Gardens without borders

We were at our friends' cottage on Easter Monday morning for coffee, chat and some cat cuddling. We shall be feeding Peaches again soon while her family are on holiday and we are really looking forward to that as we've been without cat contact for some time now. We took a stroll round their lovely garden and got chatting about daffodils. Shelagh told us she had been lifting and dividing clumps of daffs that were blind, ie they had failed to flower because they were too overcrowded. She said that last year she had planted some spare ones on the grass verge outside their cottage, beyond the realms of their own garden and lately she had put daffs and snowdrops into the newly planted woodland at the back of the cottage. I am much in favour of this idea, I planted daffs along the side of the lane that runs behind our garden many years ago. As you see, they have have settled in nicely. I also put down a few packets of wild flower seed and now have campion, ox-eye daisy, poppy and some interesting grasses spreading about. Fortunately they have never been damaged by cars driving onto the verge or by the council cutting the edges too early.

I didn't know until Shelagh explained that this is known as Guerrilla Gardening, in fact there is a whole website that encourages gardeners to cultivate neglected public spaces.

This reminds me of the silver thistle like Eryngium giganteum Miss Wilmotts Ghost, named after the nineteenth-century gardener, Ellen Wilmott, who liked to secretly scatter seeds of the plant in other people's gardens. I don't think I'll go as far as to sow lettuces in a burnt out car, but I may be sprinkling a few more seeds round the village.

The back lane in winter

and in spring - point made, will you be joining the movement?