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| One of the last pictures I took at Montpelier Cottage. Late September. |
“I felt so shocked I shut the computer right away and could not get over the news ” wrote a friend when she read my email
telling her that we were planning to move. It has of course been a
very difficult decision, perhaps the most difficult of my life. So
many people who come to visit or stay remark how lovely it is, not
the garden so much as the setting (a shallow valley, with woods on
one side and no sign of human habitation) or if they mean the garden
it is clear that they mean it in its rural setting. “Paradise” is
the word often used. So how can we bear to leave?
Paradise of course is
precisely that, a non-earthly place, where the garden-of-Eden
maintenance was presumably done by angels, or some of the clouds of
cherubs which infest Baroque churches. Earthly paradises are hard
work. People have often wondered at how I have been able to juggle my
varied, disparate and complex workload and garden. The answer is that
I have been increasingly unable to; we have had a wonderful
one-day-a-week gardener, Diana Sessarego, but I really needed more of
her time to really achieve what I wanted, or someone else's, and we
couldn't afford that.
Back last June, I wrote a blog post which
flagged up our moving plans. We have now made the painful wrench,
renting the house to a friend until we decide what to do. We are in
for a year of travelling - a trip to New Zealand and Australia,
culminating in my doing a presentation for the biennial Australian
landscape conference. The rest of the year, I will be in Portugal for
much of the time, which indeed is where I am writing this. As flagged
up in June, we are seriously considering moving ourselves here.
“Life, and parties
are best left too early than too late” is something that I read
recently. I would add gardens. In my career of garden journalism, I
have all too often visited gardens where the owners have clearly been
unable to manage what they originally set out, or had simply
over-extended themselves. I have usually found these quite depressing
places. Reality unable to match the dream. Only rarely do gardens
manage a dignified retreat. In truth, given my main focus being the
naturalistic, I could probably do just this, and find it a very
interesting and satisfying process. But I, or I should say we to include Jo,
do not want to.
I am in many ways an
experimental gardener, interested in how plants work, and work
together. Once a certain point has been reached, things begin to
plateau out: I feel as if I am learning less every year. I'd like to
move on to new things. And new plants of course; there is always the
plantsman-thrill of trying new plants and there is nothing like being
in a new place for having to try new plants simply because of it
being a different environment. At a time of changing climates and
weird weather, it is important to learn more about drought,
resilience to extremes, heat tolerance. Which is part of the thinking
about spending some time in a Mediterranean climate.
We've had friends
round to dig plants up, particularly rarer varieties which I worry
may be lost to commercial cultivation, apart from it just being nice
to share plants. I've also been able to distribute plants for some
research plots, versions of the plots I have had for the last seven
years and which have been a great way to trial plant combinations and
learn more about how plants survive and interact over time. That has
been a very positive outcome of moving, and the idea of trying to
recruit other gardeners into running trial plots as a way of
documenting what we learn about plants is something which I think I
may well devote quite a bit of time to over the next few years.
Another reason for
moving, or even forcing myself to move, is that staying in one place
is actually quite limiting. One tries to grow Dicentra a few times,
they fail every time, conclude that the soil is unsuitable and that's
it, you don't try them again, so we never get to enjoy Dicentra or
learn any more about it. Geranium endressii and its pink pals all
grow like crazy in Herefordshire, that for me is 'the normal', and
so much gardening has to revolve around how to manage or make the
most of these plants; that they may not do so well elsewhere becomes
a rather alien concept – but that will be the norm for others.
Gardeners have traditionally very much been people who have stayed in
one place, but as someone who has become a globally-orientated
teacher of gardening and related skills, staying in one place has
become to seem dangerously limiting. One of the biggest problems in
garden writing I think has been the assumption that because it works
for me, it must work for everybody, so that's what I'm going to
recommend, and drone on about it all the magazine articles and books
I write. This way we do not learn but spread self-centred myths.
There is something to
be said for getting down on hands and knees in lots of other peoples'
gardens, appreciating how plants grow in many different places rather
than endlessly in one's own. It sounds like I am arguing for a future
rather peripatetic existence of poking around other peoples' gardens.
For how long I would actually do this before succumbing to the
inevitable temptation of wanting my own plot again I don't know. I
suspect probably not that long. We shall just have to see.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I shall be back in England in September, leading a tour of Devon gardens. If you are potentially interested do drop me an email on: noelk57@gmail.com
