A friend once came across a seedling she didn’t recognise in her garden. This often happens in gardens. I have no idea where my dark-red hollyhocks or the pure white aquilegia, which appear every year by the side of the mower bay, blew in from. They are happy accidents.
Gardens are made of such happy accidents. Anything you actually meant to grow, and spent far too much money on after going crazy with the seed catalogue, will probably be doomed to failure. I let things self-seed, which means that you have, at the end of summer, a garden made up of sticks. But it’s worth a bit of scruffiness for all those free plants in place of expensive packets of seed.
My friend was very excited about her stray seedling. It could turn out to be something spectacular. She cosseted it, and fed it, and peered at it, frequently. Her seedling grew like a triffid. Then it flowered. It was a weed.
She was miffed. She posted a picture of the bloody thing on social media, along with the story of the seedling saga. Some ninny responded with that old chestnut: “A weed is just a flower in the wrong place.” No it isn’t. It’s a bloody weed.
Ninnies are wont to quote that line, which comes from a bit of doggerel and reads in full:
A weed is a flower in the wrong place,
A flower is a weed in the right place,
If you were a weed in the right place
You would be a flower;
But seeing as you’re a weed in the wrong place
You’re only a weed –
It’s high time someone pulled you out.
My friend pulled her weed out.
Weeds, in certain circles, are the new dahlias. The certain circles are mostly posh English gardening ladies. Or lazy people. Wild gardens are the latest gardening trend, if you can call not pulling your weeds out a gardening trend. I must be terribly trendy. I have a lot of weeds. The reason, or so I claim, I have a lot of weeds is that it has been raining for a hundred years and you can’t garden in mud. Gardening in mud wrecks your soil. Or so I claim.
I might enter my weeds in next year’s Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Chelsea show. In this year’s show, a third of the competition gardens featured, you guessed it, bloody weeds. English gardening gurus Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh, in Gardeners’ World magazine, pooh-poohed the idea that weed patches posing as gardens are gardens at all.
“Puritanical nonsense,” scoffed Don. Titchmarsh wrote, “Gardening is about growing things, sowing seeds, taking cuttings and beautifying our little bit of earth to feed us body and soul.
“It is there to improve our lives and our outlook, at the same time as being hospitable to birds, bees and other forms of life.
“And yet, if you have been brainwashed by current trends, you would assume that the garden is theirs alone, and the less we interfere the better. I will have none of this.”
I will have none of this. I am all for a garden that rambles a bit (quite a bit) and I seldom use any but organic sprays. But I hate the idea that “proper” gardening – as in actual gardening – is somehow immoral. Which is what the wild-gardening gang would have us believe.
Gardening is not supposed to make us feel guilty. Gardening is supposed to make us feel happy. As Don wrote: “It is as though a so-called ‘wild’ garden that mimics natural conditions is somehow worthier and more moral than one in which mankind’s creative skills are more obviously played out.”
I once, for some unknowable reason, went to a foraging workshop. At this workshop, I (half-heartedly) joined a bunch of boringly earnest urban hippies. We wandered about paddocks, pretending to be ruminants, munching on weeds. Predictably, they all tasted disgusting.
I should have gone to the garden centre and bought more dahlias. They are very hospitable to earwigs.
