Quality time in the garden doesn’t have to be spent gardening, says Nigel Slater. You also need places for food and conversation or just to sit and savour the moment. Illustration: Paul Wearing, Portrait: Jenny Zarins
Even the words ‘al fresco’ have a spring in their step. They sound jolly, even a little frisky. (I confused them with ‘in flagrante’ for many years.) Now, with sun hopefully beaming and the garden in full summer colour, is the time for some open-air activity, be it lunch in the garden or simply dozing in a deck chair.
One of the first horticultural mistakes I made was forgetting that a garden needs somewhere in which to sit. So busy was I with making vegetable beds and compost heaps, creating a shade garden and even re-laying a terrace that I gave little or no thought to where anyone might sit or eat. A place in the garden to just ‘be’.
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All that changed when I invested in a zinc-topped garden table and a set of four heavy wooden chairs, an addition that immediately became the site of early morning pots of coffee, breakfast and lunch. Soon, meetings were held in the garden and within weeks the table was covered in wine stains, olive oil smears and coffee drips. Friends could at last sit and soak up the birdsong and the tapping of the woodpecker and ponder the varieties of butterfly that came to visit. Crucially, I had somewhere to sit and work. For about six weeks each summer, I turn my garden table into my desk. Pelargonium ‘Lord Bute’ and Pelargonium ‘Attar of Roses’ are pushed to one side, their place taken by laptop, pencils and notebook. I write in the shade of a Nottingham medlar, whose canopy keeps the sun from the screen, even sending down a few late petals to fall gently on my keyboard.
Making time to sit and simply take in the delights of the garden is a must. Surely it is why I made a garden in the first place?
If I am outside, I want to be within touching distance of plants. I may be grazing on a tomato and nasturtium-leaf salad or sipping a glass of elderflower cordial, but I need to be able to lean over and stroke a leaf, fondle a fern or stick my beak into a rose. Only two feet away from my seat are terracotta pots of yew and ilex through which to run my fingers; a climbing rose – Peter Beales’ cheeky little Rosa Pippin (= ‘Beajaffa’) – and the costume-jewellery flowers of what I still call Dicentra ‘Alba’ (correctly, now the ridiculously difficult-to-pronounce Lamprocapnos spectabilis ‘Alba’.) There are foxgloves too, but they are not for touching, however tempting it is stick my fingers into their poisonous purple pixie hats.
If ever I rethink the garden path, and I probably should, I will design it so I can go from kitchen to garden table in bare feet. Coarse, sun-baked gravel does nothing for my tender English soles. Next time it would be slabs of York stone or possibly hoggin. Certainly not the pointed beads of torture I have now.
A place in which to ‘be’ as much a place in which to grow and work. What was that about ‘time to stop and smell the roses’?
Another rethink would involve a pergola of some sort over the table. Nothing too large, and probably of the rather rustic wooden variety, it would have wisteria, perhaps the charming Wisteria floribunda f. rosea, and a rose such as the apricot-buff climber Rosa ‘Alchymist’. Honeysuckle, though tempting, has a habit of dropping its sticky berries in late summer.
Eating al fresco is all very well – I remain convinced that food really does taste better outdoors – but there are simpler pleasures to be had en plein air. The ritual of stopping for coffee mid-morning or for a mug of tea in the afternoon. Short breaks that enrich our gardening days.
Evening, just as the light starts to drop, is for me the best time to be al fresco. It is then that the light is at its most gentle, the colours deeper (Salvia ‘Amistad’ is positively delicious at twilight) and the air is particularly calm and still. There is less birdsong than at an outdoor breakfast, of course, but there are mysterious rustlings in the undergrowth to ignite the imagination. This is also the time to pour a glass of last year’s damson gin, a tiny glass to sip as the sun goes down.
That said, it takes something of an effort for this amateur gardener to just sit and breathe in the garden. Within five minutes of sinking into my chair, I will spot an azalea that needs deadheading or a wayward stem that could do with tying up.
It takes a stronger will than mine to turn the pages of a book knowing the sweet peas need watering. To be honest, I am no better in the kitchen, finding myself unable to enjoy a glass of wine while there’s washing up in the sink.
This summer I will do better. There will be a glass of rosé drunk while the path is still littered with dead petals, and tea will be served (cake too), even though I really should be clearing the leaves from the gutters. Making time to sit and simply take in the delights of the garden, to breath, to smell, to hear, all the little wonders that exist in this space, is a must. Surely it is why I made a garden in the first place? A place in which to ‘be’ as much a place in which to grow and work. What was that about ‘time to stop and smell the roses’? Well, perhaps that time is now.
Listen to Nigel Slater on the Talking Gardens podcast