I stood in the doorway of the large shed. My breathing was ragged and I was clammy, even though the day was chilly. I thought I might be sick. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I tugged at the pockets on my trousers and whimpered. I had to go into the shed but my feet wouldn’t move. They had grown roots and I was fixed to the ground. I couldn’t move forward or back. I was petrified. Turned to stone by fear.

I was working at Stourhead as a gardener for the National Trust and had to collect my dried flowers. I had unlocked the shed with the key on my lanyard and dragged the heavy door open. I had no idea why it was so securely closed for what amounted to fifty bags of compost and some dried vegetation. Someone had blocked the doorway with a wall of compost and left a tiny walkway to get to my dried flowers. The problem was the walkway was guarded by an enormous black spider, sitting in its own jungle of threads. When I opened the door it rushed forward to the edge of its web and teetered there, looking at me. And I looked at it. There was no way I could go in.

I began to sob, hot shameful tears. I couldn’t ask for help, everyone else was miles away, working on other parts of the estate and the House Display team needed my dried flowers for the Christmas display.

For weeks, I had bragged about these flowers. I’d nudged the team away from using plastic ornaments and encouraged more natural decorations. I’d insisted that I’d grow and dry enough flowers for the Christmas display and for wreaths and chains. For months I’d grown and carefully hanged Helichrysum bracteatum, Echinops ritro, Calendula and hydrangea. But now, I couldn’t even collect them because of a totally irrational, deep terror of spiders.

Some people joke about a fear of spiders, some cruel people will try to show them to you. They really don’t understand the level of distress that comes with arachnophobia. “It’s only a little spider” , they cry or “It’s more afraid of you”. Arachnophobes know it’s irrational that the sight of a spider can create a spike of adrenaline that makes your heart snap like you’re sprinting the final furlong in a 1500m race. But we can’t bloody help it.

I have tried everything to get over my phobia, I have had Aversion Therapy (there’s even a picture of me, tear-stained and ashen-faced, holding a tarantula), hypnotherapy and even been to London Zoo for a Spider Day that claims a 96% success rate. But I’m not cured. I subconsciously check every room for spiders before I sit down. I dread September, when the giant, horny spiders come into the house looking for love. I know that they aren’t interested in me but that doesn’t penetrate my lizard brain. It doesn’t help that we live in a rambling old house on the edge of a wood. The spiders here are legion and colossal.

To put it more succinctly, my life is corralled by my phobia. I’m embarrassed about it. It’s a weakness that should be easily controlled but it controls me.

So that day in the shed, puffy-eyed and sweaty with humiliation I went and found a Ranger who removed the beast with a gentle tut. Even though he’s a man mountain who chopped trees with a huge chainsaw, it turned out he wasn’t keen on spiders either.

I wish my phobia was my only fear but I’m plagued by them. It isn’t just physical things, I’m anxious most of the time. I’m scared of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I frequently freeze up when I make decisions. I’m even scared of making mistakes in the garden.

When I was little, I was convinced I was going to be an actress until I was 50 (quite a career!) and then become a writer because then I would have enough ‘life experience’.

But I was too scared to push for drama school so I never became an actress, and my life has been a general drift of jobs, culminating in gardener.

But I’m not 50 yet and I have begun to write.

I’ve always written: journals, stories, letters to friends and children. I even wrote a Mills & Boon style romance when I broke my leg (it was awful, turns out I’m dreadful at writing sex scenes). But now that I no longer have small, sticky-fingered offspring grasping for my attention I’ve started to jot a few things down.

I’ve always been horrified at the thought of having to hold my work out for inspection. It seemed so childish, so needy to create something and then request an audience. What if it’s mediocre? Or hackneyed? Or just plain bad? How mortifying.

But something has happened in the last year or so. I’ve started secret, furtive scribbling. I’m attempting short stories and devising one act plays. I record little vignettes or imagine comedy interactions. I note down the descriptions of people on trains and listen in to conversations at other tables in the pub. I’m still wracked by inner critics but I’m choosing to ignore them and keep going. I haven’t cured of my fear of failure and ridicule, I write under a pseudonym for goodness’s sake, but this is me, having a go. I owe it to the little me who was so clear about her future life and OK, I’m sorry the acting didn’t happen but I’m trying my damnedest to make this writing thing take. Even if I couldn’t go into that shed on my own, I can write about it, and that’s almost as good.

