My Secret Garden

I have a recurring dream. It first began with me opening a door to new rooms in a house strangely familiar. A suite of new expansive rooms. Long unknown. Undiscovered. But lately I dream of finding a door to a small bountiful garden.

A miniature landscape without people and without restriction.

I came to gardening late. Already in my forties. I moved from rented flat to rented flat in my twenties and thirties.  Seldom having access to more than a balcony - jammed cheek by jowl with multicoloured terracotta pots. Or a precariously positioned window box balancing the prerequisite red geranium, a splash of colour in the monotone of London’s industrial skyline. A welcome and necessary distraction.

I always longed for a garden of my own. Love aside it has been the most consistent of my desires.

And somehow, I always knew, when the time was right, I would be a gardener.

We finally moved to Surrey eight years ago where I came to own my very first garden; an awkward West-facing tick-shaped space. And through the highs of lows of becoming a mother, lockdowns, joys and loss it has become my sanctuary. My escape and my adventure playground.

And never more so than in early Summer.  

It’s June. The most hopeful month of the gardening calendar year. June raises from the ashes, phoenix-like from Winter’s gloom. Triumphant in success. Stronger and more powerful than ever before. June is reparation. June is abundance. June is full of endless possibility.

In my dream it’s always early June.  

The skies seem to attach more light now. Waves of virtuous light.

Like the enigmatic door of my dreams, I enter the garden through the redwood gate as if it were a portal into another dimension.

I follow a sun deprived concrete path beside an old stone wall adorned with purple Wall Bellflowers. And from here, like Mary Lenox in the Secret Garden, I become a very different girl.  

No schedule. No particular plan. Here only nature defines success. Control reframed. We train, we frame, we tame. We nurture. We invest. We wait. We watch and we marvel.

For my little garden unfolds. It twists and meanders. Tightens and expands.

The wall latticed sweet jasmine and streams of rigorous ivy. Tall, graceful verbena. The purple haze of the camassia. The blousy pink and purple petunia. The aptly named perennial salvia ‘Hot Lips’. The little purple trumpets of the agapanthus. Gentle waves of pink, purple and white geranium. The resplendent dogwood I have grown from a cutting. Wispy grasses. Blowsy zinnias and dainty cosmos with their silky petals. The bold rich golden rudbeckia. The now netted juicy red strawberries, manna for the squirrels.

The first showing of the almost prehistoric spiky Eryngium, the plant which thrives in sun drenched, dry earth in our exposed front garden, turning the heads of every passer-by.

The steady buzz of busy bees. The resplendent orchestra of bird song. Here beneath the lush green canopy treetops, the dark days of Winter are a distant memory.

And there are roses! I don’t believe it’s possible to have too many roses. Tough and resilient to changing climates. Be My Valentine red, Lovely Lady pink, Crème de la Crème yellow. They burst into life with their heady sweet scent; they give, and they give all Summer long.

I have made all the mistakes in the book in this small garden. And it’s not really mine at all. I am just the caretaker. With every season of my eight-year stewardship, I have gradually increased the size of the flower beds leaving an ever-shrinking patch of mossy lawn which, by July, is a dust bowl of scorched earth before becoming home to the annual invasion by industrious ground bees creating a labyrinth of miniature volcano-shaped holes. Before the Autumn rain replenishes and revives.

I share my little horticultural oasis with a bold and inquisitive robin. He cocks his head and watches me closely, waiting for me to pass him a juicy worm. We work as one as if it has always been so.

“The robin is a friend of the gardener; with its bright and cheerful song it lifts spirits high. The robin, natures messenger, brings hope to you and I” wrote Louisa Jeffrey.

I dream of owning a grand Victorian style greenhouse like Monty Don with nightlights for evening pottering. Or even just a small potting shed to extend the gardening year.

But always the dreamer, I patrol my garden as through it were Kew itself. My inscribed leather gardening belt slung over my hips, secateurs and trowel holstered, John Wayne style. Knelt beside my little potting steps, now resplendent with hopeful seedlings almost ready to make their own way in the world. Here anything is possible, as if I were Capability Brown himself.

It matters not that I rarely have more than an hour to spare. Sometimes first thing in the morning before the family awake when the snail patrol is on the march. Or at dusk while the bats encircle, swopping, driving, darting.

Here time sweeps me up and carries me with its natural rhythm and flow. Just being here is timeless and limitless in equal measure.

No matter the trials and tribulations of daily life, the horticultural embrace is transcendental. I defy anyone to be grumpy when you are elbow deep in potting compost.

Here there is acceptance and relief. Growth and abundance.

‘If you look the right way you can see the whole world in a garden,’ wrote Frances Hodgson in her 1911 novel.

Even the humblest of gardens urge us to cultivate kindness as a perennial bloom. Gardening gives us perspective. It allows us to appreciate the seasonal beauty that nature gives us. Beauty in the rich diversity of life. Gardening must come from the heart or it will never reach the head. Gardening, surrendering of perfection.

Every garden is a work in progress. Always changing. It can always get better and often gets worse. Being part of that change is sweet surrender.

Life is short and absurd and coursed in pleasure and pain. But even in the face of real suffering, gardening makes even the dullest days shine with joy.