For the past few years, I have been a joyful Chelsea Flower Show attendee. Every May, my phone’s photo album usually becomes stuffed with pictures of plants: variegated borders in shades of white and purple, hostas bursting from decorative pots, cornus trees providing shade over ground cover of miniature geraniums. I obsess over dahlias, clematis and roses, not to mention the mini greenhouses, chic she-sheds and pretty pergolas.
A couple of years ago, I had recently acquired for the first time my own garden and was embarking on filling it with gusto. I was drunk on possibility when it came to what I could fill my little patch with. Climbing roses! Strawberry beds! A fig tree!
I spent accordingly. It was impossible to pass a garden centre without dropping a ton every time. I started hiding new plant purchases from my husband, digging them in furtively as soon as I got home before he enquired how much I’d forked out. I began reading the gardening pages in the newspaper for the first time. Gardening books stacked up beside the bed.
This year, the tables have turned. Last summer, I had to leave my lovely garden behind (my husband’s job requires occasional erratic moves) and I find myself 200 miles away in the north of England, living in a rented house with a garden that’s not a patch on my previous one.
Where before I had a sheltered, south-facing lawn surrounded by pretty borders and facing on to wilderness, now I have a north-facing strip of weed-strewn turf. The house is a new-build and the garden is accordingly rubbish. It is uneven, with no planting to speak of and surrounded on three sides by a blank wooden fence. It overlooks similarly uninspiring gardens. The only thing that seems to flourish in it is weeds, of which there are plenty.
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