Hello friends!
Thank you so much for bearing with me and the haphazard thing this letter has become. It seems that the lack of time and space to sit and write is affecting my ability to do my favourite thing which is sending you this newsletter…funny that! A better focused person would have made the thing they enjoy most non-negotiable, but I find, as with many things in life, that the ability to live your best one depends on certain ducks lining up politely. One duck is the sleep duck. That duck has to be on its best behaviour. Another one is the personal space duck, followed closely by time alone duck. Blah blah blah (quack quack quack?) So yes, ironically, to be calm, considered, together and productive, you must first be, ummm, calm, considered, together and productive. Is your brain broken yet?
Despite being written in the present tense, this letter usually gets done in one big burst on a Friday night or a Saturday morning (today I’m writing on a Saturday morning). I use gardening notes and lists that I write in my bullet journal and these scribblings take me back to the day of the week so that I can remember it and re-live it (or bits of it) here. See, the garden is the ONLY space in my life where I do a little bit every day. I’m working on the rest of the stuff. It would be INCREDIBLY sensible to write each entry at the end of each day wouldn’t it? Yeah, it would, but that would be entirely out of my shambolic character. Everything is last minute. Everything is haphazard. I regularly have nightmares about missing university exams simply because I have FORGOTTEN they were happening. What I’m saying is that I’m not sufficiently switched on to tell you what was going on last Monday without some visual or mental triggers to take me back there, and there has been no note-taking or list-making or anything else for the last two weeks, so instead of going through each day, I’m going to write a list here of everything in the garden that I’ve done, in no particular order. All of these things are perfect for May endeavours and I hope they might inspire you to get out and do a bit of gently messing around in the dirt.
Weeding
You all know about my love for weeding. Weeding is where I go when my brain is messed up and I cannot think what to do that will be good and happy-making. Weeding is the horticultural equivalent of making ones bed, or putting on lipstick, or phoning your best friend. It takes zero brain-power and brings you back to a place of contentment and, yes, JOY. Excuse me for wheeling this one out again, but in case you hadn’t heard, there are chemicals in the soil which act exactly like happy-pills - boosting your levels of whateveritis that balances your brain and brings you out of wonky and into even, calm waters. There are a few things I normally do when things get difficult, (going OUT of the house to write, PLANNING things like weekends or holidays, GOING TO PLACES, like museums or shops, or the gym or weeding the garden) none of them are available to me in lockdown apart from the last one. You can find out about the way I weed here, but essentially it’s the idea of picking a small spot and doing the Karate Kid thing of waxing on, waxing off until that bit is done. Only then do I move to the next space. It works for me. I have an awful lot of bindweed. It’s strange, because I seem to have more than last year. You need to be careful with bindweed because if you pull it out without chasing the roots through the soil you’ll break them and provide the perfect excuse for it to come back. I spent a good half hour in one tiny area this week, my head obscured by ivy at the base of a wall, crouched with my widger, trying to remove masses and masses of it from the boundary with my neighbour. It had sneakily grown up behind the ivy that covers the wall, so that I only noticed it was there when the leaves popped up out of the top, waving at me, triumphant. Not so fast.
Chopping
So much can be achieved with the secateurs. If you really look at your shrubs and climbers, and think like a sculptor, you can work wonders, just by REMOVING things. There is so much to be said for the creation of LESS in a garden. I’m talking about things like lifting the canopy of that enormous bush in the corner…you could let light in and plant bulbs there in the autumn…you could even put a chair beneath it. I’ve been freeing the trees at the boundaries of my garden, which get engulfed by the beauteous ivy that covers the wall. Just chopping off a small amount so that the trunk is visible was a total joy and a game changer. My smallest child said she wished I were prettier yesterday. When I asked her what she meant she said she wished I would wear more makeup. Small minuscule ache in throat and wave of hideous insecurity followed by explanation of the idea that less is more. It fell on deaf ears I know. She, like me, will spend half of her life thinking that things will improve if only she has more, does more, acquires more, slaps on more makeup, only to discover that the absolute opposite is true.
I’ve also been clipping the box balls. This year I was timely with my application of Topbuxus Xentari (which does away with the awful box caterpillar - links and information on it here) and the plants have thanked me with gorgeous, new growth so bushy and new and soft that running my hands over it makes the whole thing wobble like a huge jelly. It seems so wrong to cut it, but snip I must if I want a tight shape. Every time you snip the top growth of something, the sideshoots lower down start producing more plant material. It is these side-shoots that create the lovely dense bushes you need for topiary shapes. My little box balls started life as tiny little spheres in my window-boxes. They have suffered MUCH neglect (and not just from caterpillars) and so I’m incredibly grateful to them for springing back so beautifully. I snip one each day, whilst it is in shade and have finally finished, except for one, which is difficult to access and which I am considering moving.
Clearing
The tulips have been over for a while now and because I’m not keeping them for next year I can pull them out before the leaves go brown, to make room for other things. I don’t always do this, but the colour combination I ended up with this year was annoying (half the tulips turned out red instead of orange) so I’m pulling them out. It’s always a relief to decide to change your tulips in a way…it means that you don’t have to be careful of the bulbs when you’re planting new ones (or anything else). To be honest, I don’t manage to dig out most of the bulbs - the plants just snap off at the base. Lots of forgetmenots get removed as well - always hard to say goodbye to them. This clearing uncovers many lurkers - creeping potentilla (fine, but you want to keep abreast of it) chick-weed, but also other lovely surprises, such as calendula (keeping them).
