When you inherit a new garden, it’s always a good idea to spend the first year seeing what emerges. The tally in my last garden never got much beyond the small oak tree, the four shrubs, three herbaceous perennials and a patchy lawn that I found when I first moved in. The previous owners had clearly not been keen gardeners and I looked forward to the challenge of a blank slate.
Digging into the heavy clay soil revealed more clues about who’d lived there before. I found pieces of lego, rusty nails and broken china. My best find was two fragments of a willow pattern plate depicting a pair of birds in flight. I kept them on my windowsill wondering about their significance and struck by the luck of finding the two pieces together.
Years later I am getting to know another garden. This time there are lots of plants – both thriving and struggling from years of neglect. Keeping track of what’s growing here is proving more complex and it’ll be a while before I’m ready to start digging.
I had always thought the painted birds were swallows, but I recently found out that they are in fact doves. I was somehow disappointed about that discovery until some other swallows found me – real ones sweeping above the chaos of my new garden.
What’s planted in a garden is, of course, a gardener’s major focus. But gardens are also shaped by so much more – by people, by wildlife and the occasional hidden treasure linking one garden to the next.
