Daily details from the garden to bring you inspiration throughout the year
It’s never just about the flowers. The flamboyant attention grabbers (the rude bits of plants, let’s never forget that) might be the gateway drug to a lifelong horticultural habit, but anyone who’s been gardening for more than a single season knows that the garden is a complex web of relationships between those living things that wander about and those that stay rooted to the spot. The sedum (sorry, Hylotelephium) in the photograph is simultaneously playing host to both hero and villain – the plucky pollinating honey bee (cheers) and the slimy, leaf-munching banded snail (boo, hiss). Life out here is a little more nuanced than the binary systems in which we seem to be encouraged to exist just now, though, and I’m happy to have molluscs breaking down decaying matter and returning nutrients to the critters even lower on the food chain than they, as well as providing dinner for animals higher up. Sure, it’s annoying when they eat fresh plant material (admits dahlia foliage into evidence), but that’s also a message to the gardener that something could be out of whack – a prompt for me to listen more closely to what the garden is telling me before I start making demands of it.
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Hello! I’m Andrew, gardener, blogger, podcaster, and owner of a too-loud laugh, and I’m so pleased you’ve found your way to Gardens, weeds & words. You can read a more in-depth profile of me on the About page, or by clicking the image above.
