Alan Titchmarsh yields to no-one in his striving for garden perfectionism — and he's helped in his task by a cunning strategy that helps him avoid weeding almost completely.
There are those who consider tidiness an affliction. A disease, even. I am not of their number. I am firmly with Sir Winston Churchill who opined that: ‘Tidiness is a virtue, symmetry is often a constituent of beauty.’ My other half is of a similar disposition and we both subscribe to the maxim ‘Don’t put it down, put it away’ — indoors at least.
We excuse ourselves on the grounds that our first house — a Victorian cottage, two-and-a-half up; two-and-a-half down — was so small (no room measured more than three yards by three yards) that if we did not put stuff away we would regularly fall over something and hit our head on an internal wall. One friend who came to visit shortly after we were married exclaimed: ‘I didn’t know they made houses this small.’ Thankfully, we moved when our first born was 18 months old or the frequency of bouts of concussion in two adults and one small child might have aroused our GP’s suspicions.
I would not want you to think that we are paranoid about tidiness and there are certainly moments when our kitchen worktops resemble a jumble sale, but the effect is temporary and the satisfaction of clearing things away and enjoying the uncluttered surface more than makes up for the effort involved: symmetry is most definitely a constituent of beauty in our household.
However, when this maxim is applied to the garden, a degree of tempering must come into play. As a lover of topiary, of axes and vistas, allées and avenues, I struggle to restrain myself in those parts of the garden that are deliberately informal. Where a grassy path winds through a woodland copse, I am frequently to be found bending down and removing an offending twig that has come down in the wind and temporarily defiled its pristine beauty. I chastise myself for such perfectionism and try to convince myself that this is woodland, not garden. Sometimes it works, but I’ll return to the house knowing that I would have been much happier if I had had a good old tidy up.
I make no apologies for a tidy shed — it means I can save time by knowing exactly where everything is. I don’t always oil and polish my tools when I return them after digging and raking and hoeing, but I do scrape off the worst of the mud and console myself that such an action shows that my fastidiousness is under control. I’ll be using them again the next day anyway and the cleaning will have been a waste of time.
“I tend to plant my perennials quite close together. I see no point in leaving swathes of earth that aliens will invade; I would far rather enjoy a sea of cultivated plants”
There are also boundaries to my tidiness out in the garden. My beds and borders, grass paths and vistas are clean limbed. I have metal edging on borders that run in straight lines, but within the border itself I am a fan of billowing informality. In autumn, the faded stems of perennials are cut down only gradually, so many of them can offer food and shelter for insects and birds. In early spring, the earth around them is fed with blood, fish and bone, then mulched with garden compost.
Apart from essential staking, the beds and borders are left to their own devices. Only a waving vine of bindweed will induce me to wade among them and pull out the errant weed. With the exception being Convolvulus arvensis — which seems to find room to insinuate itself into any border — there is little room for other interlopers, as I tend to plant my perennials quite close together. I see no point in leaving swathes of earth that aliens will invade; I would far rather enjoy a sea of cultivated plants. I seldom plant things much more than 1ft apart, being happy to thin them out after two or three years rather than spending my time hoeing the bare earth until they have spread sideways to colonise it.
My tidiness on the lawn is confined to weekly mowing and fortnightly edging in spring and summer. I feed with the ubiquitous blood, fish and bone in April and again in June, and extract any large rosettes of plantain or dandelion with a daisy grubber. I stopped using lawn weed and feed years ago, preferring to watch the blackbirds hoisting worms to feed their young from a greensward that has not been contaminated with herbicide. My rotary mower has a rear roller that produces the stripes I love, but, mercifully, the botanic-garden mixture of close-mown plants that constitutes my lawn offends my sensibilities not one jot.
