Well to be honest, it is one of the best jobs in the world, working outside in all weathers, seem the natural world in all its best and worse moments, seeing big trees admired for 100’s of years, reduced to a pile of splinters in seconds, the plant you have grown from a cutting, nursed it from the brink of death after forgetting to water it, bloom for the first time, a garden turn from a tangle of brambles to a site worthy of any gold medal at Chelsea, with clients that are so happy.

So what is so frustrating about being a gardener then? It’s not even the time meeting new people at parties, they tell you about their garden and what’s wrong, what can they do? Not even the question What’s that pink flower with spiky leaves? Yes we all get them at every event, que, sat in the doctors waiting room? Well no actually, I quite enjoy it, hearing about people’s gardens and their plants, it’s all part of the job and it’s a great part of it.  

For me it’s the simple fact, you can’t switch off! You look at a prefect job, the lawns are mown straight, edges trimmed, beds forked over, shrubs pruned to prefection……………………….. but no, you spot one little weed hiding underneath a leave out of site but it’s there and YOU know it’s there, it has to go………… and then you spot another and then another, then there’s a little bit on that box ball that’s not quite right, so out of come the shears again and snip oops hang on there’s another bit, hour later they go away again. You just can’t help to see the fault in the job and you hate leaving it not right. Not even to mechioned the pests, the slugs that within seconds wipe out the carefully sown seeds that’s taken 3 weeks to germinate, or the ones sown in January, carefully pricked out and potted one to bigger pots, then slowly hardened off for a few weeks, into the ground with much care and love, buckets of fertiliser, and then overnight reduced to a stub 100mm tall after the deer or rabbits have had themselves a midnight feast. Then is the overal look, the garden is looking prefect, everything is flowering to perfection, everyone says how prefect it looks, the colours, the shape, indeed just everything but………. is that yellow one just a little to yellow? Or the pink just right? The drive to perfection is always there and no matter how prefect it looks it still could be so much better!!  Then at the weekends you go for a visit to a public garden, that borders a little weedy, how come the hedges aren’t cut yet? Why on earth would you plant that there? And it goes on…………. that’s why being a gardener is so frustrating, it’s like an artist working on a picture except we are working with a living landscape that moves and changes with the seasons and time, every time we get close to perfection, goal posts move and we start again, so frustrating but such a wonderful job!