30 MINUTES AND DONE! REALLY?

By LADYBUG

I belong to the school of thought that believes there’s no such thing as a low-maintenance garden. A real garden requires effort. And time.

Thus the claim that one could enjoy a garden in just 30 minutes a day had me intrigued. And it’s like Greg Loades is addressing me when he tells gardeners to stop feeling guilty for having taken time off. Because I’m one of those who will plan their calendar around the gardening season.

But the garden will forgive you, he writes. Yes, the space is looking overgrown, yes, the weeds are crazy and all the perennials look like they need to be divided. Stat. But relax, it’ll all come under control by and by.

Our goal in becoming 30-minutes-a-day gardeners is not to make an efficient garden-maintenance regime (sounds too much like doing the dishes to me). But rather to open the door to a parallel universe that is bursting with life, to delight in the process of natural growth, and to embrace nature’s pace.

He describes his own disconnect with nature at one point in is life. 

And then shares this beautiful world view:

Adults were children.

Blooming flowers were tiny seeds.

Glorious gardens were desolate concrete.

If the last has you scratching your head a little, there are tips on growing things in cracks in the concrete or asphalt!

His tips are simple and smart, for all seasons.

Start planting before you’ve cleared the whole area. New plants can serve as encouragement if the weeds look daunting and planting some new plants in different places can help divide large areas into more manageable spaces for clearing.

Taking pictures from the same place over time helps you to see how the garden has developed and changed.

This book, like many of the best book on gardening, is written by someone who gardens in England. Where he can be out and about two weeks before Christmas, listening to the geese heading home.

My geese will be doing that soon, I might have wished to say to Loades, had I approached this book like one is supposed to, from the beginning. But instead of starting there and waiting for the book and my seasons to meld as I normally do, I start with the section on fall.

And discover a whole new way of looking at my garden.

For while “fall is the time when some plants run out of steam and are cleared away” – well, all my plants run out of steam, but that’s another story – it is also the time when we plants bulbs and dream of another season in our gardens. And Loades shows you ways to do that efficiently, while enjoying the beauty around us.

There are plenty of articles and books on how to get rid of weeds, or at least wrestle them into control.

A few contain information on “useful” weeds, but a whole book dedicated to “A celebration of wild plants is rare”.

“As an illustrator primarily and now an allotment holder, I have gradually become increasingly interested in the weeds that grow on and around my plot, rather than the conventional cultivated vegetables and plants,” writes Paul Farrell. He ascribes our unwillingness to embrace weeds to our having abandoned nature in order to control our environment.

Weeds transform degraded environments into valuable habitats, he writes. And then there’s the undeniable fact that our most common weeds are wild herbs, many with medicinal or nutritional value.

Farrell lists edible weeds, among them those that I have diligently been pulling out for years: Chickweed, nettle and broadleaf plantain.

And then in an interesting flipping of the narrative, under weeds for wildlife, he lists “weeds” that occupy pride of place in my garden beds, many of them purchased from nurseries and others acquired from friends.

Bluebell, daisy, dog rose, feverfew, foxglove, poppy, rose campion, yarrow...

I think of another, sea campion, the plant with its pretty little flowers that bloom long with a little deadheading. Soon after I picked up a plant at a nursery, I spotted huge swaths of it growing wild by a camping site. Like a weed.