This morning, I stood in the garden trying to scrawl a list of jobs on the back of a seed packet. I’m going away for a couple of days and have got a house sitter coming to take care of the ark while I’m gone. I’ve realised that even getting her to do the basics will take up more time than I’ve promised, and much what of what I do is based on instinct. How do I explain “looking a bit sad but don’t overwater” in precise language? Is it polite to ask her to do a quick weed of the big bed or is that overstepping? I’ve realised the list is getting out of control when I run out of space and make more notes on my arm. I’m so worried about leaving my garden during the proposed heatwave that I’ve considered cancelling the trip.

It’s more than that though, I’m grumpy and overwhelmed.

I always get a touch morose at this time of year. Despite the light mornings and late nights, midsummer elicits a darkness in the corner of my eye, a tickling at the back of my mind, an ancient suggestion of sand slipping through the hourglass.

The light is already starting to ebb away, even though summer has only just rolled up its sleeves and begun to put the work in. I haven’t even got sick of ice cream yet. (Although I never really get sick of ice cream, which is why I’m built for comfort not speed.)

I find autumn especially gruelling and by the time the swallows leave, I’m desolate. My heart flies off with them on their gossamer wings and around Midsummer’s Day, I get a melancholic prelude of winter glumness, a very Dylan Thomas-ish “Rage against the dying of the light”.

It’s just a flash and only lasts a day or so but it’s a foreshadowing of the dark days to come.

There is a magic around midsummer, but with all old festival times, magic comes hand-in-hand with chaos. A sense of an unravelling, untamed wildness that occurs at this time of the year. That old genius, Shakespeare hinted at it in Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck says:

“Now it is that time of night

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church-way paths to glide.”

_{Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene I}

There is an edge to this day: beautiful midsummer, when the sun is at its peak, is the moment where we begin our descent into winter. We are trip trapping through BBQ season to harvest and then the decay of autumn. The smell of rot is almost in our nostrils.

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I think a dash of this is genetic. I remember my mother shutting down in late autumn, her body seeming to deflate at the thought of the winter to come. In my youthful folly, I thought this was a ridiculous over-reaction but as I’ve got older, I understand the dread at slogging through yet another winter. The darkness, wind and rain can almost seem endless.

Part of this has been sparked by my never-ending to-do list. Midsummer is so busy, the sweet peas need constant attention (but oh the smell is bottled heaven, and so worth it), deadheading roses, tieing up lupins, watering everything, the list is endless. And this year, the warm wet weather has meant the weeding is at an elite level. I feel as though I’m fighting a stealthy foe that is dedicated to nothing short of complete garden dominance. I can’t seem to stop and take a breath.

But what of Midsummer Night itself? Shakespeare built on old traditions, common in folklore, that the night of midsummer is when spirits abound and the veil is thin. The chaos of quarrelling fairies causes devastation, crops fail and livestock are diseased. There is an imbalance because nature, always a chaotic force, is at its strongest and is unsteadied by man.

In the pagan tradition, Beltane gives way to Litha, midsummer, when early summer reaches its height. Litha is the sun at its zenith, but is also a precipice, which then tumbles into Lughnasadh, the harvest. At this moment, everything is speeding up and is almost out of control.

Perhaps, this is why I feel so exhausted by my own garden. Nature is at its most potent and I am struggling to contain it. There is so much to do and sow, in fact this is always the week when I sow my biennials as well, ready for next spring. It seemed like a good idea when I was buying the seeds, but now planting another tray seems almost too much. Exhaustion and overwhelm taint the sunny days.

I’m trying to buck the sadness this year with additions to my little ark, a pair of spring-born chicks to add to my flock of hens. They are the most adorable Lavender Ameraucana chicks. They look like little rainclouds and seem utterly furious at everything. As a nod to the time of year, I have called them Cobweb and Mustardseed and have spent more hours than I like to admit, watching them cluck about and discover the world. There is something enormously hopeful about new life.

So I will sow my foxgloves, sweet william and lunaria for next year and watch my new chickens and try not to give in to the darkness that drags slightly at my heart. I will ignore the fairies who are making my garden run wild and instead try to embrace the anarchy. Maybe it is my fault for trying to control forces that are beyond me, I should learn to enjoy the ride. Nothing is permanent and as the wheel of time turns another season will take its place. I am only exhausting myself trying to overrule nature at its most formidable.

