Start, start, and start again!

Welcome to our first blogpost. This blog is aimed at people who love gardening, especially those who love plants and the challenge of growing them. Anglophone gardeners in France, the rest of Europe, and beyond - there will be something for everybody (except vegetable growers, sorry - there are limits....!) The hope is to be informative, opinionated and inspiring.

After ten years a garden should look pretty mature, but when you are gardening in retirement Mother Nature only too easily outruns you, and instead of sunning yourself on your manicured lawn you feel you should be organising tiger safaris in the savanna grass!

When the pressure is on to first get things into the ground planning often slips, while record keeping is sometimes haphazard. Always remember this simple rule: never throw any lists away! Lists, planting plans, invoices - all can help to answer the question that crops up sooner or later. You look down at a plant, the plant looks up at you, and you say to yourself - I must have planted it, but what the hell is it? It isn't just old age that leads you to be surprised at what is growing in your own back garden! Things grow at different speeds - small plants are overtaken and left languishing in semi-darkness and obscurity.

The wet spring of 2021 has made this The Year Of The Pruning Saw. There have been more savage cuts than a Tory Government Budget(!), as years of luxuriant growth are brought back under control. Re-shaping shrubs and trees has been a labour of skill and judgement, but the added bonus has been the rediscovery of buried treasures.

A wrought iron pergola ('tunnel') needed tidying up, and serious amounts of vegetation needed clearing from behind. We waded in with saw and loppers, and what should emerge from the muddle but a rose bearing this lovely flower, simple, with subtle colours, deserving to be seen and admired.

This was a clear case of I must have planted it, but what the hell is it? It must have had a label, but it was long gone - stolen by the mischievous Label Pixies that live down holes around our garden.

We eventually found it in an old invoice from David Austin Roses around 2014: this is Rosa 'Morning Mist', one of their 'English Roses' catalogue. Classy, sophisticated, slow growing - we will offer it much better care from now on, not least because it can't be replaced thanks to 'Brexit'. (What do you make of a website which offers you content in French, then tells you that thanks to Brexit they can no longer deliver to Ulster, let alone France?!)

Tomorrow the sun is going to shine, so we are going out with the saw and loppers to tackle another area of the garden: I wonder what else we'll 'discover'?