When we moved from our terrace in east London to a new rental in west London's Notting Hill at the start of the year, I walked through the garden, saying goodbye to the plants we couldn’t take. The sprawling magnolia that bloomed the week our daughter was born, the climbing rose so tall that it lapped the first floor windows. The yorkstone flags dotted with Welsh poppies and foxgloves, self-seeding in the cracks. The winter-blooming camellia which flowered so heavily that I remember her bowed to the ground under the weight of snow during one of the precious few snowfalls of our time there. All these things predated our tenancy, happy inheritances from a previous gardener, ours if only on a lease.
There were things I could take, though, and that is the renter’s gift. While homeowners are legally bound to leave a garden as a part of a sale, renters simply need to leave it in the same condition they found it, although most landlords will not quibble with improvements done with permission. The martagon lilies transplanted from my mother-in-law’s Scottish garden came with us, as did the dozen varieties of sentimental snowdrops shared by my friend Tania during a visit to her Wiltshire farmhouse. Along came a rhubarb grown from seed by another friend, with a little fig tree in a pot from her as well. Speaking of pots, I took my collections of well over a hundred, all terracotta, from the tiniest of antique thumb pots to great whopping ones holding tea roses and flowering shrubs.
It is oft-repeated advice that renters should garden in pots to be able to move with them, or to garden with annuals, swathing spaces with single season flashes of colour. Annuals are a great idea but while I love pots, I suspect these experts were rarely renters, because there is nothing easy about moving a garden’s worth of potted plants. They are unfathomably heavy, fragile, unpackable, unstackable and will categorically not fit in the van with your furniture, requiring a panicked second van hired at the eleventh hour, driven by a long suffering partner in the middle of the night. It is far easier to dig up a plant in the ground than move a waterlogged pot. I still cherish my beloved terracotta, but will think twice about adding extensively to the pile. The watering alone just doesn’t make sense for the increasingly hot summers.
While gardening in a rental, I’ve learned to pick my battles. The new garden is planted with a variegated euonymus, which I personally wouldn't have chosen, but it is working hard to cover the western wall, so I’ll plant a clematis to scramble through it, giving me several flower-laden months on top of an evergreen base which will be much appreciated in February. Just as a house that has been decorated in one fell swoop can feel hollow and soulless, a garden also benefits from the quirk of a few curveballs inherited not chosen. The grit in the oyster, the thrill of something unfashionable that makes a place feel real and unstudied.
Our east London garden was shaded, moist and lush, but the new one is sunny and dry. In it, self-sown hollyhocks jostle with rosemary and sage, lemon balm carpets the ground. This is putting a positive spin on things; it has been a beastly job to clear the cobwebs of this gently ignored garden—brambles and nettles at the corners, saplings planted by birds, piles of brush and plastic pots, broken concrete pavers, trees and shrubs in desperate need of a thoughtful edit and a hard prune. I knew I couldn’t tackle the task alone; with a baby in tow, what should take days would take me months. I don’t have childcare, but by God I was going to hire help to make sense of the mess. With a rental, time is of the essence, and even though we’re in the fortunate position to find a stable, long-term situation, one where we are welcome to put roots down and make it our own, you can forget the old-fashioned gardening adage of waiting a year to see what blooms.
I called Colin Stewart, a London gardener who trained at Great Dixter and was recommended to me by many of my in-the-know gardening friends. He often works alongside the best garden designers and excels in both practical and poetic gardening: he can often be found up a tree with a pruning saw but also sees planting with an artist’s eye. It has been a luxury to have his help in hourly bursts, to get on top of the clearing together, and the planting to come. His perspective on gardening feels apt for our circumstances, too. He reminds me gardening is not a static practice, a means to an end that continues as planned and planted forever. Its very nature is mutable, changeable and unpredictable so you might as well embrace the flux, even more so in a rental. What could be more grounding than tending the earth wherever you find yourself?
I’ll be planting a mix of hard-working perennials but also tossing annual seeds alongside them, hoping for a quick splash while the perennials gain steam. Climbing nasturtiums can cover a lot of empty ground and I can see morning glories twinning up the walls and sweetpeas on an obelisk to give some temporary structure. Two bare root climbing roses have gone in already, an example I think of as ‘gardener’s math’. To those that say it’s a waste of money to plant a garden you don’t own, a bare root rose is about the cost of a half-decent bottle of wine, but will grow to be three metres wide and bloom for decades to come. Moving? Just take a few cuttings. The wine will be forgotten the day after next. By the same token, for the price of a weekend in a not-even-special hotel, you can buy a small garden’s worth of plants. As a homebody, I’ll gladly take the plants and stay home.
It all comes down to priorities and effort willing to be expended, and even for the most fleeting of tenancies, some wildflower seed mix and geraniums will never go amiss. There is no forever in gardening, no ideal to achieve and then stop, the process is the pleasure, more so even than the final product. Our new garden may take time to finds its feet and we may not even be here to see its full glory. The very least though, we’ll leave a trail of roses wherever we go.
