Spasmodic Gardener

Last Saturday some sunlight having appeared I went out into the garden and started doing the jobs that the prudent gardener does throughout the dark months and which fair weather gardeners do in a scramble at the last minute.

My garden is small:-

I measured it from side to side
It’s 9 yards long, and 6 yards wide

with an extra chunk by the back door 5 yards by 2, where the wheelie bins, flower pots and other utilitarian objects live.

It’s in Edinburgh, and its aspect is to the north-west, so it remains sunless for about 4 months of the year. This day, the first Saturday in March, the sun was lying uselessly on roofs of adjoining houses and sheds, on the neighbour’s garden, which he strims once a year and that is the extent of his gardening, so it’s wasted on him, and was touching my garden at its very edge for about 3 hours, leaving most of it in shade. When I stand up I get that early spring sense of the sun warming you between your shoulder blades and that the next few months are going to be on your side.

I am Incapability Bell when it comes to gardening – as I plant some bare root stock roses that arrived 10 days ago in the wind and rain I note:-

the roses were supposed to be taken straight out of their packet; and

the holes were supposed to be prepared with well rotted compost and bone meal some time before planting.

I have done neither of those tasks. I do have compost though, in an old rubbish bin where I chucked in weeds a year or two ago and amazingly, they have composted and the compost is dark, loose and smells earthy.

I also prune – and it is a miracle – that that clematis that I am cutting down to stalks a foot long as I did last year grows 12 feet and has been tapping fronds on the upstairs flat’s window. The fern that is brittle and brown and I thought was dead grew happily through the summer. I don’t know whether those Scotch thistles are meant to look like they have been through a nuclear blast, whether they are dead or dormant.

With gardening, as with other things, the joy of it is seven tenths journey and three tenths destination. The final result may be fat beans and perfumed sweet peas but the seeds, the secateurs and all the hopes that accompany the planting and clipping are what makes gardeners happy, even spasmodic gardeners such as I am.