'Edging

Smugsmugsmugsmugsmug

‘Edging’ is very ‘in’ right now in the sex world. Of course I have no first-person knowledge of this (I almost wrote “first hand”), I heard it from a friend (don’t worry, family).

Hedging, on the other hand, is not hot right now. Well, hedgerow is very hot right now - growing it, preserving it - but hedges? It feels like they’ve gone the way of lawns. Which is to say that only the most prosaic, repressed, suburban gardener would consider including a hedge in their garden schemes.

Hedges = privet = suburbia = mundanity = mid-life crisis = babysitter murdered with the garden shears and buried under the patio. I don’t make the rules.

(I also don’t mean to make light of men murdering women because that is truly no laughing matter).

[ Front garden the day I got the keys, 2021 ]

The first ‘gardening’ I did when I moved in here was to pull out the very ugly hedge in the front garden. And ever since, the front garden has been a hellscape.

Not that I regret my actions, I don’t at all. The front of the house needs all the light it can get given the dark shroud of municipal tree canopy that engulfs us from spring until autumn.

I don’t know what kind of tree it is, I don’t want to know. It is helpful not to humanise the enemy. But each autumn it takes a massive dump of leaves in the front garden so that one is wading through knee-high, soggy mulch on entering and exiting the house for week after miserable week.

Yes, yes, I know it is very good for the mind, body, and soul, to have a large tree sucking up CO2 and being green and things. Yes, yes, aren’t I lucky to have all that mouldy leaf mulch. No. I don’t care. It is terrible.

Ironically, when I first viewed the house in 2021, it was this very tree that sold it to me. I had viewed 10 identical houses on the estate, but here, walking into the attic bedroom, all I could see was blue sky and lush, fluttering leaves. Like sleeping up in the treetops, I thought. Sold.

Well, I wasn’t a gardener then. I was still doing the slave-to-capitalism thing. What a fool I was.

I have a particular fondness for London front gardens ever since reading Ben Dark’s ‘The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 12 1/2 Front Gardens’, a book glorifying our public-facing parterres. First impressions are everything, after all, and our home facades say as much about us as our face facades.

Please read that book. I’ve told you already, like, five times.

Aside from the municipal tree, there are many other challenges for the hellscape garden.

Most recently, for a minute, I had narcissus bulbs growing in a little pot on the window ledge. But something/one kept digging up the bulbs. Whatever it was - fox, squirrel, cat, or all three in cahoots - ignored the two large pots of bulbs and focused their vandalism on the one small window box. Each morning was a massacre.

Then one morning I walked out of the house and found half an Oreo packet ‘buried’ in there. There was one biscuit in the bottom of the packet. What treasure. Oh yes, what a good hiding place…

[ The local wildlife are messy eaters, 19 January 2025 ]

Then, something pooped on it. Literally took a shit right in the middle of the pot. That was it. I moved it into the back garden so I didn’t have to look out onto a churned up litter box. The remaining bulbs have grown on there, unmolested.

The other London front garden pest is, obviously, the human. Man, woman and child, there are those who will toss a crisp packet over a neighbour’s low wall rather than carry it home, or to the nearest municipal bin (I must write to the counsel about installing more of these). A sure sign of a sociopath if you ask me, though not specifically listed as part of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM.

Anyway, having pulled out the existing hedge I was left with a somewhat unsightly, empty bed, and tried to pretty it up on a (very tight) budget by putting down and filling gravel grids. I thought light ‘Cotswold Stone’ would be cute. Let me tell you, it isn’t. It is now mostly green and mouldy and looks terrible. I’m certain that the scruffy stones mean people throw things into my hellscape instead of my neighbours’ terribly smartly paved front garden. Broken window theory case study.

[ The Oreo incident, 15 December 2024 ]

I have often thought longingly about having my hellscape smartly paved over, but, while I don’t know how much it would cost, I know I couldn’t afford it.

Last summer, I ordered a big, cheap-as-chips, wooden, raised bed, filled it with compost, grit etc at vast expense, and endeavoured to grow various things. This was before I realised that from March until November the hellscape is in perpetual shade. Lesson expensively learned. The raised bed rotted away in less than a year, and I paid the counsel a small fortune to come and take its mouldering carcass away for recycling. False economies.

All of this is to say that I have gone through bursts of enthusiasm to improve the appeal of my curb, followed by long periods of simmering hatred and passive aggressive inactivity.

