Hedge snipping, sweet pea plotting, early morning weeding and being more MOTHER.

Hello friends…I’m BAAAAAACK!

There is a definite hint of autumn in the air and I’m absolutely fine with that…happy to welcome cooler, damper times and a bit of a slowdown. I’m pretty slapdash about planning in the garden, but I do tend to plant with this particular time of year in mind…late summer…safe in the knowledge that I really won’t care what’s flowering when it’s the height of summer as I’ll be drinking rose and larking about, but that September and October, those ‘back to school’ times are when it’ll matter rather more.

I’ve been been away for a while, and came back to a garden that felt overgrown and overwhelming. There’s a cure for that folks though (do you have my book?) and I’ve been getting back into the five minute swing slowly but surely over the past days. Here are my gardening exploits for this week, and perhaps they will encourage you to get out in this rather less torpid weather, embrace the slight chill in the air and get gardening.

Monday

It’s bank holiday. I don’t really DO bank holidays. To me, in my work-at-home/stay-at-home-mother world they are frankly just annoying (mostly because people keep wanting to be FED…ugh). I have been experimenting with a thing called habit-stacking, where you follow one habit that you’re trying to create with others in a sort of continual, beautiful, halo-tastic CARNIVAL OF HABITS. I’ve been doing my five minute gardening immediately after I’ve exercised (I say exercised but it’s more a desperate attempt to move my body after six months of neglecting myself) and I am loving the early morning gardening thing in my sweaty gym clothes. As usual I begin with the first thing I see that needs attention. Today this was the iris sibirica, whose stems never got cut once the flowers went over like MONTHS ago. I cut the brown stems and pull them out of the messy strappy leaves, and then I move along and pull out various weeds, including one gargantuan stem of bindweed that I have missed on my previous weeding endeavours. I follow it all the way to the back of the border, beneath the ivy. My head needs to go IN the hedge, and then my shoulders until it swallows me almost up to my waist. It’s worth it because I get the bastard out - highly satisfying. I come inside to find Rotter emptying the bins. He sees me and holds the two plastic bags up to show me he’s about to take them outside. I contemplate going upstairs to get my toothbrush and toothpaste and hold them up in front of him. Same same.

Tuesday

I meander out to the exercise bike in the dark these days; must buy self a head-torch because I will have to be gardening in the dark before long. Today the area of focus is just beneath my standard hydrangea…I have two of these and they pretty much provide the only summer wow-factor. They are the reason why I’ve planted two more hydrangea paniculata which I hope will make the whole space sing together once they reach a certain size. Planting beneath these two little trees always varies, but this year I’ve put lots of lock-down rudbeckia there, along with my beloved salvias…thoroughly unconsidered…completely slapdash (as usual)…it was lockdown…I thought we were all going to die imminently…what can I say. I suppose I’m trying to apologise for the mess. All my life I’ve apologised for mess, and yet I’ve never actually felt very sorry or bad about it…the apology comes from a desire to let other people KNOW that I KNOW it’s a mess, which, when I think about it is just truly bonkers. Anyway, I grab my hori hori knife and start to weed between the rudbeckias, mostly removing euphorbia seedlings and a bit of couch grass. It takes less than three minutes to deal with the whole area as the stuff comes out so easily, and I move along to the foot of my pear tree, whose carefully constructed semi-circular brick path surround has been totally obliterated by a rather too successful erigeron (Mexican daisy). Pulling out erigeron makes me feel like I’ve reached some sort of important stage in adulthood. You spend years trying to get it to grow everywhere and then the scales tip, and you spend the rest of those years yanking it out. Before you write and tell me I am appalling and how the hell COULD I do such a thing, consider that where there is fluff there must also, always be hard, solid, smoothness. Eyes need it. And I need it.

Mowing finally happens too, once the grass has lost its dew. It’s a longer-than-usual task because I’m cutting down the long grass that has provided us with such joy over the boiling summer days. I move through it carefully before mowing to make sure there are no little frogs chilling in there, and slowly hoover it all up over bed-time (because I have to recharge the battery in order to get through the whole thing…here is my battery-operated mower if you’re interested) and I am reminded that mowing ones lawn is one of the easiest things you can do to transform your outside space. It has the biggest visual payback of any job and allows me to be a total slattern in the borders. Just saying.

Wednesday

There has been a considerable amount of packing going on at our house, because my eldest will be flying off away to school on Sunday and the volume of STUFF she needs is rather overwhelming. Each individual thing must also be named with SEW-IN name tapes. As a person who rather enjoys stitching this didn’t bother me one bit until I began with the shirts and realised how HARD the collars are when my needle snapped and my fingers began to seize up. Even the softer clothes (the PE stuff) is difficult - made of soft but slippery and thick lycra-type material that won’t take a needle either. So the sewing machine has had to be cranked out and (like many things in my life) what should have been an easy thing has become a huge-ass performance and I am just. so. very. over. it. I pack most of the things, make a list of all the things we’ve forgotten and realise I’m going to have to go to THE SHOPS (which for me right now is like being asked to board a flight to Mars…ugh). Rotter has tried numerous times to get me to go out on a date with him but I keep quicheing out at the last minute, citing the well-known excuse of ‘It’s all too much’. Either I’ve had a personality transplant or I’ve finally found the joy of being my real self who doesn’t want to go out. I fear it is the latter. Poor dear Rotter.

