Gardens

This month we have the phenomenally successful Garden Trail in the village. I’m happy to share my garden but always anxious too. The changes made somehow never look enough for the hours you know you’ve put in, but hopefully people will be generous in their views of this ‘work in progress’.

I know that I enjoy this garden. I even enjoy the challenges of such an exposed site – fabulous views but difficult to grow anything that can’t cope with being battered by fierce winds. I enjoy most of all, strangely enough, the wild areas I’ve created. Filled with wild plants and flowers that seem to appear from nowhere, and much loved by insects, it’s my gift back to nature and, hopefully, a small but useful contribution to the Weald to Waves project.

I often think too of gardens I’ve been able to enjoy in the past: my vicarage gardens in Salford (small and fortified) and Warwickshire (huge and wooded). Then there are the gardens of the houses I’ve lived in during the years I’ve worked in healthcare rather than parish ministry. The cottage in Bishop’s Itchington with the wonderful structures of outbuildings to use in the layout. A house in Evesham with a postage stamp space just big enough for my motorbike but where I packed pots with herbs and flowers. A small walled garden behind a house in Stourbridge, which Monika and I utterly overfilled with everything from roses to sweetcorn, from azaleas to brassicas. And then there was the garden in East Grinstead. The one I got absolutely right and of which I am most proud.

Finally, there were the gardens of my childhood. My childhood home with a tiny garden 100 yards from the M62. My father, a policeman, had an approach to gardening which left plants terrified of breaking ranks. Easily the noisiest garden I’ve lived in but, interestingly, if you live there the traffic sounds are zoned out in your mind and you don’t hear them. The garden still felt like a quiet space. My grandad’s garden was a paradise. It was unusually large for that area and was on three levels up a gentle slope. He was a quiet, clever Welshman, and an engineer. He spent his working life on the Manchester Ship Canal tending to massive ship’s engines. He regained his calm in his garden with his prize-winning dianthuses and roses. My grandma, a fierce Irish lady, couldn’t make it up the slope in her later years, making his shed, right at the top of the garden, a reliably peaceful spot.

Gardens are precious. I am deeply grateful always to have had a garden, because that is the place, possibly even more than in church (there’s an admission), where I regain my calm. Wishing you a peaceful and calming summer in whatever garden you are fortunate to have.

David Knight Vicar of Fletching, Piltdown and Sheffield Park