September - Reflections on the year so far

As the days get shorter and I find myself picking flowers in the early morning wearing my coat and with chilly hands, I feel the need to reflect on my year of growing so far….

The first picture below is the view from my home desk, last winter, of the far corner of our North Devon garden and what is now my flower patch. It was an inherited dumping ground of rubble, felled branches and general neglect, swathed in the tight grip of nettles and mean brambles. It was also sloped up and down; the “BMX track” as I began to call it.

On a bright Spring day in April, with no expectation of what it would look like, a kind man called Chris came with a digger and flattened the BMX track into a small football pitch. As there was very little nutrition in the bare rocky ground, we set about making boxes and filled them with topsoil and compost, hours of shovelling and barrowing, shovelling and barrowing.

Then in late May, the first Cornflower seedlings went in, followed by Marigolds, Calendulas, Chrysanths, lovingly nurtured Dahlia tubers, Phlox, Cosmos, Ammi and many more. And before I knew it, this once unloved corner of our garden was bursting with colour and humming with contented bees.

I have lost count of how many buckets of flowers I have cut from the patch and tied into bouquets to be enjoyed by others, but to have grown every single stem fills me with happiness and pride. And as I start to see the colour fade a little and new seedlings go in their place, I am excited to see what this ex-BMX track can do next.