Being Outside More

Another summer solstice, another year turns. Trying to avoid the heat I went out early this morning to meet a friend for coffee. When I left the house Kier Starmer was still prime minister, when I returned he was not. In past years I have conducted my own little witchy ceremonies for the summer solstice or Litha as it is known in the pagan tradition. I have slightly self-consciously woven myself a flowery garland and sat staring into the flames of a campfire in my back garden, but this year it felt ridiculous to add more heat. Instead I sat in the shade of the evening and listened to my son explain the taxonomy of plants, fresh from his first year of a biology degree. We slowly sipped some cider, as some traditions should be kept. There is such abundance in my garden right now, the cliché of a midsummer garden is a ‘riot of colour’, but that’s hackneyed, and surely too violent. Given the mood of the UK I don’t want to dwell on riotousness right now. Explosion is not much better, althou...

The sparrow gang is noisy in the overgrown hedge in my back garden. The planting is a mix of a spiky Pyracantha and two variegated Euonymus, one green and white and one yellow and green, which being evergreen glows brightly even in the depths of winter. It is the final reminder of the previous residents' choices, provides a useful barrier to the road beyond and great cover for small birds. I watch them peer out from the bush, dash across to the birdfeeder, then make a series of hops and jumps into my two fruit trees. The apple is looking particularly resplendent at the moment, freshly minted leaves and delicate five petalled blossoms, white with pink tips. We’ve had a bird feeding station in the garden since the children were small, and it’s currently positioned directly opposite the kitchen window, providing hours of entertainment whilst washing up. But now it seems that even a tube of birdseed is not a simple unalloyed public good. New advice released last week by the RSPB warns ...

  It has been a difficult day, my brain moves slowly. I am not inspired. I take myself out to the garden and wait impatiently for nature to heal me, there are enough self-help books on the subject, surely that's how this works? Come on, fill me up with awe and wonder. I'm practically drumming my fingers now. Branches in a nearby garden are flexing gracefully, welcoming the breeze. My own apple tree sits in a blaze of tulips, yellows and reds. The plum blossom is already starting to fade, brief snowy perfection last weekend, she has welcomed many bees. My thoughts spool forward and I think of summer and glossy stewed plums on my muesli, sprinkled with a hint of cinnamon and ginger. Breakfasting like a medieval lord. A collage I made in a workshop comes to mind, a headline cut from a gardening magazine that said "Tidy The Shed". When you're stuck, just do something. So I tidy the damn shed, carefully taking out all my tools: a spade, a fork, a hoe, loppers, shears, ...

This weekend I visited my parents, who live in Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City. I was reminded how refreshing it is to walk in different places, especially those which are familiar but changed. On Sunday morning we walked part of the Letchworth Greenway . It is a millennium project, put in place after I left home, so it’s not a walk I grew up with. The path is shared, mostly amicably, by walkers, runners and cyclists and is 13.6 miles long, encircling the whole town. One day I would like to walk it all, setting out early one morning in the dawn light, just for a sense of completeness. Dusty chalky soil crunches underfoot. Fields that I remember from my teenage years as being just another monoculture field of wheat or oilseed rape, are now set aside for wildlife, and the scrubland (which has an image problem, seen as scruffy, but provides vital habitat for a wide range of species) is dotted with hawthorn, blackthorn, and bramble. I half remember a quote about “the thorn is the...

Until very recently my 1970s house, with its pebble-dashed exterior and white UPVC windows, came accessorised with another suburban cliché - the leylandii hedge. Leylandii (Cupressus × leylandii) is a fast growing conifer hybrid. It is almost always sterile and so all the plants we see in garden centres  will have been propagated by cuttings. This is a plant that humans have encouraged into life, wanting a rapid thick hedge to protect from the prying eyes of the neighbours. The tallest example of this relatively young species is said to be a 40m (130ft) specimen at Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent. However, its ability to quickly reach height is also one of the downsides, with leylandii hedges often cited in disputes, including gruesomely in 2003 becoming implicated in a murder, where a man allegedly shot his neighbour after an argument about a hedge. Boundaries are touchy subjects it seems. Around the same time as these sad happenings, we were house hunting. I remember viewing ...

Being outside more connects you with the reality of the seasons. On Friday I was hit by this in a very physical way, cycling back from Grow Wilder in a steady cold rain that froze my face, made me curse that I hadn’t packed my big winter gloves or my waterproof trousers. As I gritted my teeth and pedalled on grimly, I was definitely questioning my life choices, thinking wistfully of a nice warm car. All the precious glimpses of early spring I’d been spotting during the week; bulbs blooming, blossom flushing along leafless branches, tight packed buds everywhere, seemed very far away at that point. But I am also reminded that the seasons are contextual, where my damp experience of February contrasted with my husband’s week in Montreal for work. Images shared to the family WhatsApp showed snow all around, here was the deep cold winter of fairy tales, temperatures well below zero, between -15 and -20℃. Back home in Bristol, thawing out by the heater and sharing a cup of tea with my daughte...

When I was a teenager, there was a TV programme called Ground Force, where Alan Titchmarsh and team would descend on a small garden for the weekend to spring a makeover on the surprised resident. An instant garden, revealed with a flourish in a format designed to provoke a flood of grateful weeping from the owner of the garden. Watching other people cry happy tears is apparently good telly. In reality, and in my experience, making a garden is a much slower process, and because it is something alive, it is always changing. We moved into our house over twenty years ago and it has taken time for me to feel confident that this is really my patch. For several years we lived with the garden as it was, mostly grass, a narrow pinched bed at one end with some explosive leggy Hebe. Several tall dark conifers and a tatty garden shed lurked in the sunniest part of the garden. It took me several years for me to feel brave enough to have the conifers cut down, and then to ignore the protests of my h...