This week was a ‘burst of enthusiasm’ week. I tidied up the plastic muffin casing left by a thoughtful passerby, the weird, brown tissue paper that had blown in from somewhere, and set about tempering its hellishness.

I think I told you that I pulled out my Rosa ‘Rambling Rosie’ in the autumn. Well, on a whim, I replanted her in the front garden and after a dose of winter sun (because until the tree regrows its leaves, she does get quite a bit of light) she is sprouting healthy growth.

Had it been any other rose I probably wouldn’t have bothered trying it in the hellscape, but over the almost two years I have had her, she has proved herself practically bomb proof. She’s a large, mature specimen now and it seemed a shame not to give her a chance. On Tuesday I ‘tied her on’ to the front of the house and we will see whether she can survive the coming months. I do love the idea of rambling red roses on the front of a cottage like mine. I dread your comments on my pruning/training techniques. Please remember I am unapologetically self-taught.

[ Rosa ‘Rambling Rosie’ ready to put on a show, 26 February 2025 ]

But more importantly, the solution to the question of prettying up the hellscape is obvious, and has been right in front of my face the whole time. Well, not right in front of my face, its a couple of blocks away, but still.

Many say - most recently, Alan Titchmarsh in a Gardener’s World podcast I was listening to - walk around your area and see what is growing well and happily nearby. This is a particularly instructive exercise here, because the estate is streets and streets of identical houses, and mostly in a grid.

Two streets away is a house exactly like mine, under a municipal tree exactly like mine, and the front garden has the most spectacular hydrangea hedge. I have admired it before, in all seasons. I don’t know that they ever prune it, but certainly they leave the dead heads on over winter, so it provides year-round interest.

I love hydrangeas. Not only for their flowers, but because they’re such a useful plant. Happy in part-shade, happy in wet, happy being pruned back hard (good for small gardens). Unfussy and spectacular. How is it that I’ve slept on this totally obvious solution all this time?

Yesterday I set out to remedy this oversight. The dogs and I drove down to Wisley between showers to browse their selection. I had a browse online beforehand, but in this instance buying online wouldn’t do. Specimens, I decided, needed to be fairly mature, and ideally at least as tall (if not taller) than the low wall already.

[ Hydrangea ‘Strong Annabelle’ at RHS Wisley, 11 August 2023, photograph by me. #Inspo ]

I was bracing myself for the cost. Browsing online I knew even one mature ‘Annabelle’ specimen (one of the most celebrated varieties and a classic white mophead with a reassuring AGM) would be a stretch. I would need at least two, but probably three or four, at least in the beginning, to have a decent hedge.

Imagine my SHEER GLEE at arriving to find that Wisley were offering decently tall ‘Annabelle’ specimens for £10 EACH! VOILA! A HEDGE FOR £30! HAHA! SMUG SMUG SMUG. Each was taller than the low wall. TEN POUNDS! A HEDGE FOR £30! SMUGSMUGSMUG.

I rushed back, smugsmugsmug all the way home, and immediately planted them.

They look… ridiculous. Currently each is just a narrow bundle of sticks.

[ Hydrangea ‘Strong Annabelle’ at RHS Wisley, 28 July 2024, photograph by me. #MoreInspo ]

And here’s the pinch re gardening. Everything takes so bloody long. Unless you have BUCKETS of money and can buy very mature everything. No instant fixes here in budgetville. I know that at their mature size they will be enormous, and that at that stage three will probably be too many, but by the end of summer ‘25 I hope there might at least be a bit of a hedge in the hellscape.

Currently it is an uninspiring sight. My “young professional” neighbours, with their pristine porch where, as soon as a leaf falls it is immediately expelled by the fastidious husband, must look over and think with even more distain than usual “we live next to a lunatic”.

But these are people whose religion is the gym, who sit in the evenings in their Brilliant White living room with their operation-suite ceiling lights blaring, and whose garden has an exercise-yard vibe - high fencing, artificial turf - and contains only a huge L-shaped sofa that the husband awkwardly sprawls on to tan in the summer. He is the kind of man who frequently washes down the outside bins. So who is the lunatic really… Who should be looking at WHOM with a mixture of loathing and pity? EH?

I’ll keep you posted on progress of the Hydrangea hedge. God, I hope I’m right that the ‘Annabelles’ will grow. I can’t face yet another very public hellscape failure. I dream of arriving home and walking through a huge, fluffy cloud of giant, white mopheads in August. Imagine what the neighbours would think then… Stay tuned.