When my girlfriend and I moved into our house a few years ago, the garden was in bad shape and I’ve been steadily working on it. Gardens are never “completed”, but I would say I’m roughly half way through a major redesign. I’m a fairly inexperienced gardener, so I’m mostly learning as I go. A great deal of time has been spent removing weeds and concrete slabs. The garden seems to have grown both in equal measure — I remove a slab, stab my fork into the soil and *CLANG!* another slab is underneath! The bindweed is even more relentless, finding all sorts of ingenious ways to reappear, but I am determined to win this war of attrition. I have already rescued an apple tree stump from its clutches and the tree has sprung back to life. There is a lot of dead wood — trunks sawn up, whole branches discarded, sticks and bark scattered here and there. Whenever I move these things, I discover all sorts of creepy-crawlies living amongst them and remind myself to not be too clean and tidy (my heart sinks when I see a “sterile” garden). I’ll leave as much as possible and have plans to make space for a permanent wood pile. I have laid stepping stone paving in a grid pattern to divide the garden into sections: grass lawn, tapestry lawn, flowers/shrubs, arbour, pond, fruit/veg and compost (they are at various points of progress). It is a modest sized garden and this helps to maximise the space, as well as provide clarity and structure for my feeble brain. It looks severe and imposing at first, but as things grow, begins to melt away. To further soften the grid, I will allow the plants to spread beyond and blend the separate areas. My plant knowledge is not great, so I’m having to rethink a lot of things I was planning on planting, due to the hours of sunlight certain locations get. I will have to make final decisions on some of these before the autumn, when I start the serious planting. One thing I have already planted is a multi stem silver birch. I did this in the first year, knowing it would need plenty of time to grow. It’s coming along nicely — the lush green leaves of spring and summer turn golden yellow in the autumn and the white bark is impressive all year round. I’m looking forward to it getting big enough to hang bird feeders where my cats can’t get to them! I think the greatest challenge of gardening is to find a balance between taming nature and allowing it to do its own thing. It’s a philosophy that seems to have got more and more lost in our weakness for convenience and desire to control the wild and troublesome. It’s something I’m very conscious of as I continue my project. Whatever your connection is to nature, I hope you treasure it.