Letters to garden makers

Dear Monty, A brief letter written about the reality of the day. Today is a day off from tending to wounds, doing ecg's , checking medication and blood pressures, discussing diabetes control, taking bloods, checking lung functions, discussing diets and weight, giving travel advice and vaccines, hormonal treatments and chemotherapy, disease modifying drugs, syringing ears, monitoring chronic diseases, listening and encouraging, and most of all inputting data into the ever hungry machine. My brain slows to a pedestrian pace. I miss Mr Owl - but I may have found a replacement waiting to be revealed from inside a block of fly tipped thermalite found on the coal tip that overshadows this garden. I feel overshadowed. But burning slowly inside is an unquenchable fire - it is held in a glowing ember. I still love this strange mix of post industrial and nature. It is both scruffy and beautiful. I was once a working class boy who made dens and plasticine caterpillars. N...

Dear Monty, Thank you for letting us know it is the year of light. If only that were true for everyone in every country. There has been a good debate on  ThinkinGardens  about garden 'experts' which after reading the replies to Anne Wareham's article - made me realise perhaps we are all experts in our own preferred style of gardening. Katherine Crouch www.katherinecrouch.com  garden designer stated that the word garden means an enclosed place free from grazing animals. I love this idea of being hidden, enclosed - private - safe - peaceful. After the grazing of animals or the whirr of the mechanical sheep, the land can be cleared for planting and controlled to suit our own ideas of what a garden should be. I was surprised to hear Piet Oudolf in an interview say that he did not like returning to past projects because he once had a bad experience seeing one of his schemes poorly maintained and weeded. This made my very slow brain think ... ...

Dear Monty, Anne, Charles, Noel, James, Alison ... and anyone who may be out there, Is there anyone out there ? To embrace the ravages of change by disease or fight ? - That is the question. I have learnt to wait for nature's cure. There is plenty of misery to be had if I aim for 'perfection' in the garden. I once hated daisies and other 'weeds' in the lawn but now I embrace them. When I first noticed fungal disease burning through the old privet boundary hedge I panicked and felt that the garden was infested and doomed, but the inertia this created in me actually turned out to be a blessing because in what seemed to be a relatively short time opportunistic trees and shrubs begun to replace the privet. Buckthorn, hazel, hornbeam and honeysuckle. Even the privet revived ! The apple tree is always affected by brown rot - but then some years are worse than others, perhaps I should cut it down - yet it supports three mistletoe plants which co...

Dear Monty, Arson in the hills again. This weekend has brought fire and upset for our neighbours for the second time in a couple of months. I look to the positive things of life - the life affirming things. What is so sad is that eyes do not seem open to the beauty of this valley and its re-wilding after a long period of industrialisation and all the hope that is contained therein. Hope in making gardens? Making paintings ? Being inspired ? I still have hope Paul

Dear Monty, It is the morning after the night before -I look out of the kitchen window onto the garden with mug of tea in hand. A drizzle morning - humid and no overnight thunderstorms. The forecast said sunshine. It sometimes strikes me as odd (but then I am odd) that when I watch GW it is almost as if there is a parallel universe or a delayed signal between the universe at Longmeadow and here in Ystalyfera. What do I mean by this ? It's a struggle to explain it in words but I was looking at the garden here last evening and I was deeply satisfied by the emergence of different yellows only to find later that right at the very end of the GW broadcast you moved through the yellows of the dry garden. I also spotted parallel plants - some of which I confess to not knowing the names of (apart from mullein). It cheers me to see that gardeners recognise beauty in similar combinations. I confess it is a thrill because I have no real plant knowledge - this garden seems to gro...