Gardening Without Moving

Part One

Falling in love is often unexpected. Even more so when a former plant witherer falls in love with gardening...but can't actually garden.

Well, I'd like to qualify that statement for starters because since I ejected the word can't from my vocabulary I've surprised myself with the number of things I actually can do.

Gardening without moving is about time, patience, imagination and design. It is not about digging, sweating and swearing. I suppose, ill health aside, I'm more into the design side of things, and always was. So not being able to move much doesn't stop me from enjoying my new hobby.

We've lived here for over two years now. And as soon as I saw the garden I knew I had to do something about it. What started as an urge to create a space for myself and my son has become a true love. And yet, we're renting! And many people say "What's the point?"



In the past when I have rented I've agreed with this, largely because I had other (and I thought better) things to do. And yet this time, something was different. I suppose time was the largest factor. Months when I couldn't do anything else but watch Gardener's World (the most non-threatening TV there is) or dip into books. Hours and hours just dreaming and researching, learning about plants.

No one had touched 'our' garden for years prior to us moving in and at first you couldn't even tell where it started and where it ended. We discovered a greenhouse after saving up for some serious clearance to be done and things kind of went from there.



We ended up freecycling the old greenhouse as it was beyond my capabilities to repair it, and replaced it. The picture above shows sweet peas, one of my first attempts at growing stuff in year one.



There are of course, varying degrees of committment that can be applied to doing up a garden. On moving here, I could have contented myself with getting the hedges cut and installing a few tubs of daffs.



But no. Having watched all those experts on TV, and read so many books I felt I wanted to do more...