Saturday May 19 2012
Gardening Archive
TheVillage Gardening
The people you meet in the garden
Posted on June 17 2009 at 2:45:33 0 comments
David Morgan is fascinated by the characters who come to mooch around open gardens.
Getting a garden ready for a public opening, whether for the National Garden Scheme as we do, or for a local charity, can be hard work but rewarding – as long as the weather plays ball. And it’s always fun to meet new people, some very normal and some, well…
We often have people asking us why our hostas are so good and don’t we get slugs (if only they knew – we go on regular slug hunts). I told this to one lady who then asked what we do with them. I told her the big fat ones are wonderful done in garlic or on a salad.
She went away muttering something about the Royal Society for the Protection of Slugs, so she obviously believed me.
Then there are those who ask me names of plants. Now that’s like asking most women what type of car their husbands’ drive and getting the answer “a red one!” I don’t know. I just cut the hedges and mow the lawns. Occasionally I look very knowledgeable – but when I do know the name, check the plant and I bet you there is a label at the base.
Some people ask us (well not me obviously – but the real gardeners) for advice, while others seem to think their role in visiting is not to enjoy the gardens and perhaps pinch some ideas but to correct our plant name pronunciation and tell us we have planted things in the wrong place.
Then there are the real characters! On one private opening we had a gentleman who clearly had little interest in the gardens themselves and had presumably come as the “driver” but he still came into the first one, Alan and Lynn’s gently sloping garden in Braces Lane, and just sat on the wall passing comment on how easy it would be to slip off it and how the wall was therefore a health and safety hazard.
Moving on to John and Janet’s steeply sloping garden, this gent seemed to be in his element as he commented on the number of steps, the steepness of the garden and how he wouldn’t want to go up it.
I’m not sure what he expected from a garden that is actually built in an old sand quarry, but John and Janet have done a great job in making the garden as accessible as possible.
Then we had the 99-year-old in a wheelchair. We all have steps – they can’t be avoided when gardens are sloping or on multiple levels – which makes wheelchair access impossible, something we can do little about. But the “owner” of the lady seemed quite content to leave her in our garage and, having checked that the brakes were on, proceeded up our little part of England.
I made frequent visits to the garage and calling from behind, asked if she was all right and needed anything. After two or three such visits without a response, I decided to make doubly sure by walking round the front of the wheelchair only to discover she was fast asleep – and presumably had been all the time – especially as I later discovered she was stone deaf, so wouldn’t have heard me calling to her anyway.
But perhaps one of the funniest incidents was the man we “hijacked”. We always have a helper on car park duty, trying to ensure we don’t cause a traffic hazard and visitors’ cars are neatly parked.
As he was showing in one couple, the man behind hesitated, so our helper quickly ushered him to a parking slot. The man, very smartly dressed in a suit, got out and said, “And this is…?” to which the helper was quite willing to complete the sentence by saying, “…the car park to the gardens” and pointed to the entrance to one of them across the road.
The man in the suit then crossed the road, went up to the person taking the entrance monies and just said: “Gardens?” Well we were delighted to take his money, but surprised that he spent less than 10 minutes in John and Janet’s steep garden, which takes at least 15 minutes just to walk round without stopping to read plant names or admire the structure or planting, and then completed Alan and Lynn’s garden in half that time, before departing again in his car, without bothering to see the third garden.
With hindsight, and based on his comments, we think he had actually been looking for the Tesco’s car park!
So if you want to meet some interesting characters as well as see great gardens, Marlbrook Gardens is obviously the place to be. But whatever you do – please just ask me the names of plants with labels, so at least I can look like I know what I’m talking about!
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