“If you want to be happy for a month, buy a car. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy forever, plant a garden.”

My husband was deeply offended the other day. A neighbour was admiring our garden. “I like the way you have it as a wild garden,” she said. He was mortified. Yes, it’s not the tidiest of gardens, but in no way is it supposed to be wild. It’s just that I haven’t done much weeding lately.

One of my favourite books is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It is a rural comedy, written as an antidote to all those gloomy books set in the countryside - think Thomas Hardy. Cold Comfort Farm pokes fun at all the tropes within those books. One of my favourite quotations from it, said by the heroine to the farm girl, who has just had her fourth illegitimate child and who is blaming Mother Nature for this, is “Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.”

Feeling my husband’s pain, I set about doing some weeding in our untidy garden, but I’ve stopped. As I was rooting up all the bindweed and other plants for which I have no name, I found I was making a whole load of little creatures homeless. As I weeded, large swathes of bare earth were revealed; I was making the garden into a desert. There were crawling and creeping insects everywhere, all frantically trying to get to shelter at the other side of the flower bed – the side I hadn’t started yet.

I couldn’t bear it. I put away my fork and trowel and have decided to leave it until all the weeds die back naturally, and all the little creatures will have gone. Then, I might have a little tidy up.

Of course, I could try buying a whole load of plants to put in the bare places, so the little bugs and creepy crawlies have somewhere else to make their homes, but buying plants is expensive; it’s the kind of thing you don’t do without consulting your other half who, in this case, hates spending money and insists on growing from seed whenever possible. And it’as the wrong time of year to be sowing seeds – whatever Monty Don said last Friday night about sowing winter salad crops right now.

So, a wild garden it is.

Yet I can’t help but feel shame. Many of my friends love gardening and have well disciplined lawns and borders. My best friend has recently planted a white garden, so she can sit in the twilight and admire all the flowers bright against the fence.

I feel guilty because I want a tidy garden, yet a tidy garden gives no place for wildlife – and I want the wildlife more.

Do you love gardening? If you have a garden, is it tidy? And how do you feel about your garden, shame or pride?

Mary

A Moodscope member