I have torn up the list for house sitter and just asked her to generally try to keep things alive. In fact, I’ve encouraged her to just enjoy the garden and the animals and even pick some flowers if she fancies it. Perhaps, I should give myself the same advice.

After all, as Puck says “Lord what fools these mortals be!” and I for one, have to agree.

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Do let me know if you are a midsummer lover or the sense of time passing gives you a chill? Are you loving the long evenings or do you secretly pang for a fire and warm, scratchy jumpers? Or are you in a another country where it the weather is altogether different? Let me know your thoughts.

GW x

I was home alone and jumping at every noise. The problem with a rambling old farmhouse is that by day it’s charming and bucolic, by night it’s alarmingly spooky. So, I had a little chat with Claude, the AI in my laptop, to distract me.

I have never used AI like that before, but I have used it. It’s the chirpy robot in my phone that helped me to heal a sick chicken or review my plans for a border. But that evening when I was home alone and ignoring every creak and rattle, we had a natter. Initially I felt better, it was like texting a friend, he cheered me up and encouraged me to have a bath and read a book. It felt kind and thoughtful. He (I can’t use it) seemed chatty and genuinely caring. It was only thinking about it afterwards that it felt strangely hollow and synthetic, like strawberry ice cream made with fake flavourings. Almost there but not quite. An illusion of humanity.

AI, has ever two letters caused so much fear and confusion? It is the Beginning of a New Age or it’s The End of Days depending which tech bro you believe.

Pope Leo has become so worried about it that he wrote in his recent Encyclical AI is in danger of reducing “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency”.

Even the Pope is worried about the human experience being whittled down to a series of actions for the good of the machine, like daleks made real.

What to do? I have come up with a pitch to resist the algorithm. This isn’t necessarily anti-AI but more an antidote to becoming a cog.

All creativity is a radical act.

The most radical act I can think of is to create. It is inefficient, slow and requires your full attention. Any creative undertaking will do, mine is just limited to gardening and occasional knitting, I can’t paint or draw, poetry fills me with terror, and I once sewed my work to my skirt and had to unpick it, so that’s out. But you pick a hobby (or three) and run with it, there’s no limit. Just relish the act.

Wonder

Do you remember when the instant answer to any question wasn’t at your fingertips? If I didn’t know something I had to remember to look it up later and then I might read something curious along the way. Before I knew it I had read a dozen remarkable facts that I could whip out at a moment’s notice (much to mother’s chagrin).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman over 40 has at least three empty notebooks at any time, write down things you want to know and find stuff out. Handwritten stuff sticks in your brain. Write down those facts and they’ll be with you forever.

Grow

Plant a seed. Watch it grow. We do this with children when teaching them about the miracle of life but then, we stop. Planting a seed is the most magical thing that you can do. Witness and marvel.

Mine the accumulated knowledge of humanity

There was a time, only a few hundred years ago when one person could know everything humankind had to offer. Now it is impossible, there is so much. Revel in this ocean of knowledge, plunder its depths. There is so much to learn about. Cherry-pick the things that interest you. Teach yourself, take exams if that’s your jam and become an expert in whatever peccadillo titivates you.

I am currently teetering on the edge of a Knot Garden obsession whilst also hearing the siren call of fermenting my own pickles. None of these is useful to anyone but me, but oh what a joy it is.

Boredom is resistance

I’ve always loved train journeys as I enjoy that semi-hypnotic state reached whilst staring out of the window. Boredom gives your brain a moment to breathe and rest. Boredom through long illness meant Ada Lovelace created the first algorithm, boredom on holiday meant Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Embrace being bored, in an Attention Economy, being bored is an act of resistance.

Fail

Failure is a uniquely human trait, we fail and we learn. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have become afraid to fail, embarrassed at our own short-comings, which mean we won’t improve. I bake a bloody good sourdough loaf, it’s airy, yeasty and fills the kitchen with a scent so heady you could carve it. But I had to make 748 loaves that were in some way crap. I taught myself armed with Dan Lepard and The River Cottage and it finally took. Don’t be afraid to fail badly, be afraid of mediocre success.

