
I just read a really sad post on Facebook. A woman had friends round in her garden and someone said her garden was ugly. It was full of flower borders and a neatly cut lawn. There were pots on the lawn and it looked like a proper cottage garden with ox eye daisies.
Unbelievable how unkind people can be. I replied to her post:
“Looks amazing, if you have birds and small mammals you are doing the right thing. I’d rather your garden that something covered in decking! Ours is full of trees, squirrels, hedgehogs, the occasional fox. Loads of birds. Don’t let them get to you.”
I thought about it. We need to make more space for wildlife not less. Somehow patios and outdoor rooms have become the norm. How much money is spent on concrete? Lease think about making a small place in your garden for wildlife.


six weeks ago I ordered our hanging baskets from a little nursery in the countryside. It’s actually based at a small farm near Silverdale in Newcastle-under-Lyme. It’s set back off a country road and is basically a little parking area surrounded by greenhouses and shaded concrete platforms, each of which is covered in garden plants. Most of the normal plants seem to have been sold but we took some clematis, begonia, a rose and other plants as well as the hanging baskets. We have been going there for about six years, and each year we get what we need for the garden. Now it’s a case of rearranging plants and hanging the baskets up. You can see we’ve gone a bit mad. But as we haven’t been spending much lately it did mean we could afford it.



