Tarting up in vain

yes I tweeted this pic the other day, but my camera's broke so I couldnt take a new one

One of the reasons I havent been blogging much recently is that I have been spending every spare moment of every day on tarting up. Not tarting up of the nail-painting, waxing and weaving* (google it, menfolk) variety, but of the mowing, weeding and mulching kind. No significant planting or re-shaping, just trying to make the very best of what I’ve got, every evening, all weekends. The reason was a visit from local NGS ladies Su and Jane, coming to assess my garden to see if it’s good enough put in the yellow book and open next year. I purposely didn’t tell any one they were coming in case they said no, but now that they have (said no) I find – slightly perversely – that I want to tell you about it.

I’m not quite sure why I was so gutted. I suppose opening your garden for the NGS is a right of passage for any gardener, but takes on an extra layer for a garden writer. It proves that you are not just sitting in a bed sit copying and pasting stuff off of the RHS website, that you are actually doing it and have something to show. In truth there was also a gardeny-writery-competitive element to it: Martyn Cox does it, so I wanted to do it too.  So the ladies came. They were properly lovely, not at all the scary dragons NGS ladies are made out to be. They were encouraging and interested in the ideas and it all seemed to be going swimmingly until my: ‘So, what do you think?’ was met by a long silence. I kind of knew what was coming.

It wasnt a ‘No, never’ sort of a no, more of a ‘well there’s lots of access problems to sort out, and the garden is quite young, and you would need to find other gardens in the area’ sort of a no. I thought all this could be done in a year. They didn’t.

Down but not out, I have contacted Transition Bristol to see if they would like to do an open day here instead. Transition groups are the people who are trying to find small, local ways (as well as big, nationwide ways) of lowering dependence on oil and as such are fairly likely to appreciate my efforts, if that doesn’t sound too self-aggrandizing. It makes many things easier in that they are already aware of the eco-issues and the arguments (and are unlikely – if they don’t mind me saying – to have quite as high gardening standards as Su and Jane) and it means showing the garden to a very receptive audience. I really hope it comes off. But I suppose I am a bit of an evangelist at heart and I wanted to have your normal (ha!) gardeners come round – those that havent even thought about avoiding chemical fertilisers or forest gardening or whatever – and show THEM that a garden can be both eco and lovely. But it’s just not lovely enough, it seems.

*Since writing this post it has been brought to my attention, by Alys Fowler, no less, that I really meant threading. Weaving is a way of adding hair to the head, threading is a mysterious technique for the removal of hair and I still dont know how it works. However Ms Fowler suggests that it is ‘rather effective and possibly the most environmentally friendly’ hair removal technique. You see, we have the finest hair removal consultants on Midnight brambling…