Pass on knowledge to others

Share the curiosities of your brain, Vanessa, my lovely friend, created a village gardening club. There’s a wide range of skills from novice to know-it-all but there is such pleasure in sharing experience. I have learnt about seed snails, apple tree varieties and collecting my own seeds, all over tea and biscuits in the village hall. I could, have of course, found all this on the internet, but there are no hobnobs on Reddit.

Volunteer

There is nothing as inefficient and time-poor as helping others. But nothing gives you as much of a glow of satisfaction as volunteering. It doesn’t have to be a formal ‘sign-up-to-a-scheme’ thing but doing something for someone that needs help is glorious and makes you at least 10% more beautiful. Fact.

Love

Hate seems to have become the modern currency. Division drives clicks. Anger is an insidious beast that will take your whole being if you let it, believe me. I’ve lost precious time being angry about things I cannot change.

So instead do the unexpected. Love. The Ancient Greeks has many different words for love. From eros- sexy-time love to agape - selfless love of your fellows, there’s love for every situation. It’s definitely easier to write down than do. But if showing love to everyone will confound the machines then agape all the way, baby.

Slow the FUCK down.

I’m a messy bitch. I’m wildly chaotic, maddeningly disorganised woman approaching her crone years but if I want to spend an hour watching the barn swallows build a nest, I damn well will. So reject the Life Maxxing fools who want to streamline themselves into becoming cyborgs and relish freedom while we can.

I hope that by trying to incorporate these ideas into my life, I will resist the lure of the algorithm and retain it as a useful tool. Afterall, in the middle of the night, when I’m scared and there’s a blur out of the corner of my eye, I don’t think a laptop will rescue me.

Do let me know what you think about the AI revolution. Is AI your best mate? Or the worst thing to happen to humanity? Are you Team Leo or Team Claude? Tell me everything.

GW x

Once, I accidentally went to a ‘cool-girl’ party and had the worst evening of my life.

In the early days of school there is much jostling and shuffling of the hierarchy, cool kids set the tone, the rest of us follow. It is exactly the same amongst the parents.

When my eldest daughter was young, a new mum arrived on the scene, she was well-travelled and well-connected. She had a wardrobe of elegant separates that she put together with ease, not for her the jumper and jeans off the floor for the third day running. She had that indefinable quality of cool. I desperately wanted to be in her gang.

Then she had a summer party and invited me.

It turns out, that wearing enormous sunglasses in England impairs your vision somewhat, she’d actually got me mixed up with someone else and I wasn’t meant to be invited at all. No one mentioned this me until afterwards, and by then it was too late.

The party was in the garden of their stylishly shambolic country house. As soon as we rattled up in our clapped out VW camper, I knew I had got it wrong. Everyone else was in washed-out jeans and authentic band t-shirts. My blow-dried hair felt sticky and overdone, my high street dress stuck to the backs of my legs and I couldn’t breathe properly in my spanx. But I couldn’t just run away, so I jutted my chin out, gripped my handbag like a life raft and dived in.

I made a beeline for the one person I vaguely knew - a woman who had a child in the year above. My mother had once pointed her out at school, “That woman’s mum dumped your dad and broke his heart. I got him on the rebound.” Armed with this er, hilarious opener I marched up to her, she was a tall willowy brunette, with sharp bob and an imperious air, Kristin Scott Thomas’s evil twin.

“Your mum and my dad went out!” I gabbled almost shouting at her in my excitement, “Isn’t that funny?”.

She just looked me up and down, glacially slow, from my Dorothy Perkins heels to my peach lipgloss. Then, without missing a beat she bent down and picked up a bowl of cashews from the coffee table. “I must pass these around” she purred and left me standing there, entirely alone. It was humiliation performed with surgical precision. And a reminder that being invited to a cool-girl party does not a cool-girl make.

I have never stopped wanting to be a cool-girl, though my obsessions have shifted. Now I covet other gardeners’ styles and planting schemes. One week I want my beds to be entirely grasses and architectural shapes, next I want a hundred terracotta pots filled with bright annuals. This magpie taste can only lead to creating a mess with no theme.

