A calm and pleasant morning but my garden is looking increasingly frazzled, with a crispy lawn and very few summer flowering plants actually flowering. Much of my garden is climate change resilient, but it is obvious to me now that a surprising proportion is not. Of course, if I owned my home rather than rented it I would make radical changes which, like all things in relation to gardening, would bear fruit – so to speak – in years to come rather than the immediate future.

Fruit is something I probably would not grow, with the exception of tomatoes, but I would certainly grow vegetables. It is hard work. I had a go at growing kale once and the growing was relatively straightforward, but the harvesting, washing, blanching, and cooling in ice prior to freezing was time consuming. However, the sense of achievement and the taste was more than reward enough.

I remember being quite surprised at the time. I lived in the inner city for 30 years with no garden, just a 10th. floor balcony overlooking central London. Even upon my return to Devon I had only a small paved back yard in a terraced Victorian house. Since moving to the bungalow in 2017 I have had a garden that, whilst relatively modest, is large enough to do something really quite dramatic with. I have many ideas and I know I am good at garden design, although I lack many of the skills to put it into practice. My garden has suffered years of neglect before I moved in, and sadly I do not have the financial resources to overcome much of that neglect. It needs to be gutted and started all over again.

I have a clear picture in my mind of just how good my garden would look, and how much time I would spend in it if only I could get it done. It will never happen, and sadly I spend almost no time at all in the garden. I suspect that my next home will, at best, have a small room-sized yard which, oddly, I might spend more time in. A bench, a few plants in pots and a bit of shade. Sounds good to me! I will, of course, continue to dream of how good my old garden could have been…