Bonzer Words!: A Wild Cottage Garden
...I have a lovely theory that plants flourish from being looked at. They don’t even need to be sung to or talked at. You just sit in the garden and watch them growing. Nobody is allowed to refute this beautiful theory...
Valerie Yule writes with deep affection about her cottage garden.
Valerie contributes to Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
My Surprise Wild Cottage Garden has many purposes:-
* So passers-by are always surprised and delighted by what flowers next.
* So I can give people and op-shops cut flowers, or at least a bunch of parsley.
* Sometimes I give a flower to children on the train. If people already have the weed oxalis I can give away plants and cuttings.
* For fruit and vegetables - although often these are mini-vegetables.
* For more pleasant, healthy and creative exercise than a gym.
* For outdoors exercise, which you don’t get in a gym.
* To encourage wild-life.
* To be a garden that uses minimum water, costs as little as possible, and requires as little mowing as possible.
* A garden that can get by with as little or as much work as I have time to give.
* To give me pleasure to look out on and be out in.
* To develop character in facing adversity and frustration (that is, oxalis, onion-weed and some horrible grass-weeds).
* To be such a garden that when this house must eventually be sold, people will rise up and say this must not be turned into shoddy developers’ units. We must keep this eccentric and livable house for people to live in; for people who will also want to keep this wild cottage garden for everybody to enjoy and children to play in.
Some distinctive features and principles of the surprise wild cottage garden:-
If the garden is full of plants, there is less room for weeds.
Plants are given their chance, and from the ones that flourish I take cuttings and self-sown seeds to plant elsewhere in the garden, so it is basically a garden of ‘What will grow here’.
I have a lovely theory that plants flourish from being looked at. They don’t even need to be sung to or talked at. You just sit in the garden and watch them growing. Nobody is allowed to refute this beautiful theory.
Plants are trained to need as little watering as possible in the summer. When they don’t expect to be watered, their roots draw up water from down deep. Watering can interrupt their capillary process. So except for new plants just getting established, they don’t get watered except when they start to droop, showing that the capillary process is faltering anyway. Then they get enough water to go right down.
Self-sown seeds are encouraged. Because I am not a totalitarian weeder, new plants often grow—seeded from elsewhere in the garden. But sometimes I have no idea where they have come from. I always keep an eye on spontaneous seedlings, to see what they may turn out to be, because having come up from seed here, they show they can survive in our garden. Many come from the compost or plants that have spread their seeds, and are easily recognised, such as tomatoes, pumpkins, potatoes, daisies, silver beet, love-in-a-mist, forget-me-nots, prunus seedlings, arum lilies. Many are strangers, and I keep an eye on them to see what they are before ruthlessly pulling them out. Among the strangers that have appeared have been a passion-fruit that was laden for four years until drought-stricken; a baby oak-tree; black-wattle; little black-hoods; Californian poppies; golden myrtle; several Mysteries still not identified, Australian century. And, I am afraid, weeds.
© Valerie Yule
