Realising a dream.

Photo by Andrew Maybury

The start of the week was quiet. Nothing happened. I went to work, got caught up in some deadlines, failed to sow some aquilegia in the four hour window indicated by the lunar calendar would be good for them. I caught a cold which, as someone who self identifies as Never Being Ill, is always disproportionately irritating. But Thursday? Thursday everything happened.

Thursday 6th February. The smell. Did you smell it? As I went down the path through the kitchen garden to the field, it washed through me. Spring. You can smell the earth warming up and the plants coming to life. This year’s planting of tulips are up through the gravel (the old tulips have been up and green for weeks) and the pots of muscari neglectum are pushing up red tinged leaves. Then I heard it. The sound of the birds coming from the woods across the valley was as full as an aviary at the zoo. A solid chorus of sound. 

Then I saw that the family of birds had moved back into the thatch overhang. I am not brilliant at bird recognition and these ones move very fast. There is a built nest that I think might be from housemartins, but the first occupants are just living inside the layers of straw. The squirrels wake up in the straw-lined attic and spend the night charging up and down in scampering relay races.

Then people started sending me messages to say I was in TOAST magazine, and what a lovely article it was. Lots of people said how wonderful it was that I was combining psychology and gardening and how positive growing things was for their mental health. I pretty much said exactly the opposite in the interview; I find flower growing one of the most stressful things I have ever done and I work in child protection. 

Anyway, if you fancy a read, it is here. I am so so lucky to have two amazing photographers, Andrew Maybury and Roger Bool, alongside me in this crazy venture that I have embarked upon, and I am thrilled that they get to be in TOAST magazine with me.

I am so delighted with all of this, I get a bit giddy and order a bright red Katherine Hooker jacket and two tickets for Chelsea. We are going to go up to town and make a night of it, so if you can recommend a lovely place to stay, please could you let me know? Boutique more than opulent preferably, but I’m all for something a bit different.

Not my finest photo but this is the thatch overhang at the front of the cottage through the leaded window. The birds have made little entrances in at various points.

Friday 7th February. I pack orders. (Some behind the scenes pictures below.) Harvest tweedia seed. Fill in forms for my talk at Hampton Court Flower Show. Make soup. The forecast starts to reflect the incoming storm and I check the greenhouse repeatedly.

Saturday 8th February. A day of blue skies and warm breezes. The light is hazy and soft, rather than the hard sunlight of winter. I spend significantly longer than I should trying to get Maud to sit with her face in the light. (She was Instagram star of the week with her clever stair posing, but some moments in life are not to be repeated.) In the end, I settle for photographing my incredible stairs. 

I have left a lot of the stems and seed heads over the winter, both for the birds and because they look beautiful. Also because many of the plants in the matrix planting are intended to softly self sow and intermingle at their own inclination. However, I am starting to pull out the skeletons of last year’s annuals, the daucus and atriplex, shaking any loose seeds back off. The perennials, the salvias and bronze fennels, I chop at the base where the new growth is already strong and clear. 

I left a lot of my sweet peas on the vine last year, thinking that they would grow where they dropped and give me a very early harvest indeed. I cannot find a single plant. I think this may explain the vole population explosion.