This morning, after a bit of weeding, I go indoors to order my sweet pea seeds, only to be told by my small boy (doing minecraft in the same room) that my typing is ‘annoying’. I tell him to that if he wants to share early mornings with his mother, then he’s going to have to lump it, because if mummy doesn’t get to do her own stuff in her own space at SOME POINT IN THE DAY then mummy won’t be happy and healthy and then she won’t be able to look after you mkay? I am entirely agog at homeschoolers (I’ve been following lots of them on Instagram). Lockdown has helped me to realise that I can actually give much more of myself to my children than I had previously imagined, that I can deal with more chaos, and breathe through more noise, and ignore more mess, and magic up more meals and play more bug bingo and talk about more minecraft and generally be more MOTHER than I would ever have thought, but none of that means I’m not sitting here waiting for the beginning of term like a hopeless drug addict waiting for a fix.

Here are the sweet peas I ordered, just in case you fancy joining the autumn-sown sweet pea party. Sowing your sweet peas in the autumn will give you earlier, beefier plants, and is one less thing to do in the Spring.

Jet Set Mixed by Johnsons

Giant Wave Mix by Johnsons

Charlie’s Angel - one packet because I cannot resist.

I absolutely won’t be sowing all of these sweet peas, just a few of each.

We mess around in the garden too, and I make them help me trim the hornbeam hedges I planted a couple of years ago from 1m bare root stems. It won’t ever be very dense, this hedge (for that, I ought to have done a double row, which I don’t have room for) but my love for hornbeam in all its guises trumps my desire for smartness. I clip off the errant branches, the children telling me where I should cut. Eldest makes a flower-crown of sorts, which I am pretty impressed with. Boy removes all the leaves from a stem and spends an hour whacking things with it. The rest I pile up at the back of a flowerbed out of sight, hoping it’ll provide a good home for overwintering creatures.

Thursday

We are welcoming new neighbours today, with distanced drinks and I spend a lovely five minutes sweeping out our seating area, having finally removed the rickety old table (which is broken and now leans precariously at an angle). This table is now in my bad books, because it has transformed what could be relaxed outdoor eating experiences into a game of disaster roulette. Children will LEAN on things. I don’t know why they have the compulsion but they do; if there is a table within view, they will come up to it, put their palms firmly on the edge, hunch their little shoulders and float their little feet off the floor. When you, alarmed, tell them to get off they will swivel their little heads around and push down on the table harder, rather than removing their weight. It’s inevitable. As inevitable as the fact that a child will look up at you adorably and step INTO the dog poo you are warning them away from. Best to say nothing. Seriously. Anyway, Rotter rolls the table down the side return and I sweep methodically, and arrange chairs, and wonder whether we should have a fire (nope).

I drag the children off to the park for a bash around and leave my snippers by the front door on my way out, as a reminder that I need to clip the yew hedge in my front garden at some point when I get back. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for weeks and when I actually do it, it takes five minutes. This hedge, like the hornbeam, was planted back in 2018 from 1m bare root plants. I’m thrilled with how well it has done in such a short time, and think it must have a lot to do with the drip irrigation I laid at its base when I planted it. If you are an anxious person, or prone to worry, then I heartily recommend installing a drip-feed irrigation system…even for a very small part of your garden. The JOY of knowing that the care of at least ONE thing in ones life is AUTOMATED….that you don’t have to think about it. Massive thumbs up.

Friday

I wake up with a tonsils the size of golf balls and an extremely sexy voice. I take this to mean that all bets are off today and that I must actually do NOTHING…because my body is telling me to etc blah blah. So no early morning, and the cancelling of plans ensue. Permission to sit and let things get thoroughly messy all around me. Permission to park any pretence of wholesomeness (we should collect acorns!…we should make playdough!…we should chat about the changing seasons!) and instead put the telly on, eat brownies on the sofa and practice Duolingo until my fingers hurt (I know, I’m weird…I do it to relax). The children think they’ve won the bloody lottery.

We do go for a walk though, and end up at the local garden centre where I accidentally find myself walking out with a corydalis. I have always loved corydalis and I’m not sure why I don’t have any in the garden. The yellow one reminds me of my childhood - you would see so much of it, growing out of walls and crevices…not so much now. But it’s the blue ones that have my heart and I suddenly have visions of a cloud of blue froth in a pot on a table. Sadly I can only afford one little pot, so a large blue cloud will have to wait. I plant it as soon as we get home, in a medium sized container which already has some cyclamen growing in it. These two will be good companions I think, under the apple tree.

Sending you all the good things, always.

x Laetitia