Talented gardeners since the time of Gertrude Jekyll have always gone their own wayI stumbled across a gardening post on Twitter today that really made me think. Forty-five seconds of smartphone video footage took me, and thousands of people across the world, around a quirky, colourful, yet tiny outdoor space. Starting on a shot of a Bagpuss-topped fluorescent-pink wheelie bin, it drifted past dazzling mosaics to a tree so festooned with hanging bird feeders it looked like a conceptual art piece. It’s one of the few everyday, domestic gardens that’s really made a big impression on me. Not just because of the design itself, but also for the story behind it. Posted by the creator’s sister, this garden sprang from the imagination of a person with mental health vulnerabilities. Despite having the dream of sharing the space with a wider audience, the creator’s application to a local garden scheme had been repeatedly rejected.Now, this design admittedly doesn’t have the hallmark features of your typical open garden. There are no immaculate flower borders that look as if they have been cut and pasted from a CGI model of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. The lawn lacked the nail-scissor-clipped attention to detail and, of course, the all-important stripes. There isn’t even a vast space to serve tea and cake in the tiny plot. But its unselfconscious sense of fun and frivolity coupled with a total absence of any whiff of keeping up with the Joneses made it, to me, far more brave, original and honest than many of the top show gardens. In fact, its lack of obediently conforming to accepted ideas of what gardens “should” be is what makes it so special. Continue reading…
Source : theguardian.com
Read more…The fine art of not doing what you ‘should’ do