Planting
My saliva ‘Mystic Spires’ are slowly getting planted. These are the majestic salvia that I bought on a whim and put in my front garden last year and ended up being the best thing I have ever grown pretty much. I ordered more for the back early this year and they arrived in March as tiny plugs. I put them into small pots and they’ve been waiting patiently for the tulips and forgetmenots to finish singing their song. I was horribly conservative with my purchase and I wish I’d bought more. There’s a lesson there…no such thing as extravagance in the garden. Anyway, I’ve already planted eight of them in two ‘drifts’ and they are my new babies and I will throw a TOTAL wobbly if my children squash them with the space hopper that they think is a thing for throwing and catching. I’ve never understood why children can’t play with a thing in the way in which it was intended. Surely you HOP on a space hopper no? I spend a lot of time shouting at them NOT to do things. That damn space hopper is basically performing an early Chelsea chop on many of my plants (I’ll do a post on the Chelsea Chop next week but it’s basically where you cut back your perennials to delay flowering and stop them flopping over). I realise that I am tempting fate by putting these salvia here but I figure I can just confiscate the big orange blob and give them a tennis ball. Better for the hand-eye coordination. We have been serenading the enormous number of children in the street with May birthdays. Bringing out bunting and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the top of our lungs. One of my neighbours tells me one of these street sing-songs that she thinks I am ‘a lovely mother’. We share a garden wall. She can hear everything. She is well into her eighties and I often feel the noise of us must annoy her. Perhaps she’s trying to make me feel better, or perhaps I don’t shout negative things to them as often as I think…either way, it’s kind of her and I tear up.
Pricking out and potting on.
We’ve reached peak panic situation with the seeds that need dealing with. We can blame the beginning of lockdown for this, when we all merrily started seeds with our kids, thinking they’d have the SLIGHTEST interest in them (spoiler, they don’t). So I am left with eleventy billion babies to tug at my heartstrings and DO THINGS WITH. We have rudbeckia, fennel, parsley, morning glory, pumpkins, and goodness knows what else. Luckily I enjoy pricking out and the children seem miraculously to leave me alone while I do it. Youngest sometimes asks to help and she’s actually not bad at it, so I let her. In the last couple of weeks I’ve put six parsley seedlings into a wide, shallow pot, and several others into smaller pots, dealt with all of the rudbeckia (half of which have been eaten by snails) and put six morning glories into two deep containers which I hope will cover some new trellis and some of my pergola. There are a LOT of things left and I’m fast running out of space so I’ll be giving quite a lot of stuff away to my neighbours.
Tying in
The sweet peas are ginormous and continuing to grow, triffid like. Autumn-sowing really does make bigger beefier plants and I’m not saying that to brag, but so that you can sow some this autumn! These need tying in every few days, along with the two new clematis I planted back in March, and EVERYTHING else. String in my pockets, always and I am running out of string. Rotter finally finishes the enormous piece of work he’s been coordinating from Domino’s bedroom. It’s nice finally to have a wingman of sorts, although I’m aware this won’t last for long. Last week, when everything got rather too much, an Instagram friend messaged with the brilliant observation that the nation is finally waking up to a taste of new motherhood. Stuck at home, zero social life, non-stop cleaning/clearing/washing, bad hair, awful clothes and crucially A VANISHING SENSE OF REALITY. As someone who has experienced a newborn three times (and I’m not ignoring the lovely blissful bits etc) I value the ‘freedom’ of walking out of the house, unshackled and without anyone asking me for anything more than any man could. That’s why this lockdown has been so hard. It has taken away the thing I value above everything else; my own time and space, alone.
Sweeping, tidying, setting up
Every fine day (and there have been many) we’ve eaten outside. This involves much table-laying and fussing around with trays and finding hats etc and it takes time. But we have time. So we do it. I realise how very close I am to becoming a person who lays a table for breakfast every morning and I’m letting that ship sail right into port. I like the beauty and the slowness and the self respect of the whole thing. I like that my children help me and I REALLY like that they are beginning to enjoy doing their bit. “Let me get a jug of water!” “Can I pick the flowers?” Perhaps that’s the bit my neighbour was talking about when she said I was a lovely mother? It was my eldest’s birthday this week. She turned 11. I have been wracked with the pain of knowing she cannot see her friends and this has made me massively over-compensate in present-form. More clothes than she can possibly wear. It’s ridiculous. A neighbour made a delicious cake. There were many sweet, kind presents left at the door. Her best friend created the most beautiful handmade book of memories for her that made both their mothers cry. It’s not the birthday she’d envisaged, but it’s the one she’ll remember forever. As darkness falls I realise, purely due to the absence of anxiety, how knotted up I have been trying to make sure this day was special. It sounds awful but it’s such a massive relief to have got through it. I pick up a broom and sweep. I often do ANGER SWEEPING, indoors, when I am full of rage (it belongs to the same group of things as furiously tidying up, mid row) and it is very effective because things get cleaned up while you are at your worst. But RELIEF SWEEPING on the terrace and paths in a garden is also an excellent thing because all the worry flows through the broom and ends up with the dust and the dirt and gets thrown into the back of the flowerbed.
All the good things
x Laetitia
More than five minutes of gardening
I don't usually comment and I've only recently started following you but I wanted to say that I ADORE these newsletters. I'm so appreciative as a professional/mom/gardener/artist/introvert. You nail pretty much everything I'm feeling these days during lockdown. Thank you! 💚❤
I love getting your newsletter and don't care how haphazard it becomes. I find committing to anything regular at the moment is beyond me. Even in the garden I flit from one half done job to another!
Happy birthday to your daughter, what a wonderful friend she has - handmade gifts like that are so special.