A Pocket-sized Patch

“I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one's clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable.”

GERTRUDE JEKYLL

A house just up the road from ours came up for sale recently. It’s an old but very large house, renovated by the previous owners after years of neglect, with a substantial plot of land behind it. It was way out of our price range, so I had no intention of buying it, but as you do (if you’re as nosy as me), I went and looked at the pictures online to see what the house looked like inside, and more to the point, the garden.

The house was gorgeous, but I was slightly disappointed by a fairly bland garden. A vast area of grass with a border here or there, mostly for shrubs, and a few trees dotted around. It looked as though more effort had gone into constructing a large bird feeder than any growing of flowers. I imagined how much time and effort they must put into just mowing all that grass, but I guess not all of us are gardeners. What struck me the most though, as I was going through the photos, was an aerial view, that showed not only this garden, but a few others along the same road including mine. My garden was like the size of your little finger compared to the garden of the house for sale, which was the size of your entire hand.

I’ve often thought I’d love to have a bigger garden, and I still would, but the idea of owning this particular garden freaked me out. Okay, in an ideal world I’d be retired from work and would have all the time in the world to spend in the garden, but even so, do I really want a vast space like this? What would I do with it all? How would I manage it? I certainly wouldn’t want to be mowing all that grass, it would be very tiresome, but turning it all into flower borders would be a huge amount of work too. Maybe a large pond? But that’s something that has to be managed and maintained as well. I guess I’d leave a certain amount to growing wildflowers, let nature have its way, maybe below the trees, which I’d hope were fruit trees. Okay, so I spent way too much time looking at this garden and imagining what I’d do with it – don’t tell me you haven’t done the same at some point – but it made me seriously question whether I’d really want a big garden. And then I came across the above quote by Gertrude, and I thought, yes, she’s absolutely right.

Back up the road to my tiny patch. Sandwiched between a large potting/storage shed at the top (which is paved alongside) and my garden office down the bottom end, is a space around 20m x 3m. It was mostly laid to lawn when I bought the house in 2007, a single border down one side was home mostly to daffodils and forget-me-nots. I wasted no time in digging out a border along the other side, and filling it with all the spares that mum could give me from her garden. It looked pretty neat and tidy for a while, but over the years I have crammed more and more into this space, and what was originally a lawn down the middle, quickly turned into a grassy path, and that path has slowly become narrower and narrower as the flower borders on either side have widened. Roses and shrubs such as Euonymus have grown bigger and wider, a smoke bush on one side has now grown up and over to touch branches with a Ceonothus on the other side, creating a natural archway, and the borders are now home to much taller and bushier perennials such as giant scabious and globe thistles, along with phloxes, perennial foxgloves and michaelmas daisies, everything growing tall to try and outcompete everything else. So walking through my garden now is an immersive experience like pushing your way through a green tunnel.

The view from my garden office back towards the house.

The aerial photo I mentioned earlier, struck me not only by how small my garden is, but also by how green and lush it is. You can’t actually see any grass path from above, it just looks like a mini self-contained wilderness, which I guess is what it is. But you know what? I bloody love it, despite or maybe because of its wildness. I know I have probably planted way more than a garden of that size should by rights contain, but I have spent very little money on it. A lot of plants came originally from mum's garden, from the discount counters at garden centres, from the local market, and mostly from propagating the existing plants. I have (I think) 8 sedums that all came originally from one plant, and the same goes for hardy geraniums and day lilies. Other plants propagate themselves without my help – Red Valerian, Fleabane, Feverfew, and the original forget-me-nots which now have a job to muscle their way back in each year, but they find every nook and cranny and neglected pot.

To recreate a similar lush wilderness on a much, much larger scale would be very hard work, be very expensive and be years in the making. Even then, I’m just not sure it would be physically possible, as the space would be too open. I guess I would attempt to break it down into a series of smaller gardens, but oh the work it would take to manage it all. 

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have that large garden, and I’ll find a way to make it work for me, in a very different way. For now though, my little oasis is just enough for me, and I suddenly no longer envy the big garden. As they say - the grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it.

Thanks for reading Garden Bliss. I hope you enjoy these posts. The illustrations contained in them are all done by me (not AI). If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee here which will be very much appreciated. I also have a shop on Etsy called Zoe’s Garden Prints that you might like to mooch through, or you can like and share this post, it all helps.