Stories from my Sketchbook . . .

I was going to begin this post by telling you all what a very ‘ordinary’ gardener I am.  However, after reading Janet Kilburn Phillip’s statement, I have decided to rethink that.  If you look at it from her point of view—I am actually a gardening-experimenter-extraordinaire!

I have always liked gardens—other people’s gardens—but I never really had much luck when trying to create one of my own.  It seemed to be all about keeping the lawns mowed, the paths swept and the weeds at bay.  It was also true that, over the years, I have had very, very, many (failed) gardening ‘experiments’ . . .   

Happily, those days now appear to be (mostly) behind me.  Since I discovered the fabulous ‘succulent’ my garden has been totally transformed.  I never even try to grow anything else any more.  I don’t need to.  Honestly, once a succulent is planted it mostly looks after itself (at least mine do).  In fact, it’s just as well the majority of mine are actually confined to pots because if some of them got a foothold outside of those pots I am sure they would simply run amok. This became even more apparent to me last weekend when I went outside to do some general ‘tidying up’ and found that, almost overnight, most of my plants had begun spewing ‘succulent babies’ of every colour, shape and form imagineable all over the place . . . 

So it appears that a good deal of my upcoming Christmas holidays might now be spent out in the garden—separating, thinning-out and repotting.

You never know—I might even get the time to sketch some of them too . . .