Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in north Norfolk, my youngest child – in the throes of a screaming meltdown – eyeballs me as she rips the heads off a row of giant ‘Mount Everest’ alliums.
By the time Fiona Black arrives, I’m spiralling into an existential crisis myself. Why did I bother asking if we’d be suitable, I wonder, contemplating the futility of gardening alongside children and dogs. Sliding tackles have taken out most of the alliums that survived the dogs’ digging. I retrieve a football from a bed of irises and chuck a bottle of Roundup weedkiller out of sight (soon-to-be illegal in the UK, but so effective, it’s the chemical compound I just can’t kick).
In ‘The Glory of the Garden’, Kipling eulogised those ‘grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives’, but it’s impossible to keep on top of them when you only have a few hours a week to wield the broken knife. (I prefer a stirrup hoe.)
Opening one’s own private Eden to the public – and looking around other people’s – is peculiarly British
‘What a heavenly rose. Madame Alfred?’ asks Black, one of those redoubtable countrywomen, all backbone and tweed with the horticultural knowledge of Carl Linnaeus. ‘This is charming,’ she says, diffusing the tension, and strides off to inspect the borders.
