Terra Legra

I feel like a taxi driver learning The Knowledge. My head is spinning with plant names. I'm six assignments into my RHS course, and the most recent one nearly broke me. It was giving 105 examples of plants for various purposes in a garden; hedging, containers, rock gardens, all sorts... and it wasn't just plant names. No, no, it was also what site requirements, the appearance of the plant, how tall it grows, and how it can be used in a garden.  This assignment took me a good few weeks alongside occasional working-from-home, childminding over zoom, and continuing my pledge to walk 1000 miles in a year (I'm on 107 and it's only the 29 Jan!). I was totally daunted doing it - I only know what I know, I'm still very much on this learning journey. Would I be able to source these plants and do it right? The final submission was over 3,500 words and it was a beast. 8 pages! I uploaded it to the distance learning portal and felt sick with nerves about it. The other assignmen...

Last year, my kitchen and dining room in the late winter, early spring were awash with seed trays, propagators, misters, spray bottles, and pots. It was Lockdown 1™ and my wife and I were both either working from home or furloughed (we've been a combination of both since March 2020 and it's *checks watch* nearing the end of January 2021). We have always loved gardening but never dared to grow anything from seed.  Seeds were a mystery to me, that only "real" gardeners, true experts could handle. They were what my Dad collected on walks and kept in film canisters (showing my age here) or little envelopes. They were unbelievable to me: how can this dry, tiny thing become a luxuriant plant? I'd side-eye them, like, surely not? But we bit the bullet and started growing tomatoes, sweet peas, beans (French and broad), nasturtiums, calendula, and sunflowers. All of a sudden our (very tiny) kitchen and (built-for-two) dining table were cluttered and bursting with promise. ...

The soil was frozen this morning. It had been -3 overnight, and a little pail of water in my garden was frozen almost completely solid, with a handful of miniature bubbles the size of the head of a pin gurgling away under the surface when I touched it. Someone has been digging at my tulip bulbs - gah! I think it's the local squirrels. They're all very sweet and cute and Disney-ish when they're playfully scampering on my neighbour's pergola outside my kitchen window, but to see bulbs dug up, munched and cast aside has seriously irked me. I've sprinkled everything with chilli and used some ugly netting, pray for me.  I'd gone outside to do some clearing; unwanted mushrooms had sprouted in my raised beds and then flopped and turned to a black sludge. I wanted to cut back things that needed it, swipe away dead leaves and wind detritus and make way for the shoots of things to come - the dahlias, the geums, the first little promises of alliums and tulips.  It was free...

We have emerged out of the strange post Christmas limbo, where we loaf about picking at marzipan, watching films with a thousand red and cinnamon-scented candles glowing, pondering a plate of cheese at 10pm. We have emerged into what should be reality, but isn't. Phrases like "back to normal" are no longer being used - as I write, the UK is into its third lockdown. It's only day two, and there is much less of the hope of before. In March we were baking banana bread, planting seeds, doorstep chatting shielding the sun from our eyes. Now it's January and a different story. The 'new variant' (and Christmas easing) has made doing things like going into shops or getting a takeaway coffee riskier, less appealing. And it's very cold! The first few days of 2021 were drab in both national mood and weather, and for the past 48 hours I have been under a blanket, munching on leftover Christmas food, categorically not-going-running and staring out of the window at ...