Real reveal: garden-gate
Nature eh? Turn your back for mere moments and the sly old fox is busy reclaiming your immaculately manicured garden. The summer has been somewhat dubious, so it’s taken until now for me to face up to the fact that something must be done. Secateurs in hand I set about cutting down a year’s worth of shameful neglect. Here’s a recap…
June 2010: This is my garden just after I got the keys to my house, two years ago. Where I live is, I think, the site of an old quarry. My garden rises up, up, up behind the house, so that you can stand by that fence at the back and look over the roof. It’s cute, the house set in a hobbity hollow, but maintaining the garden is pure hell.
Aug 2010: A couple of months later it had ‘blossomed’ into this. Sort of wild and romantic in the sunshine, but it’s a fine line between free-form gardening and ‘do you think she’s died?’
Sept 2012: Oh, garden shame. This is it now, and this is after quite a bit of cutting back. The lawn is now a rustic mix of moss and dandelions, the plum tree is choked with ivy and those shrubs are blocking out the sun.
* Cat shown, as always, to illustrate scale
Somewhere under these piles of stuff are the secateurs. This is a Real Reveal as cautionary tale. Don’t leave your garden for a whole year. It’s bigger than you, and clearing it up again will bring you face to face with what it means to be a puny human pitted against the force of nature. For a view of a really lovely garden – and an illustration of the difference between My Friend and myself – here is her recent Real Garden Reveal.
I hate to tell you this (but am going to anyway) but that ‘recent Real Reveal’ of my garden is a year old. It has been tidied and pruned at least four times since then (winking face). x
Oh the shame! But don’t worry, I’ll put your name down for “Garden SOS”. Is there such a TV programme or did I just invent it?
It’s all personal taste but I much prefer the look of your June 2010 garden over your friend’s well manicured nod towards minimalism (which I find a bit sterile and ‘easy maintenance’). I don’t have a garden and envy anybody their outside space regardless of it’s state. Good luck; I think you have the foundation of a beautiful little haven… which you’re not showing for dramatic effect (?)
Perfect friends… don’t you just hate them?
When I had my allotment I invented the concept of the Rotavator Party – perhaps a gin fuelled work party is the answer here too?
I’ll come!
Gin fuelled sounds good – though any tools will have to be binder-twinned to our wrists to avoid losing them (again) x
Your shed rocks!