Grow your own joy
Find your own garden pleasures without following the trendy herd
In the pursuit of a picture-perfect garden, happiness can sometimes get forgotten, or left low down the ‘must do’ list. I am secretly planning a nature garden that echoes an important garden, the Japanese Gardens in Rivington, and this is an important garden to me for all the wrong reasons. It is a pleasure garden built by a millionaire who knew nothing about plants and promptly filled all the terraces with invasive Rhododendron ponticum, but for me this was the first garden that I loved to get lost in.
The monumental-towering rhododendron canopies dwarfed me, and the vibrant purple flowers sang to me. I was happy to be here, to be transported to another place - but it was also a warning about the pursuit of fashion, because given the opportunity - all gardens return to nature, eventually. My new nature garden wants to capture that early feeling, but I want it to be resilient to changes of climate, we’re getting more rain and rhododendrons thrive in it. Sitting under that invasive canopy of a Rhododendron ponticum as a child has had more of an impact on me than any garden trend.
Our Norman heritage
My garden has had its share of distinct garden fashions. The prior custodian, Norman, laid down crazy paving and rockeries. These fashion choices extend to the house, which has doors
covered with hardboard, panelled walls and boxed-in fireplaces. Poor old Norman thought Barry Bucknall was the
King of interiors (look him up, you will shudder) but in the garden Norman loved Percy Thrower. However, it is obvious that this was a strained relationship between Norman and Percy. There are echoes of a Blue Peter-style pond, which didn’t unfortunately work on such a hillside. At some point Norman gave up on Percy and eradicated him with laurels.
The Cherry Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) may on paper look like the perfect hedge but it isn’t because the roots choke the soil and when it really gets going, it can be anything up to 8m (26ft) in height and the same in width. The garden at its widest is 7.5m (24ft). These towering monsters swallowed all the Percy Thrower throwbacks, and the roots destroyed the formal paths. We grew to loathe the laurel, and our neighbours hated it because it blocked the light. When our then farmer neighbour got wind we were thinking of ripping them out, he arrived on our doorstep with a small digger and the biggest grin you have ever seen. It appears that Norman planted the laurels on the farmer’s side of the boundary and for 30 years refused every request to cut them back.
Norman legacy slightly lives on
Take all the ‘heritage’ bricks I use around the garden. Visitors think it is a fashion choice, but I would never have chosen to dig up enough bricks from my soil to make a factory. I have no idea why they are here or where they are from because my cottage is built of stone and all the houses around here are built of stone but somewhere in Norman’s past he got hold of a lot of red house bricks.
I have found red house bricks entombed under the hawthorn hedge, beneath the footings of an old shed that burnt down and in numerous broken water butts across the garden. Norman had shares in red house bricks it would seem.
Work with what you have
These vibrant red bricks are now mosscovered and therefore ‘heritage’ and used for assorted paths and edging around the garden and people who visit always say, ‘It must have cost you a fortune for all those heritage bricks’... fashionable now apparently.
I am not, nor ever will be, deeply fashionable. I just don’t like to throw things away because it makes me sad. There is something wonderfully beautiful about reusing materials, so these bricks have been put to multiple good uses elsewhere.
Including old car tyres
They used to be all the rage as spraypainted planters. Then someone pointed out their links to cancer and they all got tossed in the back of vehicles and moved out of direct view. I feel like I am confessing some horrible sin, but I still have 20 tyres in the garden and did indeed used to grow edibles in them (potatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins).
Now, I use them for non edibles to be on the safe side, so they are filled with flowers and used as chicken tunnels, rather than panic and throw them away. All I am doing is extending the life of something and being sensible about it. I mean, how many of us plant in plastic? Now, that’s a material that truly frightens me.
Going back to the laurels, once the hedging was removed, I stacked them as make-do fences that provided a useful windbreak to my early attempts at growing vegetables. I planted thyme and fleabane in them as they rotted down, and you can do this with any felled tree. This way, over the passage of time it will return to the soil, creating a useful habitat for wildlife as it breaks down and for me this feels incredibly good.
We all need joy in our garden, so see what you can grow in, find your happy place and if it’s deeply unfashionable, all the better. I now have a gnome on my upstairs landing. We found him in the loft, we called him Norman.