A garden is a living thing, like a person. It’s often said that caring for a garden is like caring for oneself. Gardens change, like people; they grow and develop and change over time.
Gardens are also unique, like people.
This is a time of year when English gardens often look at their best, blooming with plants from all over the world, but which we now think of as being deeply English; yellow spears of Loose Strife, which grows profusely by the roadside in Turkey; Rose Campion, originally from the warmer regions of the Mediterranean; Marguerite Daises from the Canary Islands. Soon red and orange Montbretia will come into flower, far from its home in the grasslands of Africa, mixed in with native British plants such as the foxglove and the ‘deep vermillion’ of the rose.
Gardens are places we explored as children, when they seemed so vast; we would seek out particular areas of shadow or sun, changing as the day developed. Gardens are places we associate with the people who cared for the garden and perhaps for us. Gardens are places where pets are buried; they are places of memory, of long, lost summer evenings, lights shining through trees, brief, remembered moments of music and laughter.
