13/09/2025
Garden Tales….
I haven’t posted for the last two Saturdays as I was on holiday in Spain, but it gave me time to think about the sort of things I really want to say here. Gardening tips are all well and good but you only need to use Google or AI for a mountain of information so I think I’d like to use this space a bit differently.
I realised that unless you know me personally, I haven’t really introduced myself, so this week is a little self indulgently and self consciously about me! 😊
Nature, plants and nurturing an outside space isn’t something I came to, it’s a blueprint that goes back to some of my earliest memories as a child; pollinating strawberry flowers with a tiny paint brush in the greenhouse with my mum, pulling great stalks of rhubarb from the vegetable patch with Dad and always, always eating blackberries straight from the bush without washing them, a habit that continues to this day. My Mum and Dad were both great gardeners and my Mum taught me the basics of floristry early on, distilling her knowledge from a Constance Spry course that she did.
Flowers were always something Mum and I had in common, we were awed by the Chelsea Flower Show and other RHS events and on walks she always had a twig in her bag from a plant she’d passed and liked the look of or a seed head that she could germinate from!
Over the years, I’ve had different gardens in several different homes, a reflection of how much time I’ve had for plants amidst a busy family life raising 4 children, work and owning horses, the latter seriously compromising gardening efforts!
My first allotment in 2021 rapidly moved from growing food to a micro Flower Farm and I became obsessed with cut flowers. If it couldn’t survive in a vase, I wasn’t growing it, and my garden at home became an overspill and foliage site, with my husband despairing as I snipped at everything, justifying that I “had” to have that element to make an arrangement or bouquet work.
I wanted to consolidate and extend my horticultural knowledge and knew that it would be helpful to have a qualification to move into the horticulture industry as a career, so I signed up for and passed my Principles of Horticulture RHS Level 2 exams.
This year I made the leap and worked at the fabulous Botanica Nursery in Suffolk, their huge collection of plants and trees completely blew me away and I developed a new appreciation so many things that I’d barely given a second glance to previously.
I was offered a job more locally at Deans’ nursery in Elmstead market, which I absolutely love and running my own gardening business alongside means I get the best of both the commercial and private horticulture industry as well as continuing to grow cut flowers and tend my bee hives. 🌱🐝🌸
This photo is a bumble bee accompanying me at work at Botanica. It encompasses things I love ❤️
See you here next week for more ramblings….
Lisa x
