Show border diary

The countdown is on to garden glory... or bone crushing humiliation

In January, I let my creative impulses get the better of me and put together an entry for a mini show garden at BBC Gardener's World Live. It was the very deepest part of winter when work was sparse, light was dim and summer seemed very, very far away.

I’ve since been offered a fabulous new job at a historic garden, been buried in writing commissions and June is suddenly looking alarmingly close. So please forgive my lack of writing recently - I’ve been doing a somewhat frantic juggle which while fun, has not a lot of time for regular Substack writing.

Because I’m unable to say no to apparently anything, I’ve agreed to write a monthly diary entry about the project for the lovely Garden Folk Magazine. I will be re-publishing each entry here, so at least you’ll know I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.

Here’s the first one:

A few years ago, when I decided to change careers from PR to an as-yet-undefined one in horticulture, I must admit I felt a bit foolish. ‘I’m quitting my PR career to be a gardener. Or a designer. I don’t know - something with plants,’ I would explain apologetically to fellow parents at the school gates. All I knew was that my career thus far wasn’t making me happy, and I was deeply, madly, in love with gardens.

Fast forward to 2025 and here I am, feeling a bit foolish all over again. The news is out now that I’m building a little show garden of my very own this summer. The feelings of imposter syndrome are very, very real. It will take up a huge amount of time, energy, logistics and planning. Nobody is paying me to do it - I’m using savings to cover my costs. And I could, quite feasibly, make a complete and utter fool of myself. I keep remembering that line in Bridget Jones where she’s terrified of walking into the Law Society Dinner - ‘What are you doing in here? Bridget Jones, you are ridiculous.’

But we only live once, so I’m doing it anyway.

My garden is one of the Beautiful Borders at Gardeners World Live at the NEC. The theme is connections, so naturally, I’ve taken the theme to a bit of a weird place. My garden focuses on the connections between new life and, well, death.

There is method behind what, I’m sure, sounds a bit like madness. One thing gardening has taught me is to be a lot less squeamish. I’ve become obsessed with composting and with it, have learned to accept all manner of creepy crawlies in the garden. They are essential for making new soil, feeding more critters and helping plants to grow without a load of synthetic chemicals. Just as you can’t have spring without winter, you can’t have new life in a garden without also having death. The perennials need to lie down to rest, the annuals need to complete their life cycle, the birds need to eat leftover seed-heads. On a more long term scale, trees will eventually fall, their wood will rot down, and that process will feed fungi, bugs and worms, who will then feed the soil and feed the new and emerging plants.

My show garden is all about this cycle. A spiral of logs (which is proving to be a bit more challenging to compile in real life than on paper) forms the main structure of the space. As the logs rot down, they feed the soil and new life emerges from the ground. The planting will be woodland-edge-ish, and three trees of different sizes will grow around the spiral, along with grasses and absolutely loads of flowers.

But on a personal level, the garden is about a bit more than that. The last few years - which have coincided with my move into all things horticultural - I have been immersed simultaneously in the joys of new life and also a wild and ever-present grief.

I have become a mother of two glorious, beautiful children and by doing so have found my body infused with love, (and robbed of sleep), and the house filled with laughter and chaos. And I have also lost my dad. He was very ill when I started my RHS course, and died just after my summer exams. In the months after, I was buffeted by waves of grief which sometimes left me exhausted and other times filled me with a fizzing rage. He died in July, and on the days I could barely move I would sit on the lawn staring at the flowers. When the rage came, I picked up my spade and dug up the lawn. So in many ways, this garden is an expression of all of that. The joy of new life, the agony of grief, and how nature is there for the cycles of our lives, as well as the cycles of the plants.

There is a lot to do on what I know is going to be a big and emotional adventure. But first, I really need to get my hands on some logs.