Planning

I have come to the realisation in recent weeks that planning is an element of gardening that I have been severely lacking over the past year. I seem to have bungled my way through this year’s planting by guesswork. This has resulted in a number of consequences:

My Osteopermum have ended up hiding at the back of the border behind a tall Penstemon. The Osteopermum is flowering its heart out, and is a very striking colour – bright white with blue and dazzling orange centres – but we can’t appreciate them because they are hiding at the back.

The Heucheras got a lot bigger than I imagined and have dwarfed the cornflowers at the front of the border – in hindsight they should have been planted further towards the back.

Thirdly, I have completely lost my lavender bushes somewhere in amongst the Penstemon, Heucheras, Buddlejia and violas. A job I have planned for the weekend is to don my exploring kit, go in search of them and lift them out to live in pots where they should be a lot happier.

Fourthly, there is a definite absence of the colourful displays I had imagined in my head when planting up the border. I completely failed to consider flowering times when I planted any of the plants and so we have ended up with a rather unimpressive, nay dull, display so far this year. I have a feeling it will explode into colour in the next month and then fade away all at the same time. 

And lastly, I have developed a nasty habit of leaving jobs half-done. I am fairly convinced that this is down to not having any real structure to the way I work in the garden. The border is one example of this slack work ethic: I started to clear the border and plant it up with new plants but then stopped half-way through to work on the front garden. A family of mice have now moved in to the un-cleared area of the border (which the cats are taking a huge interest in) and now I feel terrible about heaving the mice out of their new home. So the border remains unfinished and unkempt looking. While the front garden (also unfinished) has half a chopped hedge in it and currently looks like no-one’s lived there for three years (in fact, I got home last night to find that someone had posted a little scrap of paper through our door which had a phone number on it and a message to call the number for rubbish clearance. Oh the shame!)

I have therefore decided that a small revolution needs to take place in my gardening diary. There needs to be structure and plans…and lists. I think a diagram or two may not go amiss either. Design is not my strong point, I’m the first to admit, but I have a feeling that if I don’t make some sort of effort to gardening slightly more intelligently and with more forethought, I might end up with a garden that is mildly boring and unimpressive, not to mention fit for the rubbish tip.