27/06/2024
This corner of my garden has been weighing on my mind. Last year I took out a huge leylandii that had taken over the rockery, carefully pulled out reams of ground elder with its tiny white annoying roots, and prepared the soil for my big plans to plant it up with considered plants and herbs.
And then, as it does, life happened. While life was happening to me, it was also slowly creeping back to the rockery. To my dismay, the ground elder came back with a vengeance; my carefully tilled soil was overcome with wild campanula and sticky willow.
The stress I felt while watching this happen without the time or energy to fix it grew with each rainy day last month. Until the sun came out, and with hoe in hand I walked to the sad corner to get started.
But then I looked at the chaos in the sunshine and started to see it differently. I had let the ground elder go to flower as all good gardeners shouldn’t, but it was beautiful.
Ox eye daisys, foxgloves, feverfew, creeping buttercups and ferns, wild geranium, campanula bells of all colours, even the sticky willow had tiny flowers; the wild campanula had grown up the wall to cheer up the ivy. The rhubarb is so big it made me feel like Alice in my very own wonderland.
So I made an arrangement out of the wildness, I took out my earbuds and swapped my self help podcast for birdsong, I found all the beauty in a place I thought was ruined by neglect. And I realised that my friends have been right all along: release control, RELAX, let it happen. Abundance is there for the taking.
