The Wrong Kind of Advertisement for a Gardener
I live in a flat or what in my more pretentious moments I call a maisonette where the front garden is owned by my downstairs neighbour. I have a low maintenance exotic garden at the back but the sheer lack of effort that goes into the front garden is a constant source of annoyance to me.
My neighbour is one of those people that absolutely hates gardening. This is partly because she has extremely bad hay fever but it is not that she dislikes the idea of physical work or getting her hands dirty. In fact, I don’t think she can see any point in gardening even if she had a gardener to do the hard work for her. I find this antagonism to nature very confusing. When my own health and happiness are so profoundly based on my relationship with the natural world I don’t understand how someone can completely shun such a beautiful and rewarding phenomenon.
Her idea of gardening is to get out the roundup twice a year during the summer and really drench the weeds in her front garden. I’ve tried to explain that we could cover the soil with a mulch to prevent the weeds but my pleas have fallen on deaf ears as the garden remains resolutely bare half the year and covered in weeds for the other half.
In my more sardonic moments I have considered asking her whether she was conducting a scientific experiment to see which weeds grew on her bare patch of garden rather like Charles Darwin’s famous weed garden at Downe House in Kent. I suspect saying something like that would signal an end to my hopes of ever seeing the front garden look half decent in the next decade at least….
The Ultimate Cottage Gardener Plant
I realized that when I wrote my first book of snippets in which one vignette described Cottage gardens I failed to mention the ultimate Cottage garden plant- the hollyhock.
I got my first introduction to hollyhocks when I used to bicycle past one of our neighbours, Colonel Hamer’s garden in Old Hunstanton, Norfolk. He was something of a pioneer in terms of guerrilla gardening because he had planted hollyhocks along the wall on the other side of the road from his garden on the flint wall that separated the church yard from the road.
The hollyhocks always seemed to thrive and grew very big ( perhaps 3-4 feet but they always seemed much bigger back then!).They flowered prodigiously during my summer holidays and were something of a feature of my return journey by bicycle from buying sweets at the village shop in Ringstead.
Actually, although I would not be as uncharitable as to say it was purely down to luck that the hollyhocks flourished; in all fairness they do seem a very temperamental plant sometimes thriving on neglect and sometimes dying suddenly even when under the care of quite experienced and talented gardeners.
Anyway, the flowers are quite blousy and brightly coloured and so are a natural fit for a Cottage garden plant. Despite my preference as a gardener being more for foliage in the form of exotic gardens I still have a fondness for the hollyhock and that is mainly based on the happy memories of those summer holidays when I zoomed past Colonel Hamer’s hollyhocks as they gently swayed in the breeze….
Cow pasture Lane
When I read Roger Deakin’s description of the lane that runs from his house on Mellis Common to Thornham Parva church in Suffolk in his book ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm’ I was immediately interested. The name alone conjures up the rural ideal I am always searching for in England and which is alas, sadly lacking due to our population density and all the services we demand to make ourselves comfortable.
But his description of the lane was so lyrical and his commitment to it so passionate that I felt almost as though he was completely in love with Cow pasture lane. Which of course he was- Roger fought tooth and nail to save the complex habitat that had evolved around the lane when it was threatened. He had been so successful that more trees had be planted to extend it right up to the Norwich to London railway line that bisects the lane before it reached his house.
I know this because I went to have a look in September 2020. Although I would have loved to have gone in the spring and seen Roger’s beloved primroses and cowslips that he bemoaned the temporary loss of…. autumn was an equally good time to go because nature’s harvest of seed and fruit was being consumed by the huge numbers of birds, mammals and insects that sung and buzzed through the fattened hedgerows in chorus to their benefactor, Roger. Now it’s me who is romanticizing nature!
Roger died of a brain tumour in 2006 in his sixties so he was no longer at Walnut Tree Farm but some friends of his son have taken it over and the fattened hedgerows, Gipsy caravan and other charming outbuilding remain although it will cost you £100 a night to stay in them.
That being said that corner of South Norfolk and North Suffolk has escaped the smartness of the North Norfolk coast and Suffolk coast and the tackiness around Great Yarmouth and when combined with its soft and unspoilt countryside I could completely see why Roger chose it as a place to settle and almost escape the excesses of the outside world.
It was a pleasant escape for me from the pandemic of 2020 to wander along the peaceful, wooded lane having parked in the car park for Thorham Parva church. This church is definitely one of the most beautiful in Suffolk if not East Anglia and I had a pleasant introduction to it a few winters ago when I arrived to watch an impromptu snow flurry settle briefly on the thatched roof and churchyard’s yew trees. Anyway, having walked through the Thornham Magna estate I arrived at Cow pasture lane which is an old Drovers’ track which explains why the flora around it was left undisturbed for so long. This is because like railway sidings you cannot use all the land for farming or houses right up to a track or road. Curiously, there was a sign forbidding the use of a horse and cart on the track which made me wonder if there were Gipsies in these parts half-remembering Roger’s fond description of the nearby Bungay Horse Fair of the seventies. The distance from the church to Mellis Common must be no more than a couple of miles and it was a pleasant wander, nicely tucked away and few people about so I definitely shall be returning to observe and marvel at the contrast in the seasons on Cow pasture lane in the future.
A gardener out of this world 