Access All Areas

Are you a fan of small flower borders? Or does your garden sway towards the impenetrable jungle vibe. Or, do you like the equally as impenetrable, but immaculately kept vibe? I do think the only people who choose the latter are those that employ someone to do it though. Or they’re a glutton for punishment. I’m particularly talking about hedges here. Hedges that you want to be perfectly square, but are tucked in away behind an awful lot of other things that get in the way when you’re trying to achieve that flat face and crisp corners.

Generally, if said hedge is in your garden, you attempt the hedge twice and either a) decide it looks better au naturale, or b) re-organise it and get some access happening. Access that doesn’t include squashing a ladder, and yourself, in between a pot of (very spikey) bougainvillea and another smaller, but very solid, and twiggy shrub. And then squashing yourself, and the ladder back out and in between matching pots and shrubs at 1 metre intervals down the path (speaking from experience. Obviously garden was owned by someone else and I’m the one that has to try to maintain it!)

Personally, I love rambling jungles, but in my own garden, I also love easy paths. Pathways can make life interesting too, a deep garden bed with a meandering path will draw the eye and give you somewhere to explore. It also makes pruning a lot, lot easier. And cleaning up the mess you make when pruning. Granted, you can leave the prunings where they fall and claim you’re into ‘chop and drop’, but chop and drop generally doesn’t extend to whole entire branches and even I try not to be that lazy.

My front garden path helps people find their way through all my flowers!

While I used to just mulch a pathway - and that’s always a good start - I found, that as I encourage self seeding, the pathway would inevitably get skinnier and skinnier as I manoeuvred my way around plants that I should have transplanted but didn’t. These days I put down large pavers as steppers and am ruthless (mostly) about removing plants in between them (at least by the time they’re too high to step over). Or, I just pick up and move the paver to go around the plants I haven’t moved (because things ALWAYS seem to self sow easier right next to where you want them!). Either way, the path stays at least a pavers width, and I can find my way through the jungle!