I had a wonderful day yesterday playing in my garden, the sun shone and the rain stayed away, so I made the most of the opportunity to cut back and pull away some of last year’s dead stems and discover a world of new spring foliage beneath.
Because I don’t ‘weed’ my garden in a traditional way, the soil is covered by a thick and diverse carpet of plants, some expected and very welcome like the wild strawberries which are so good for insects when they flower and sweet and tasty for me to eat when fruiting. That’s if I can find them before the blackbirds do, and there are others which I’m puzzling over too.
I would expect mosses to thrive in the drip line of trees and at the edge of the pond where they have access to moisture but I’m very surprised to find them colonising a south facing, hot and dry border as happily as they have. Holding in what moisture there is and forming a ground hugging micro climate for the soil organisms, they’re contributing to my garden’s biodiversity and with the most interesting delicate leaf structure, what’s not to like.
With a wildflower meadow lawn as their anti social neighbour, various grass species pop up throughout the borders, they are not unexpected but neither are they particularly welcome, so I try to act as a selective herbivore and pull them where I can. With an image in mind of a cow wrapping its tongue around the tussocks I hope to remove the roots from the damp soil too, but as the rewilder and gardener within me battle I do use an small adze as well, my version of a rootling pig!
Although our very real dog does his best to help the garden rewilding process, I can keep my imaginary animals away from the plants when I’m pleased with how well they’re doing. My favourite plants for seeding around and being beautiful as well as useful for the increasingly active bees this week, are primroses. I’ve watched over the last couple of years as their little crowns of leaves popped up around the garden and now they’re flowering. The wild ones look to have interbred with a couple of old established cultivars there are pink, cream, blue, white and pale yellow ones in the grass and the borders. Like the moss they don’t seem to mind full sun or deep shade or a mix of the two.
It strikes me as I rummage in the undergrowth of my garden not weeding, how much gardeners who do are missing and how much the nature of our gardens and we benefit if we just stop weeding.
