The Power of Nature

If I think back, my first memory of starting to learn about plants was in my Granny’s garden.

This was a small wall enclosed space behind a red brick terrace in Earlsdon, Coventry.

My Granny used to like to take me on a ‘walk around the garden’. In reality the garden was so small that this would have taken about 30 seconds, but she and I would take a slow amble around the garden so that she could tell me, the name of every plant and flower. She loved roses and had many of them.

The memory of their fragrance rushes back whenever I smell a rose. Granny had the most amazing purple clematis which would be cut down to the ground each year only to scramble back up the washing line pole and across the garden until hanging out the washing was secondary to admiring its blooms.

Granny’s garden was tiny but the joy that caring for it brought my Granny was immeasurable. As a teenager I remember walks around our garden with my own mother. She inherited passion for growing from her mum and did her best to pass it onto me and these memories I treasure.

I have an old peony in my garden that came from root stock in my parents’ garden. It has moved with me to every house I have ever owned and must be more than 40 years old. Mum loved traditional cottage garden plants foxgloves, lupins, delphiniums and hollyhocks and spent much of her summer waging war on slugs and snails to try to keep their flowers at their best.

My own children have always been more interested in anything that they could eat. We have grown many fruits and vegetables in a veg patch at the bottom of our garden. Every year our successes and losses would be different. From a glut of strawberries or plums to French beans or tomatoes but every year new and every year different.

They enjoyed making paper pots to plant seeds or to quietly disappear only to reappear sometime later their faces and fingers smeared with blackberry juice.

Garden spaces become full of memories and treasures. A ‘garden walk’ whatever the size of the garden is incredibly powerful. If you go slowly enough you can always find something to wonder at. Gardens are full of memories, scents, sights, sensations that remind us of times past but also our responsibility as guardians to make sure that we encourage and are respectful of the natural world in everything that we do.

These experiences have led my passion for good garden design. Design which enhances an outdoor space for its occupants be they human or otherwise. Spending time in nature is proven to support mental wellbeing. So, having your own little piece of paradise is something that I feel passionately that everyone should be able to enjoy.

From the most elaborate project to the simple redesign of a border, anything which draws people into the outdoors is powerful and can be most restorative.

Katharine