We have parts of the garden which I think of as specially ours. This is because they flower in the spring, when we don’t have visitors. Though, strangely, in this year of maybe no visitors at all, we were able to share one of our spring joys. Charles has planted 50 or so Erythonium Pagoda in the Woods every year almost since we first came, so the result is now glorious. On Easter weekend we were able to invite neighbours to come and enjoy them, which they could without encountering us or even entering the garden itself. (And someone left a little Easter gift) In the circumstances it was a pleasure to be able to offer a little joy.

I wonder how many gardeners are shocked by the idea of two acres focused simply on one plant?

But generally the summer garden, May to September, is shared with the visitors, and their contribution helps fund the garden. This is essential and will get more and more so as we get older and need more help. This Coronavirus year will be different though and we may have the novel experience of having the garden totally to ourselves, while we are quietly bankrupted.

I was thinking about this when Charles suggested he might do the mowing today and I realised that it does look as if it needs doing but the payoff will only be for us. In summer, like the hedge maintenance, it’s an essential task, to keep the garden looking all right, like hoovering the house before visitors come. And can be difficult to fit in when the weather’s bad and there are many coach parties to fit it in between. So this year if it rains a lot will we bother? Just for us?

I didn’t ever make this garden to be a visitor attraction. I’ve come across such gardens and they’ve shocked me. People frame their design and planting around what they imagine visitors expect. And they’re probably right. But perhaps inevitably gardens lose their distinctiveness and special character this way? Plas Brondanw is an interesting case in point. Originally Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s private garden, it had very few flowers in line with his preferences and aesthetic. Now, obliged to attract visitors to fund the garden, it is flower full and a completely different garden to the one his granddaughter showed me round some years ago, when it opened with an honesty box. See my thoughts here.

So Veddw never was intended to be a visitor attraction and while I’m alive may never open every day along with a cafe and a shop. It was truly a totally self indulgent and quite mad exercise, made because at a very low time of my life with my career killed dead by illness, I needed and wanted a garden and the only way to have that was to make it. As it were, by hand, as we lacked both funds and help. (See The Bad Tempered Gardener)

And still, it’s for us, me especially. Charles enjoys it and, critically, he enjoys it’s heavy demands, fortunately. But for me it remains a compulsion, and I need to always keep improving it, bringing it closer in all it’s multitude of parts to a imagined perfection, each month of the year. Well, maybe winter is a rest for all of us, garden included.

But inevitably the garden is now being informed by our consciousness of visitors. I do now focus the planting on the months when we are open, attempting to have something worth seeing everywhere in (sigh) May, June, July, August and September. Bit of a challenge. But these are not bedding plants and so they should all happily flower for just the two of us this year. And I will still be driven to be thinking of and creating ways to improve every one of those months, because I’m driven that way, regardless. So that minimises changes caused by no visitors.

What may be different is the pressure. The need to have the garden as tidy as possible. The need for the weather to be good for a coach party. (Oh, yes, I do feel responsible for such things). The need to meet and greet. Charles tells me I will be rejoicing every Sunday when we can’t open as we would have been doing, and, of course, he’s right. Peace and quiet and a good book….. But at the same time I will be aware of what the wow is in the garden and that there’s only us to be wowed. What’s that worth? Well, a lot, in the evening, when we enjoy such things, glass in hand. And Charles is a photographer, with a commission to be photographing Veddw this year, so there will be a record of what you all missed, I hope.

In fact, it’s all about the ambivalence that I never escape. I ordinarily and inevitably feel two contradictory things at once: exhausted by the mere idea of the garden out there demanding time and effort, and pleased that we have something which inescapably demands that we get fresh air and exercise. Tired at the demand to continually improve the garden and to publicise it to bring in the much needed visitors, and excited by the prospect of people coming to see our latest efforts. Depressed by the thought that I can never retire, and glad that I will never be wondering what on earth I’m for. Desperate for solitude and delighted by appreciative and perceptive visitors.

And this year I will be pleased by the solitude and devastated by the lack of visitors. All at once.

And – will there be hosepipes left lying around? Wheelbarrows left out? Dust and debris left on the Reflecting Pool surface? Will there be (more) weeds? Unmown lawn? Shaggy hedges? Will we read more? Relax more? Eat and drink more? Seems that we will find out….the cancellations are coming in daily now.