PART TWO                                                      CHAPTER SEVEN  Practicalities  Attitude Relax.  Let go, be tolerant, accept the odd holes in a hosta leaf, a few misshapen flowers.  If the hosta is destroyed by slugs, grow another in a tub where they can’t reach it, or grow something else. Don’t use words like plague, infestation, pests, horror, nuisance, don’t treat your garden as a battlefield where the fighting never stops. Don’t be seduced by...

       CHAPTER SIX                                                 Downsides of Gardening  If you don’t employ a gardener, your garden necessitates continuous toil.  Winter may provide a brief and welcome break, but there’s no such thing as sustainable gardening.  A truly sustainable garden which did its own thing would have little but ground elder, brambles and bindweed.  Even the plantless gravel gardens of Japan require constant raking and the removal of weeds which appear (where from?) with depressing inevitability.  Your designer may...

CHAPTER FIVE                                                                The Seasons  Winter Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society * stay open throughout the year, but most gardens open to the public close from September to Easter.  We only see them in their party best.  Our own gardens are the only ones we regularly see in a state of continuous change, for worse and better. In early November birch leaves still hang, like gold coins when the sun is low, and silvery when wet.   After a storm, twigs and short branches snap and...

  CHAPTER FOUR      About Trees Every garden, no matter how small, needs some verticality to break the flatness of two dimensions, and ideally this is a tree.  What is it about trees?  We relate because we both stand upright, with a trunk supporting our head and limbs.  We identify.  We can embrace them and feel reciprocal pleasure.   The aura of any place, its atmosphere, may be personified in goblins, angels, elves and demons.  More visibly, it is felt in the long silent being of trees.  The older a tree, the greater its individuality; we can sense the dryad within – is it...

CHAPTER THREE The Others Birds Birds are free as we can never be.  They soar the sky.  They blithely cross garden fences, barbed wire, prison walls, national borders and oceans.  We need birds to remind us of a liberty which, except in the mind, we have never had.  We need the dawn chorus in spring, the jabber of jackdaws, the whole orchestra of the garden. I write this having just returned from Egypt, where on ancient temples and inside tombs all manner of birds are painted and sculpted.  They are mostly gods.  Horus a sky god is a hawk, Thoth, writer and recorder, is an ibis, while the goddess...