When I was at the National Trust, we were encouraged to listen to the ‘Spirit of Place’ before changing things. A slightly hippy term but actually very sensible one: take time to notice exactly what your environs are telling you. Use your surroundings as more than a canvas, it is a guide to show you exactly what to do. By paying attention to your soil, your frost pockets, the colour of the bricks, or even the neighbours tree, they will give you clues as to what will thrive and what will jar. I like to imagine a literal spirit, dressed as a 16^th century farmer, tutting or approving as I make decisions. It isn’t that I want the garden to look like a museum, I just want it to appear to have evolved naturally from its backdrop rather than fight with it. I have to stay strong, despite the temptations of whatever looks more gorgeous in Gardens Illustrated.

This week I visited a friend’s garden and was struck how clearly her garden stays true to its setting. G is a hugely creative person and has always had instinctive taste. This is reflected in her garden. Much of it has self seeded or ‘moved itself’ according to her, but she has embraced it and let the garden show her how to proceed. She is lucky, it is in a lovely setting, surrounded by farmland with Mendips beyond but she has to work with the wild chill factor of living at the top of the hill and the added excitement of living with three boys, two dogs and chickens.

G uses the hills beyond as a ‘borrowed landscape’ drawing the eye upwards but there are also some lovely intimate touches- Tiarella ‘Spring Symphony’ just by your feet as you sit on the garden bench for instance, or using old farming troughs, a nod to the setting, as a planter for hostas and ferns.

So yet again, this is a tale of restraint and holding back where my tendency is to go full throttle. I must not be swayed by every passing fancy or glossy catalogue but try to listen to what the garden is telling me. It’s so easy to have a twitchy trigger finger when all the plant websites are shouting offers and temptations but by taking my time and really getting to know this garden I will make fewer mistakes and probably buy fewer plants.

It is definitely the more boring option, restraint is never sexy is it? But the one thing I know is that even if becoming a cool-girl was never really on the cards, a lovely garden just might be.

“Sow, prick, weed, prune, sow, prick, weed, prune”.

The gardeners’ spring mantra begins before I’ve opened my eyes. It’s the start of a long, bank holiday weekend and I already feel behind. Add to this my coven has the audacity to make plans that involve an entire day away from the garden, and I’m slipping further back before I’ve even begun.

Trying to put order into chaos is the essence of spring panic. Every year I get into a fluster trying to jump start a garden I’ve ignored for most of the winter. I’ve done a few structural things: crown-lifted trees, hedge trimmed and pruned roses but much of the garden has been left to its own devices. I’ve comforted myself that if the garden was asleep then I should be too.

What I should have done, of course, is mulched my beds in autumn (nope, bad back), started my hardy annuals (nope), sharpened my tools (did not) and washed out the poly tunnel (ha), ordered my seeds (did this!) and tidied the edges of all my beds (as if). I did very little this winter, it was just so wet and frankly, I was bored of it all. Who wants to garden in the pissing rain?

So now I’m in a pickle. I’m waking in the middle of the night with anxious dreams of people coming to judge my garden. I haven’t finished tying up all the climbing roses, the barn cats have got into my tools, knotted up all the string and knocked over all the pots, I’ve only pruned half the hydrangeas and my sowing schedule is in tatters.

What to do with all this chaos which is entirely my own fault? Normally, I’d chase my tail and try to catch up; get up with the sun and spend every spare moment in the garden, making up for lost time. But I worry about gaps and the temptation is to pop to the garden centre and fill up my pots and beds with jolly bedding plants.

This year I’m trying to embrace the chaos a little. Spring is busy but life is returning, I once had a head gardener who pompously intoned about “a busy growing season” but spring isn’t just a growing season, it’s a moment of sheer joy. The earth has turned, sap is rising and we get another go. Every year I’m reminded of the start of The Wind in the Willows, when Mole gives up domesticity to enjoy a spring day.

“The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow… Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning…”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I fear I’ve started to treat the start of the ‘growing season’ with the same attitude as spring cleaning, as a succession of tasks to perform and have rather lost sight of the point of it all. Even the language we use ‘tidy up the garden’, ‘cut-back’ ‘retrain’ suggests taming something wild and dangerous.

So, I am trying a more holistic approach. William Robinson (1838 – 1895) was a Victorian who rejected many of the stuffy ideas of his contemporaries. In The Wild Garden he encourages a wilder, more naturalistic approach that respects the plants’ needs and habits. In his words “Hardy flowers, once placed in fit positions, will thrive and increase without the need for further care”.

