If in doubt, garden 🌱

Hello Friends!

In these strange times, we can absolutely turn to our outdoor spaces for solace and comfort. I am entirely unworried about loo roll, but I DID go and buy a few bags of my favourite wool compost yesterday, because in times of uncertainty it is best to be prepared to PLANT something.

Here are my five minute forays this week.

Monday

Today I am off on a jolly, having been a last-minute invitee to a press day that’s going on in Somerset. Make no mistake, this is not my usual deal…I am in no way important or influential enough to get do this kind of stuff (and anyway, the logistics make it impossible) but Rotter encourages me, saying he will be FINE. I stick post-it notes on everything, reminding about books that need taking to school, and which homework needs doing, and then I pack my bag. This situation typifies the usefulness of having a five minute rule for the garden, because when you’re on your way out somewhere, it’s tricky to think that there’d ever be time to go and do some gardening. Unless it’s only for five minutes. I grab my secateurs and pull on a pair of wellies. I step carefully into the pool on the terrace, avoiding the enormous lumps of frogspawn, and start chopping away the papyrus leaves that have gone brown or fallen over. It’s become a lush forest of the stuff, and I’ve been meaning to sort it out for a while. Snip snip snip, and I’m done before my five minutes is up. I rush to get string, so that what’s left remains upright, and I clear up, resolving to move all the new shoots resulting from my neglect (because when you put a papyrus stem - or it falls - upside down into water, a new plant emerges) into an aquatic basket to fill in the gaps.

I pull off my wellies and rush to Paddington with my anti-bacterial wipes and a happy smile. We have a bonkersly fancy dinner at an incredibly chic place in Bruton, and I fall asleep, ALONE, having bathed, read-to and cajoled precisely NOBODY.

Tuesday

We are taken to The Newt in Somerset for a guided tour of the gardens. This had been on my list of places to visit for a while, and was the main reason I was so keen to go on this trip. It is extraordinary; a project of mammoth proportions that only seems to expand. The place is a hotel, a working farm, a hub for CYDER (as opposed to the apparently hugely inferior CIDER), home to two national collections (of crabapples and malus cultivars pre 1930). It has several separate gardens, stumperies, greenhouses, threshing barns, shops, cafe’s a treetop walk and an extraordinary, completely immersive museum of gardening. And more will come. It is owned by billionaires (of course) - people so enormously wealthy that making boring old MONEY from this venture of theirs is but a trifling concern. I love the fact that this is a total passion project; a vast, gaping money pit that gobbles up the millions with a big fat smile on its face. The staff all look like they’re high on something…and why not? They basically get to go shopping and do what they love with zero limitations. It’s a perfect example of work-as-play. I had a VERY lovely time, and I will write more about it on my blog soon.

I get home just in time to pick up the children and re-pot three incredibly sad pilea plants. These have been languishing for FAR too long in small terracotta pots, and the fact that they are still alive is a testament to the wonder of this plant. If you are ever in search of a plant that is un-kill-able, then this is the plant for you. I grab some multi-purpose compost mixed with a little perlite (my standard house-plant mix) and I re-pot them into slightly larger pots - plastic this time. Terracotta is lovely friends, but it does absorb moisture, so if you’re planning on being neglectful, (or you simply know yourself well, like I do) then plastic is possibly a better option. As soon as they are in their new homes and watered, they look healthier, and I feel better. It’s remarkable how doing something nice to a plant can improve ones outlook on life.

