Amateur Gardening will celebrate its 140th birthday this year and I’m proud to have contributed to its pages for 25 years. In that time, our children have grown up, my parents who helped in the garden have passed on and I’m not as limber as I used to be.
Everyone has their own gardening style and looking back, mine has come full circle. My childhood garden was a ‘private, personal wilderness’ to quote William Robinson and I can remember primroses, forget-me-nots, lily of the valley and bearded iris free-growing. I made a ‘spider farm’, hatched caterpillars into moths and butterflies and rescued unwantedperiod where I enthusiastically collected difficult and unusual plants such as Chilean flame nasturtium and Blue Himalayan poppies, only to watch them slowly but surely die. In the 1990’s we cottoned on to the ‘right plant, right place’ philosophy just in time to colonise the dry, sandy soil of our Surrey garden with Mediterranean type plants. Here in East Devon, we hope our garden sits comfortably in its borrowed landscape of rolling hills.