The Victorians were in the throes of a plant-importation frenzy and Robinson was despairing at the hideous, technicolour bedding schemes that were appearing. He along with the Arts & Crafts gang championed the beauty of the crafted, and the local. Naturalised flower beds filled with hollyhocks (Alcea rosea) and Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla mollis), grass left long and studded with bulbs, woodland areas left to ramble. They encouraged managed chaos and the gardener to really look at the shape and habit of each plant and see how it interacts with the whole.

In other words, take a breath. Slow down and really look at the garden in front of you. Don’t fill every corner with cheap, imported bedding plants, think of the garden as a watercolour rather than a paint-by-numbers.

So once again, I’m stepping back. I’m letting forget-me-nots and Geranium rozanne suppress the weeds for me. If I haven’t pruned everything I’m going to pretend that I’m deliberately letting it find its optimum shape and generally embrace an air of managed chaos. After all, it’s spring, time to become an idle dog.

“Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

How is your spring planning going? Are you in a panic? Let me know what you’re thinking. And if you think this might help a friend, please pass it on!

GW x

You could sell me anything and I’d believe it. As a child, I would pore over the Innovations Catalogue for hours, marvelling at the incredible gadgets. A terrible arachnophobe I obsessed over the spider-catchers; I gasped over the Clock Radio (a clock and a radio? what sorcery!). Each gadget felt like a miracle. I never bought anything, of course. My family were decidedly old-fashioned and only upgraded to a colour television when the black and white one fuzzed out of all recognition.

But this love of novelty still thrills me. Except now I have the internet and a credit card, a dangerous combination. I spend hours researching everything - even things I don’t want. I become obsessed with fantasy versions of myself and what I would buy or do or wear. I have chosen my designer for the Met Gala (Chanel), decided on my perfect horse (despite being allergic) and identified my perfect lottery-winning holiday (formerly a private Caribbean island although recent revelations have put me off).

This affliction has spread to my gardening life. I pore over seed websites and catalogues, wanting everything. I have planned my vegetable and cut-flower patch three separate times and still can’t fit in everything I’d like. I’m charmed by vegetables in unfamiliar colours - purple cauliflowers, pink kale or black beans. I adore the ridiculous names that abound; who could resist growing ‘Leaf Broccoli Bastard’ or a chrysanthemum ‘Rainbow Hippie Love Child’? Even though I know from bitter experience that the more unusual varieties are often trickier to grow with worse germination rates. They are rarer for a reason.

Then there is the F1 vs Open-Pollination debate. F1s are the pedigree dogs of the gardening world - the result of years of careful breeding to create the perfect form. For instance, F1 carrots resist carrot-fly and F1 potatoes yield larger, blight resistant crops but this genetic manipulation has a cost. Just as your prize poodle’s puppies won’t look like poodles if she becomes Special Friends with any old mutt, then the product of these F1s are unpredictable at best. And you have to return to the breeder if you want the same plant again.

Open-pollination seeds, on the other hand, feel entirely natural. I buy from gorgeous companies like The Real Seed Company and like to imagine this delightful Welsh family deftly counting out my seeds whilst listening to the radio before popping them in a little envelope to me. They seek out nearly forgotten heirloom varieties with enchanting names (the North Georgia Candy Roaster Squash!) and include clear instructions on how to collect and store seed from every plant. I haven’t collected any but the romance of the idea still enthrals me.

To add to my planning woes, I have an added layer of guilt about not buying ethically. I lie awake at night worrying about buying chitting potatoes from the garden centre. At 3am I wonder if Thompson & Morgan are Big Seed, and whether it’s morally acceptable to plant the free cosmos that came with my magazine.

I know this is ridiculous and I’m extremely fortunate to be worrying about such trivialities. But is it truly trivial to think about how our food is grown and the loss of heritage varieties? And how can each of us play a part? Or – and this is the uncomfortable question - is this just a version of procrastination?

At this point of my endless rounds of planning, worrying and researching my husband pointed me to this quote:

‘Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Or

Just Fucking Do it

It is time to stop fannying about and actually commit. I think that my planning and procrastination is partly born of fear. I’m an RHS qualified gardener, studying for a diploma in Garden Design, yet the idea of charging for my advice fills me with terror. Perhaps I had better do another course, just to prove my worth? Perhaps I should add yet another barrier between throwing myself out there and Just Doing It.

