The First Years in the Garden | The Second Year

The first year in my garden had been a success. Would the garden have won any awards? No, but the weeds had been cleared (one border thick with buttercups, pretty but very invasive) and the annuals I had sown had put on a good show. It just goes to show what you can achieve when all I had done was to buy a few packets of seed at random just because I liked the look of the pictures, not even taking much note of the height and spread. The praise of the neighbours had carried me into the second year full of enthusiasm.

I made the decision to concentrate on one of the long borders and the first problem encountered was the soil quality. It was clay and, although fertile, in the hot summer of the first year had baked hard and cracked.

The first step was to dig it over and I did not even try to break up the resulting clods. In my weekly garden magazine that had become my bible there had been a product heavily advertised and endorsed that allegedly helped to break down the soil structure.

It was many years ago but I seem to remember the white powder was appropriately named Breakthrough. What was the magic powder you ask? Not a clue, I sprinkled that powder over the lumps of clay and added a mulch of peat on the top. I joined a garden society and they had a very cheap source of supply. Remember this was many years ago before the use of peat was frowned upon.

The border was not touched at all over winter but early the following spring I forked it over and raked it down to a fine tilthe. The resulting soil texture was wonderful and the envy of my neighbour. A head popped over the fence one day and said "I cannot believe you are working away n your soil and I cannot get a fork into mine!" did I tell them the secret? What do you think?

Apart from making the border easier to work, there was another reason for this preparation. Instead of annuals in this border I had decided to try perennials but this presented me with a big problem. I knew absolutely nothing about perennials and herbaceous borders.

My grandfather had a beautiful garden and I did learn a lot from him but it was mainly bedding and tender perennials. His borders of red pelargoniums (geraniums in those days) , white alyssum and blue lobelia were typical of the municipal park style of the day. A solution presented itself in the form of the aforementioned weekly magazine. A nursery was offering fifty perennials complete with planting plan, perhaps only recognising four or five names. The area plan they had was four deep and I worked out that I had the same area but it would have to be two plants deep. So I set about redrawing the plan by taking the front two rows and tagging them onto the end of the first two rows. Naive or what? I could have ended up with a disastrous mess but that never crossed my mind but by tagging the front two rows onto the right hand side meant that the tallest plants were furthest away from the house and at least there was a little bit of structure.

The plants arrived, all bare rooted and packed into wet newspaper. Thirty years on they would be in plastic containers etc. On arrival they were dropped into a bucket of water to await the weekend.

I bought a load of aluminium name tags and wrote out the fifty names in readiness for the big planting day. Not that the majority of names meant much to me anyway. They were all planted out at the weekend with not much showing above ground and it just looked like a border full of metal labels, little soldiers all in a row. It never crossed my mind that anything might fail and it is all credit to the nursery that everything they supplied thrived. If I plant anything now I take notice of the conditions it needs and the space it will fill but not then, how I got away with it I will never know but I did.

Once they got their toes in they were away and what a buzz I got from seeing their progress and the different emerging forms. Their final shape, size and flower colour was a mystery still to unfold and sometimes there were surprises due to my lack of knowledge. What I thought was the finished product in some cases turned out to be the bud stage so a bonus waited.

The overall effect of the border to me was spectacular and I would never experience that exact thrill again. Some parts of that border changed and improved over the years as inevitably certain plants died and new varieties became available to me. What was important was that I had created a framework, a structure designed by an expert that at that stage of my horticultural inexperience I could never have achieved.

All that I needed now was to tackle the rest of the garden!

If there is a moral to this tale it is that you should have a go. It does not matter that you fail the first time or what other people think.

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