Two years later…

It’s nearly two years since I wrote my last post, and paused my Instagram feed. There were a number of reasons for this, which I won’t go into, but perhaps it’s time to open the garden door once more. Time will tell as to whether the world’s moved on from garden blogs, but in some ways perhaps I’m not too bothered. This time feels different, as I’m writing this for myself, and if someone happens upon it, and perhaps even finds it interesting, then of course I’ll be delighted - thank you!

I’ve updated the web-pages, in case you should be interested in some background to the garden. They’re a bit wordy, but some might find them a calming read in the midst of what seems such a very chaotic and over-heating world.

So why the come-back? Well, I’m now retired, and spend most of every day outside in the garden. There’s always something to do, after all, particularly if your garden is on the larger side. Even in the depths of Winter.

I’m not an expert, nor wish to be seen as such, l’m not an influencer (this blog is about the garden), I’m not trying to build a career, and I’m not going to feed off the latest gardening trends. I’ll leave that stuff to others. I’m not chasing ‘likes’, monitoring stats or trying to game algorithms. I’m just an amateur gardener in his 60’s!

So what’s the motivation for doing this?

Well, last year, I started to get quite tired of gardening. Perhaps it was the effect of another awful Summer, perhaps it was the dawning realisation that I had retired and was therefore ‘getting old’, perhaps it was because I had increased my hours to full time-plus in the garden, perhaps I’d become a bit cynical about social media. Or perhaps it was because I was starting to ask myself why I was spending so much time in the garden to the benefit of the few?

Gardening, for me, was becoming a list of tasks to be ‘got through’, many of which were becoming extremely dull. Let’s face it, much of real gardening comprises a small number of very dull, repetitive tasks. I was spending all my time working through my tasklist and perhaps not reflecting on the big picture, the results of my labours.

When I started writing a gardening blog twelve years ago on Wordpress, I needed to reflect on this bigger picture in order to write about what I’d done. I had a group of ‘virtual visitors’ to ‘show round’ each week or so, and some, I think, used to enjoy my ‘random jottings from a garden in south-east Scotland’. We don’t consider our garden worthy of the Yellow Book (it’s amazing what you can do with camera angles!) and we value our privacy, so the garden will never be open to the public, but the blog helped provide some justification for all the hours of mowing, weeding and pruning. So, yes, I’ve missed recording these goings-on this past couple of years. Hopefully my scribbles will persuade me that all this time spent in the garden is worthwhile. If the blog gives just one other person some pleasure, then it will all have been truly worth it. If this is you, then thank you.

And yes, I do still like gardens, both doing our own and visiting others. Arguably I need our garden as much as it needs me. Hopefully this blog will reset the pendulum.

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Until next time, thanks for dropping by.