Gardens

Ann and I love gardens, and visit as many as we can during the season each year. Of course, it helps to have two splendid gardens at Powis Castle and Glansevern on our doorstep. Here, our own gardens are small but with plenty of possibility: the back garden is a pleasant enclosed space, and gets a lot of sun - well planted when we moved here, but we've added a couple of borders. The front was little more than a patch of grass with a few shrubs, so this year's project is to gradually dig out stock a few beds and borders. An attractive front garden is not only our own space, but also in a way a gift to the community.

So yesterday we made a start on things in the spring sunshine. I put some spring bulbs in - scilla and bell hyacinth - that I'd picked up quite cheaply at our local garden centre as it's getting to the end of the season. There's plenty of flowering still to come on them, and they'll bed in, of course. Alongside them we planted a good batch of traditional and wild flowers - geum, primrose, cowslip, scabious, lily of the valley among them - all of which should settle well in that ground, to give a good show every year. They are all species that do well in part shade, which is what they'll get, as the sun doesn't reach the front garden until the afternoon.

We mowed both lawns, too - in fact I'd mowed the back one the first time in mid February, and I'm not sure when I last was out that early with the mower - not the past two years anyway, that's for sure. All the time we were working, we had the sound of siskins as a background chant: they're still here, with a few goldfinches mixed in. I imagine the goldfinches will be staying on, but the siskins will be away from here before long, and we'll miss them!

It occurs to me that some garden designs seem almost hostile to nature - more architecture than garden, turning that space into an extension of the house. They'll suit some folk, that sort of garden, but as they won't suit siskins and goldfinches and the like, for me they're not real gardens. The gardens Ann and I most love to visit and spend time in, are the product of close co-operation between the gardener and Mother Nature, to produce something that is sympathetic to and enhances the natural lie of the land. Careful management and sensitive planting can give something that is special and delightful, but feels as though this is how it was always supposed to be.