How does your garden grow?

Children are the biggest allies of dandelions. An eagrly seized prize and raptuously blown to the four corners. They are also beautiful in photographs against a setting summer sky, and are the most delightful and whimsical in artwork.

I do marvel at their hardiness, growing in the toughest of conditions to bring a splash of yellow to places too inhospitable and dry for anything else. The yellow amongst the stones in the driveway. I stopped with my daughter the other day to wonder at the places they manage to grow. To thrive where nothing else can.

The docks, though their roots seem to be 3 miles deep and don't brighten up the garden half as much. And creeping buttercups. We keep trying to have a veg patch, but the wild exerts it's control again before the seasons end.

The biggest problem is grass though, the march of the grass is relentless, and as the seed heads are another ingredient in children potions they get help to spread in a nice mud pie. it is a problem living downwind of fields.

The current bushes do well here, red and white and black. And gooseberries, which are resiliently seeding spiky shrubs all over the garden, partly driven by a small child who loved to eat them sour and throw them half eaten around the garden.  I don't mind the blackbirds taking their share of them, especially when you are proffered a handful and expected to eat them all.

The old plum tree doesn't often bare much these days, what with the bullfinches nipping the buds in spring, or the wasps tunnelling drunk when ripe.

Flowers are hard to grow when you have a child who picks them all and dissects them. I call her my little botanist and got her a marvellous book to fuel her explorations. 

We inherited a gardeners garden, but moving in with a baby meant it's half wild again now, but it's full of wildlife. I like all the small trees around the edge. In the summer you are hidden by the green, and can lie while the thrush comes out of her nest and hops around on the shorter areas of grass -a mix of cut and strips/corners of un-mown to have variety of habitat. 

That sounds lovely and an exciting environment to grow up in. There is something different about finding out or identifying plants from books than searching online.

The garden is most definitely my daughters most of all. She's grown up in it, making little pathways and demanding the nettles be removed from the places she likes to hide. And there is a good sturdy climbing tree, and a surprising number of places to hide when you commandeer your mums green coat and fashion a mask of leaves, a game of hide and seek is actually tricky. (Though apparently sitting in the greenhouse doesn't count as a good spot, I did try some what).

The garden is most definitely my daughters most of all. She's grown up in it, making little pathways and demanding the nettles be removed from the places she likes to hide. And there is a good sturdy climbing tree, and a surprising number of places to hide when you commandeer your mums green coat and fashion a mask of leaves, a game of hide and seek is actually tricky. (Though apparently sitting in the greenhouse doesn't count as a good spot, I did try some what).