I've never liked being out in the garden that I can recall. Maybe when I was very young and we had a dog to play with and swings and slides, or booting a football against a wall or something. But, in general, playing outside meant that hay fever kicked my ass on a regular basis. If you've never had the joy of that, let me tell you that it's no fun at all.
At the basic level, it's mild headaches, runny noses, and sneezing. If it gets worse, then it'll hit your eyes - itchy, streaming eyes at first but then they go all puffy and sore and red and you can't see any more. Yeah, they gave me a bunch of drugs to manage them (beconase inhalers, triludan - stuff that was later deemed unsafe for use in children just to add a little extra to things) but there's only so much they can do before they basically give up. The eye drops were the thing I remember detesting the most - stinging little dollops of pain, but at least it meant I could see again for a while.
For me, those long, hot summers people wax rhapsodic about were basically the equivalent of having a dose of flu. My only respite was in winter when the pollen didn't attack me or during torrential rain, so that quickly became my favourite season and my favourite weather. I never really learned to love the garden, or the outside in general, and I basically lived with my beconase inhaler within reach at all times.
My dad was out in the garden quite a bit - digging holes, planting stuff, and forever mowing the lawn. He has hay fever as well, but I don't remember it bothering him as much. It's fair to say that as I grew older, the symptoms got milder (and I learned to avoid gardens as much as I could and to wear sunglasses a lot more often) so maybe it was just because he was older.
Back then, the style of gardens was lots of lawn with borders around the edges and a patio near the house. That was about it. Grass everywhere. That meant lawn mowing, and that meant being stuck behind a lawn mower spewing out grass and pollen right into my face. That probably didn't help the hay fever at all.
My nan, on the other hand, had a yard backing onto an alley. No grass to be seen at all. My nan loved flowers, and despite having very little space she still managed to create herself a little oasis of calm - a bistro table, a couple of chairs, and some flowers in little borders and baskets and trailing up a trellis or two.
A picture of my nan's garden
But still, that whole gardening thing was not for me. When it came time to buy my first house, not having a garden to look after was very much a positive - and our first house was a flagged yard with a brick-build goldfish pond in it and nothing else. Neither my wife nor myself cared one iota for gardening. I tried finding a photo, but the only one I have is as a blurry background while taking a picture of a shattered double-glazing panel. That kinda says everything about how much I cared about gardens back then if you ask me. But something started to change a little bit for my wife when we moved to a new house that actually had something of a garden, and we had children of our own. My mother-in-law is a very keen gardener and that seemed to rub off on my wife as she tried to create a space for the girls to play in. The previous occupant was a keen gardener, and there were some lovely plants that we determined to keep alive. I also got into keeping an aquarium, and kept a blackwater tank with live plants in it. It was a bit like having an underwater garden, I guess, but having the tank and watching the fish swimming around and the shrimp romping through the planting was lovely.
My wife and her mother started to go to the Gardener's World shows at the NEC, and we started to have the odd weekend family trip to various nearby stately homes with attached gardens and nurseries. Each year, they'd tack on another day at the show, then stay overnight, then finally they went VIP. We started doing one or two RHS shows, and as the girls got a little more interested I found myself picking things up through a sort of process of osmosis. We started doing little bits of construction work in the garden - building a retaining wall to replace one that was a couple of slabs and starting to fail, replacing the rotten edging with sleepers for a cleaner look, and putting in a play house for the girls. That side of things was something I could definitely get my teeth into, and meant that I could share in my wife's interest. More importantly to me, though, it meant that I could try to give my wife a garden space where she could sit and relax (even if I didn't want that for myself) and where my girls could play.
Our first garden, complete with a scattering of children's toys
Then, we discovered a TV show called Garden Rescue - and, suddenly, I had an angle on the garden that I understood. I realised that the whole washing machine garden with lawn in the middle and everything else thrown out to the edges wasn't the only option. I could see gardens where the lawn wasn't the dominating element - or, in some cases, even present at all. I was hooked. I could see the thought processes behind the garden designs, and I started to plot out what I'd want to do with a garden given carte blanche. I also started to think a lot more about wildlife and trying to encourage more of it to visit and stay in the garden. The show showed me different types of planting schemes so I started researching and reading up a bit so that I could understand it all better. I started to watch Gardener's World with my wife, and any other gardening shows we could find.
We briefly ended up in a rental house where the garden was utterly infested with horsetail, but we did what we could while we were in there. We went to various shows and gardens and I started paying more attention to interesting flowers in various shades and shapes that I found myself actively liking. In the end, I bought blue spiky round ball called echinops ritro and I was on the path to gardening. The rental house saw us keeping our plants in pots so we could take them with us, but there was a glorious riot of day lilies at the back, an overgrown pond that we started rescuing, and a mad scattering of agapanthus that meant it was a nice place to be. With my new-found interest in garden design and a bunch of books from the library, I started to think about what sorts of things I would do with the garden.
The rental garden after some tidying up - note the patch of grass left long for wildlife
Three years ago, we bought a new house and in the process we inherited a garden. The previous owner had been a keen gardener by all accounts, and was fiercely proud of his immaculate lawn - but a hot and dry summer in a south-facing garden with no lawn maintenance meant that it was basically a brown ruin. The shrubs and planting around the edges survived just fine, but the poor lawn was a wasteland. That, though, was just the opportunity I wanted.
I still hated gardening, but now it was a necessary evil to get to the point where we could have a nice garden. Sure, we had no budget thanks to buying a house and the garden needed work to get it to a baseline state where we could see what we had and I didn't have the faintest clue what I was doing. But hey, I'd watched a few TV shows and read some books and that was enough for me to take a stab at it. I mean, how badly could I possibly screw it up?
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