Being Outside More

I have dragged my laptop out into the garden, it is a beautifully blue-skied sunny day, the kind of Easter Monday you hope for but so rarely arrives. My houseplants are having a holiday on the patio in front of me, earlier I topped them up with compost and watered them thoroughly. They are jostled by unexpected breezes, a new reality for them. Inside the house my daughter is planning complicated baking, there are plans for afternoon tea. When I asked the children at work what happens at Easter, I was met with a chorus of “chocolate!”. We are a resolutely secular household, but the break from work and study is welcome. Easter weekend feels like a much more low pressure festival than Christmas, my son is back from university and we’re enjoying having him home. Good food has been eaten and I have performed the traditional ritual of visiting a garden centre and daydreaming in an aisle of seed packets, so much possibility and hope. In ALDI I bought a cheerful strip of bedding plants, jewel ...

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...