In the end, I’ve bought seeds from three different independent companies. I’ve loosely planned my vegetable and cut-flower beds but already know they will be overcrowded. It is a relief to make a choice and take action, even though there is a chance that some of those actions may be wrong. Some things will work and some things won’t and I can live with that. After all, they’re only seeds.

Even if, I think, seeds are magic.

It turns out that I’m a snob. Specifically, a gardening snob.

When we moved to our house, a little over a year ago, I inherited a long-neglected veg patch. There was a fruit cage full of weeds taller than me, a pair of gnarly apple trees and a quarter of an acre of grassed-over possibility. I knew that in previous decades it had produced wonderful vegetables: deep green beans, Schiaparelli pink rhubarb and courgettes by the tonne. Inspired by this I launched into designing the plot of my dreams.

A greenhouse was the cornerstone of my design. I wanted it to be a jewel in the crown of my vegetable plot. I daydreamed about Victorian finials with sage-green metal work, terracotta tiles and rattan chairs. I imagined drifting around my beautiful space while wearing something floaty and carrying a wicker basket. I was utterly sucked in by Pinterest.

And then I priced it up. It seemed to have too many zeros and looked suspiciously like the annual budget for the NHS. Not a hope I could buy this instead of adding heating to the house. I was bereft.

I had been a victim of Insta Gardening.

Gardening in Britain has a history steeped in snobbery. The Humphry Repton style of rolling parklands at grand country houses and was based on cheap labour, abundant land and a need to impress. The graceful allées, sunlight slashed by trees, created a strobe effect as your carriage galloped past before you had even arrived. Everything was geared towards pomposity and intimidation.

I used to be a gardener in the Walled Garden at Stourhead, the famous Georgian gardens in Wiltshire. These weren’t created as a conventional veg patch – they were designed as a Show Garden. It had exotics such as pineapple pits, which were daringly new and eye-wateringly expensive. They required at least one gardener to be entirely devoted to growing them, even sleeping beside them.

And there were strawberry beds bred from plants newly brought from the Americas, which must have seemed like another planet. The Walled Garden was positioned near the house so the family could promenade with their guests - visiting this exquisite toy was about showcasing their fortune and class. The actual working gardens that fed the house were kept some distance away and probably smelt ripe, mulched with horse dung. Not somewhere to show off

.The French, of course, took idealised gardening further. The ill-fated French queen Marie Antionette converted Le Petit Trianon into a picture-perfect farm, complete with beautifully washed cows and chickens. She would dress in a soft muslin gown and collect eggs (secretly polished by her servants) and have picnics. It was shockingly bold and subversive. And suddenly everyone at Court wanted to be part of this garden fantasy. Perhaps Marie Antionette was an early gardening influencer.

The lineage of a curated garden fantasy is still alive today. I was thinking about these taste-setters as I visited The Newt in Somerset last autumn. They have conjured up their own Trianon - manicured vegetable gardens are lined with neat rows of lettuces and elegant oak-framed fruit cages house blackcurrants and raspberries. The tunnel supporting the gourds looks like a Tate-worthy art-installation and the apple trees have been pruned into whimsical shapes.

I was deeply impressed and deeply jealous. But then I realised, this isn’t reality. The vegetables for the restaurants are grown off-site, over many acres that aren’t open to the public. This is a fantasy for guests to enjoy, polished vegetable production for the Insta generation without a speck of mud out of place.

I began to question my motivation. Did I want a vegetable patch that was beautiful to visit, somewhere to smugly take my guests so I could wave my hand airily and saying, “Of course we love growing our own food” before sneaking off to the supermarket? Or did I really want to create something that maximised my energy but may be a bit scruffy around the edges?

I needed to look at what I really wanted from my garden and ignore the influencing.

It was thinking about this that encouraged me to take a deep breath, shake off my prejudice and create a useful space.

And I built a... polytunnel.