Wednesday

Things are getting rather scary aren’t they. We are going out for dinner with friends tonight and I feel this may be the last time for a while. I want to go and see my parents but I’m too worried, because who knows, we might all have it… I stare outside and settle on the sweet peas. I sowed them in autumn, because an autumn sowing will give me earlier sweet peas (essential) and beefier plants (also essential). The mild winter meant that I had to pinch them out much earlier than normal; they were flopping over and totally out of control. So I snipped them, some time in November I think, and tied each one to a kebab stick as I always do. But all was not well. Something happened with the sticks - they started to grow furry mould, and half the stems began to die off. I’m not sure why - it could have been due to the type of stick, or the fact that it was too warm over the winter… Anyway, I had to remove them, and, having nothing to replace them with, I just left the seedlings alone, lying prostrate, and prayed for colder weather to prevent further lankiness. It’s a bit early to be planting them out, but they’re not waiting, so neither will I. The simple act of carefully untangling the stems from one-another is incredibly soothing. I open up the rootrainers and find beautiful fat roots that extend in white ribbons far below into the tray of water beneath. I plant seven in a circle in a large pot by the shed. I should beef up the compost with a bit of manure but I don’t have time. I tie each stem carefully to the wigwam of canes that I’ve pushed into the pot, and water the whole thing thoroughly. I swear I can actually see the things growing, now that they’re in place.

Thursday

I go to meet a dear friend at the garden centre and pick up a couple of bags of compost at the same time. I have more sweet peas to plant and I want them scrambling all over my still-naked pergola from pots at the base of each post. The news is once again sobering, and I decide to sow the alpine strawberries that I didn’t get around to next week. You can find a film of me doing this on my instagram, and written instructions on my blog. It is five minutes of pure escapism, sowing those seeds, and I feel temporarily, gloriously alien and out of touch with the throbbing, high-pitched vein of anxiety that keeps chipping away at me. A bit of background (just to justify my paranoia) - I am asthmatic and have been hospitalised twice with pneumonia. So, WEAK LUNGS DARLING and all that. Having children is a very good way of keeping a lid on worry and woe, but when they are not around, when one doesn’t have to behave like an ‘adult’, that’s when things can feel a bit black. Honestly, if it weren’t for the children, I’d probably throw caution to the wind and hardly think about it. But I am paralysed by thoughts of what on earth would become of them without my iron fist…without me to make them brush their teeth and to read to them, without my thick, suffocating love duvet. Perhaps you will all be laughing and say it is pure narcissism - of COURSE your children would be fine without you! But I know that you are all deluded; how indeed could my children ever survive without the ferocity of my love? No, I must stay alive.

Friday

My Rotter is working from home. I have banished him to an upstairs bedroom but he is THERE nonetheless. I tell him pointedly that I ‘hope you are not expecting LUNCH’ and we laugh while I try to keep a straight face. Honestly friends, I didn’t think I’d have to deal with this until the dreaded RETIREMENT (and I’ve made him promise faithfully that RETIREMENT will never happen). Everything is wrong with it…there is not a single thing that is right with it. He bashes around with his big feet, and he shouts on the phone unspeakably loudly, and he types with two fingers as if he were trying to catch a small insect that moves deftly beneath the keys. He comes down every now and then, pours coffee into a different cup each time and then leaves it to go cold. I love him without reservation but my god, I wish he would GO AWAY. If it weren’t for the coronavirus, I would have decamped to my favourite cafe, and if it weren’t for the coronavirus he would certainly be in his office (which he loves and adores, and where he can be truly himself, tap tap tapping away at the computer keys and shouting at the screen). Thank goodness for the garden, and the last of the sweet peas urging me to plant them too. I fill two large-ish pots with compost and fashion some sort of climbing frame with prunings and bamboo canes to create a highway up which the sweet peas can climb from the pot to the base of my pergola. I plant three sweet peas into each pot and tie the stems to the supports. I water, and dunk the rootrainers into water so as to clean them. I love to dunk newly liberated containers as soon as humanly possible. It means I don’t have to clean caked-on dirt off them in the autumn and thus makes me feel like I’m somehow winning.

That’s it friends - no links, or blog posts, or anything of note…only the real certainty that if you are feeling a bit scared or worried, gardening, or being outside HELPS - it really really does.

I wish you all health and happiness, and all of the good things. If in doubt, just do some gardening.

x Laetitia

ps may I ask you a small favour? If you have my book and enjoy it, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon? It makes a difference. Thank you xxx