I thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought that because the natural world is free, and because gardening is principally about doing, rather than getting and spending, that gardeners would be hard to beguile. But I was wrong. Like the rest of the population, they have taken up shopping as a hobby.
I thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought that because the natural world is free, and because gardening is principally about doing, rather than getting and spending, that gardeners would be hard to beguile. But I was wrong. Like the rest of the population, they have taken up shopping as a hobby.
There was a time, definitely in living memory, when no one spent much money on their gardens. All but the wealthiest and most ostentatious grew their ephemeral flowers and vegetables from seed; swapped cuttings, bulbs and perennial divisions with their neighbours, so that the same gladioli and Michaelmas daisies flowered in every garden in a street; and ordered trees and shrubs, which were delivered only in the dormant season, from nurseries which they knew only from catalogues.
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