The Chelsea Flower Show’s fondness for wild places shows I’m on the right track with my garden

The Chelsea Flower Show is supposed to be inspirational but it’s just as likely to be intimidating. The designs are obviously impressive, but everything is just so verdant, so blooming, so... well... perfect. You’re likely to look at the set-piece displays and wonder why you bother with your own efforts.

The last couple of years, however, have seen something of a reset. While artful, higgledy-piggledy cottage gardens have always found a place at Chelsea, it now seems that full-on wildness is all the rage. Last year’s “best in show” was a paean to beaver-gnawed rewilding, complete with dams and lodges. And at this year’s event, held over the last few days, a gold medal in the best construction category was awarded to a garden based on a crumbling Victorian house that has been taken over by nature.

Purists, such as The Independent’s parliamentary sketch writer and dahlia expert, Tom Peck, have been aghast. But really, there is something to be said for these wildernesses. Gardening, after all, is a difficult business; the idea that manicured lawns or precisely laid out flower beds might not be the be all and end all is deeply reassuring.

I am presently taking part in “no mow May”, a campaign initiated in 2019 by the conservation charity Plantlife with the aim of boosting Britain’s wildflower stocks. It’s a grand ambition, but if I’m honest, I’m really taking part by default rather than design. Similarly, I’m participating in “no trim spring” when it comes to the hedge at the front of our house. This is my recently launched sister movement to “no mow May”, which I hope might catch on. Sadly, our immediate neighbour has other ideas and so the hedge between our two houses looks like a horticultural version of the homeworker who wears a tie and shirt for Zoom call, but doesn’t bother to change his scruffy joggers.

When we first moved to our house, 15 years ago, the little patch of garden at the front was simply a sloping square of mossy lawn. I added a couple of flower borders, then ditched one of them and extended the other. A few years later we happily took up the offer from a neighbour to take their old shed, as they were getting an upgrade. I levelled a corner of the lawn and rebuilt the slightly shabby hut. A couple of years after that, I added guttering and a water-butt; and during lockdown we put a small pond in another corner.

The addition of the water feature spurred me into levelling what was left of the lawn, which had never really recovered from being piled high with pallets of bricks from a building project in 2015. I spent hours digging and raking, then laid new turf and spent days watering it meticulously. It looked incredible for a summer, but when winter arrived it became obvious that it hadn’t knitted evenly, and despite attempts to re-seed bare patches, it remains a state. The longer it gets in the good bits, the less you can see the naked ground in between.

Things in the back garden aren’t much better. We had a parking space built there last autumn, and there remains an expanse of grey blockwork that I haven’t yet gotten around to painting. Last weekend I went out to remove some efflorescence that had appeared a few weeks after the builders had gone, only to find it had calcified and remained unmoved when I sloshed acid over it. Hours with a stiff wire brush have barely made a dent. I know I should clear it all before I paint over it, but the ache in my arms is getting to me.

In front of the wall, I have ambitious plans to lay a new path and to use some old railway sleepers to create some tiers. But at the moment it looks like a cross between a building site and a living museum to the First World War, with piles of earth dotted about, and various planks idling in odd corners.

Yet in light of Chelsea’s apparent love of wild places, I have decided that I need no longer despair at the mess, and the hard yards still to be put in. Rather, I can see my garden as art or as commentary. I could perhaps dub it “long Covid”, a biting illustration of the pandemic’s lasting impact. Or maybe I’ll call it “work in slow progress”. By the time of next year’s flower show, I wonder how much will have changed.