere, taking over big sections of my limited flower beds. Our neighbour keeps stick insects and she told me they love mint, so I went at it with gusto, pulling out handfuls and handing it over the fence for the hungry critters.

I got a great sense of achievement as I cleared a patch of soil and realised I’d made space for anything I wanted to grow.

My swimming buddy had come round with some spare strawberry plants which went dry before I had been able to get them into the ground.

So I planted these and figured, worst-case scenario, they would feed their last remaining nutrients back into the ground.

Now it’s just the other 647 plants – or weeds – to dig up, cultivate or cut back and keep on top of.