Welcome to my garden!

Hello, my name is Chris and I am a "floweraholoic"

We moved to this house in Basingstoke, England in October 1989 when our youngest was 3 weeks old, and our eldest was two and a half.  The garden resembled an overgrown meadow, with hedges 8 foot wide and waist high grass.   I'd wanted a garden for so long, but at that time of year and with a very small baby requiring constant attention little could be done but to scythe the grass and hack the tops off the hedges and leave it until spring. 

This was the first of many compromise solutions for my garden.  The years that followed seemed to be more and more busy, short cuts had to be taken and the garden had to make do.  What I did  was try as best I could every summer to fit as many flowers as I could into that small space.

English weather being what it is, sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't!  Let's not dwell on disasters like 1998, but look instead at some of the years where the garden did work - ie a mish-mash of my desired "chaos" emerged":

When the sun shines, so does the garden!  The pictures below show a myriad of "instant" flowers - mainly annuals.  In those early years the garden was mine in the summer, and a safe place for the kids to run around in winter when we didn't want to go any further afield.

You can click on some of the pics to see a bigger version.

Now things have changed, the youngest is old enough to play in the park with her friends, so I can have more of the garden all year round.  In recent years my aim has been to continue improving my stock of interesting perennials both from seed and from scrounged cuttings and roots donated by friends, family and neighbours.  I have swapped with cyber buddies all over the planet all sorts of interesting seeds and hope to continue doing so. 

In the meantime.... there's always that dark, damp and dingy corner of the patio where  I can indulge my passion for container gardening:
 

Most of it is completely shady all day.  But... it is loved by impatiens, begonias, ivy and fuchsias (another passion).

There's so much more still to tell!  There's the allotment (community garden), which I took on about 10 years ago on a whim.  It's  too much for me even now, but it feeds us well and it feeds us organically, even if it doesn't look decorative.  Here's me trying to "sort it"!

May 2000 in my garden

Back to Chris's Secret Playground