This thing is ugly. It’s enormous - ten metres long - and without a rattan chair in sight. It’s utilitarian and sits in the plot like boil on your face that erupts on the day of a party. But my god, is it practical. Last summer, I grew so many tomatoes that I made enough passata to see us into spring. I grew cucumbers, chillies, peppers and aubergines. I couldn’t keep up with the sheer amount of food it produced – harvesting became a daily job. And not one I could wear an impractical muslin gown for.

This autumn I have filled it with lettuce, rocket, kale and radishes. I have been picking and growing our own greens for the entire winter and won’t stop until the summer crops are ready to go back in.

Next summer, I’m toying with adding melons, fig trees and lemons, a small homage to my time at Stourhead. But this isn’t a Show Garden. It’s dirty, real and gloriously no-nonsense. And perhaps that’s the point: the magic isn’t in the fantasy, but in the food we actually grow. So maybe I am not a total snob after all - just a Garden Witch.

January, named after a two-faced god, is a bit of a bitch.

I used to hate January. I’d moan about being exhausted and would hibernate through the dark days until the daffodils were in full sail. I whinged that I had SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and could only drag myself through to spring by reading seed catalogues, snoozing by the woodburner and dreaming of summer. Something had to change.

This year, I am trying something different and taking my cue from nature. Books like Wintering by Katherine May reframed my winter experience but it’s the resilience of the natural world that has taught me the most.

Yes, much of nature is resting. Deciduous trees stand bare and many animals are hibernating but it is a mistake to call it slumbering. They’re gathering themselves, marshalling their reserves until the triumphant call of spring. If you take a stethoscope to the trunk of an oak tree in spring you can literally hear the sap rising - the sugars rushing through the xylem to power the leaves. In winter this hasn’t stopped, it’s just fainter and more measured.

While much of the landscape pauses, there are still plants taking this moment for their spotlight. Instead of waiting to fight their corner in spring, they break cover now and show their faces to a quieter world. I love hellebores even more so because they shyly hide, asking you to pause in your busy day and gently lift a bloom to admire them. I love the unexpected beauty of the Algerian Iris (Iris unguicularis), the perfect blue of a summer sky, who would be lost amongst June’s hullabaloo - so instead chooses the sleepier months to make a more intimate statement.

A drift of daffodils is glorious, of course, but the simplicity of a bank of snowdrops on a bleak January day is hard to beat. Monks once lined their paths with snowdrops so they could see their way to the privy in the dark. But I prefer to imagine them stumbling to Lauds in the biting cold seeing these spots of joy and realising that winter never lasts for ever, soon the clamour of spring will take over.

January is a wonderful time to view gardens – one’s own and more formal ones. Without the distraction of tumbling summer bedding, the shape of borders are revealed. Grand parklands are clearer, and the structure of evergreens can take centre stage. In my garden, Cornus sanguinea ’Midwinter Fire’ is set ablaze when the winter sun touches its bare stems and Daphne Bholua scents the path down by the back door without any competition. Winter has provided clarity without the distraction of summer’s abundance.

I’m lucky to have several established trees, and during a recent prowl around the garden I realised many of their trunks are obscured. I’ve decided to take out a rose border to better enjoy the beauty of a mulberry tree (Morus nigra) year-round. It feels brave - but also right. The roses are briefly lovely but the tangle of stems disguise the magnificent trunk of the mulberry, so it’s time for them to go.

Mulberry trees have a curious history in Britain. Though they’ve been here since Roman times, King James I became obsessed by silk and imported 10,000 mulberry trees to breed silkworms for a domestic silk industry. Landowners were required to plant mulberries and some trees survive today, over 400 years later. Unfortunately, the King hadn’t done his research and brought over the wrong type of trees (black mulberries not white), and the whole project was a disaster. Even so, the country was left dotted with mulberry trees and a population delighting in this delicate, sticky fruit - a true silver lining.

So this year, I am taking my lead from nature. Every time the darkness of midwinter begins to close in around the edges and tug at my soul, I am going to resist the temptation to burrow under a blanket by the fire. Instead, I’ll go outside pay attention. Perhaps these courageous January plants are inviting me to pause, take a breath and embrace the moment. Stop scurrying from house to car and listen to the valiant blackbirds and robins singing in the gloaming - to feel a brisk wind on my face and in my ears.

I have spent years resenting winter but now I am going to look into its corners and see what it can teach me.

And then, perhaps, I’ll have earned my spot by the fire.

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