There are good and not so good things about having an unruly garden like mine. The good things for me mainly are that the unruly plants suppress the weeds which cuts down on a bit of work. The other good things are that I just love that untidiness of plants tumbling into one another. Cottagey, naturalistic? I don't know what you call it but I like it.
The bad things? Well sometimes it does look too untidy. Sometimes I lose plants. I plant things early on in the year when there are spaces and then some grow big and hide the new plants.
When we moved in to our house nearly thirty years ago there was a lovely climbing rose near the back gate. I'd never grown a climbing rose before and didn't know how to prune it, but it struggled along. Unfortunately there were other plants in the same area, some of them coming through from our neighbour's garden. There was a spotted laurel and the privet hedge. There was also a honeysuckle. I didn't know if this honeysuckle belonged to our garden or next door's, I've never been able to find where it was coming from amongst all the other things in that area. But I love the smell of honeysuckle and this one has lovely flowers, so I let it grow and my husband built a frame over the gate for it to scramble over. It gets a bit unruly and has to be cut back from time to time but it keeps on growing. The smell reminds me of evening strolls along Cornish country lanes.
Over the years the rose gradually disappeared amongst all this unruliness and I thought it was gone forever.
That was until last week when I was doing my morning walk around the the garden. And there it was-- a beautiful deep pink rose peeping out from the base of all these plants. I never like to give up on plants and this shows that no matter how tangled up they may be they can still fight back. That might be true for all of us.
Now I need to cut back that honeysuckle
