Anne Wareham

Thursday

Anne Wareham

What to do with a squirrel (without getting prosecuted)

From our UK edition

Gardeners are up against it. There are thousands of garden pests, exciting new ones discovered every day, and few remedies left with which to fight them. The wonderful cure-all chemicals we once depended on have long been banned — they ‘cured’ a little more than was intended. And how do you repel that king of garden pests, the alien grey squirrel? Squirrels destroy baby birds, bulbs, fruit, young trees just as they begin to look like real trees, and bird feeders too. Not (yet) the human variety of bird feeders, but the peanut and seed containing varieties. At this time of year they are frantic for food and liable to chew up your beloved buds; the females become aggressive in spring and can attack.

Thursday

Anne Wareham

How the politically correct garden grows

From our UK edition

Next week is ‘Hug a Slug’ week. Well, come on, you did believe it for a couple of seconds. We’ve all grown so used to the fog of humourless eco-rectitude that has settled over our gardens that you probably didn’t even blink. No right-thinking (let alone left-thinking) person these days would dream of paving their front garden (bad for drainage), using a bag of peat-based compost (very un-green) or a nice toxic pesticide. It’s all too feasible to imagine we might suddenly to be told by the RSPCA that slugs had rights too. The apparently innocent world of gardens, dedicated, you might suppose, to pleasure (both private and in the public sphere); to aesthetic delight and intellectual challenge, has been taken over by the righteous brigade.

Saturday

Anne Wareham

Please shut the gates

From our UK edition

Eighty-five years ago the National Gardens Scheme was created and blighted gardens in the UK forever. And in this anniversary year we will be bored silly by the praises sung of it. Starting as a scheme to let everyone, even the hoi polloi, into posh gardens for a donation to charity, it now dominates the garden world, tainting all it touches. Somehow the belief has grown that the gardens under the scheme are great, quality gardens. The reality of their predominant mediocrity can never be confronted because, my dear, it’s all for good causes. Good gardens, awful gardens, nonexistent gardens such as Antony Woodward’s rather vacant plot on an inaccessible Welsh hillside — all may come to the party and be bathed in a rosy glow of goodwill and piety.

Saturday

Anne Wareham

The emperor’s new weeds

From our UK edition

Even a dreadful garden will receive warm praise if you open it to the public – as Sir Roy Strong has proved There is no garden in Britain so awful that someone won’t describe it as ‘lovely’. Especially if it is associated with a celebrity. I recently listened to Sir Roy Strong on the radio oozing complacency as he discussed his garden at the Laskett and why it should be saved for the nation. He made a virtue out of its disorder: ‘If a giant thistle seeds itself in the middle of the kitchen garden my head gardener just lets it grow there… and people love that.’ Oh no they don’t. If there is one thing most garden visitors can’t cope with, rightly or more possibly wrongly, it’s weeds and untidiness.