This goes way back to the early 90s, before I got into garden design and was just doing garden maintenance.
I had a client in her mid-eighties. She lived on a big corner block with a huge grassed area and one large willow tree. She rarely left the house and when she did she had to use a walking frame. About the only trip she ever made was to go out to the letterbox.
My job was to mow her grass, which I did every fortnight.
One day I said to her, why don’t we replace a little section of the grass next to the front of the house and put in a lovely little garden bed? Put in some plants that would flower in the spring. Nothing too dramatic.
She told me to go ahead. So I did it.
She was elated when I finished. She looked at me with a great big smile and said, “So, what’s next?”
That question set the pattern for the next two or three years. Every couple of months we would choose another section and replace the grass with plants. A dozen plants here, another dozen there, a few more in the next one. Nice curved garden beds. Bit by bit, that big empty lawn became a garden.
And here is the part that stays with me.
Every day she would make her way out to the letterbox, very slowly, on her walking frame. And on the way, she would inspect the garden. Every visit I made, she had a report for me. “Have you seen the garden yet? They’re all in flower. I could smell the fragrance when I picked up the mail this morning.” She would point out the little blue flowers on one particular plant she really loved. She told me that there also seemed to be so many more birds in her garden now.
The neighbours noticed too. It was a corner block, so everyone walking past could see this garden getting better and better. They would stop and tell her how beautiful it was.
One day she said to me, “You know, I honestly believe you’ve extended my life.”
Funny enough, I had kind of thought the same thing myself. But hearing her say it was something else. She now had a new reason to get up each morning. A better reason. A brighter reason. Her garden.
She told me she also felt like she was contributing something to the street around her, which she was. Beautifying the neighbourhood.
One day, when I was tending to the garden, someone stopped and asked me, “How do you make her grass look so good – so green and lush?”
My answer was simple. You look after it. Give it the right amount of water. The right food. Mow it correctly, to the right height. Look after it, and it rewards you.
I often say that plants are our cousins, spiritually speaking. They have a life force in them, and when you look after them, that life force comes back to you. I know how that might sound strange to some people. But I watched it happen, every time I came to do her gardening.
I watched her. A woman in her mid-eighties, on a walking frame, who barely left the house, out there every single day to see what was flowering.
It struck me back then, this is what a garden really does. It is not just some plants in the ground. It can be a reason to get out of bed every day. A reason to keep on living.
Thirty-odd years later, I still think about her whenever someone asks me why gardens matter so much to me. It’s because they matter so much to you.
