as close as it gets

... to being jungle-like.



I love the garden. I post too much about it, but when you love something that's what happens.



I like wildness (like the way the house almost disappears from view at some points) but we try to keep some bits very well maintained and 'neat' so that the rest of it (90+ %) looks wild on purpose, and not just (more honestly) neglected. Like our very well to-do neighbours who have this lovely shaggy wildflower meadow and a neatly winding shorn path through the middle to a sculpture and many beautiful overhanging trees. Ok, I am no where near having that sort of garden but what I take from it is the notion of cultivating the bit of neatness to emphasis the glorious unkempt wildness. The ragged beauty in the life beside the stream is breathtaking in it's hugeness. To shear it back would be criminal.



To let the weeds take over the vegetable plot would sap my dear tended plants of nutrients from soil competition and also looks unruly and half hearted in effort. I love it that allotments have that cobbled together and yet well looked after and loved feel. It is exactly how I feel about my own little plot. We use bits of offcuts and old logs to make beds and fill them with our own compost (really, I could go on boringly in raptures for a good while about my love of our compost: chicken and guinea pig manure and bedding, grass trimmings, raw kitchen waste, leaf mold, wood ash = nothing short of the most wonderfully crumbly oxo cube style compost I have ever seen or felt).





The greenhouse was made by my dh and scraps of plastic he bought on ebay, the tools odds and ends of found and given. The plants, all from seed, some shared, others much poured over and bought from The Real Seed Company. A big sandpit dug and assembled from logs and layers of grit and sand by my dh to trap/entertain The Beauty. The constant background white noise of the waterfall and gurgling stream, the birds, the overhang of a million trees. The bark chippings we sparingly spread to cover paths and weeds. It's great. Not fancy, there are no railway sleeper beds nor woven willow planters, just what we can do with what we have (resources, money, time). I love it more for that.



There are several pine trees over there, one for the Den, two which support the hammock. I never much liked pine trees, thinking them inferior the leafy sort, only good for Christmas (horrid in their planted acres of mono-culture that fosters no undergrowth or further life), but I have grown to see they have their place. Enjoy and appreciate the sticky sappy trunks, the changing and spreading fingers of growth of the needles; actually soft and brush like, the sweet fresh scent and the beautiful way beads of water cling after rainfall, like balls of water suspended for passing fairies to drink or play-pop balloon like.



My new favourite salad leaf - sorrel



This one time listening to a guided meditation CD it asked that I picture myself somewhere 'safe' some where I felt totally relaxed and without pause I thought of this little tiny place, hidden from the rest of the world by a thick hedge, quiet from busy life and yet so full to the brim with the life of a micro world within this huge big world we share. Right now it feels it's at it's peak, pregnant and full, not yet sharing it's fruit, hesitant but on the edge, teetering into fullness and giving. I love this time of year, still full of anticipation, no hint of decay or spoil or running to seed.

It's a miniature jungle, in that it inspires as much wonder and reverence as if it were truly one.