The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

I ordered my roses the other day and now I’m dreaming of spring.

They won’t actually arrive for ages, of course. They’re bare-root jobs from David Austin in the UK, and they won’t come until March or April. But in a bitter February, with frost on the ground every morning, a girl can still dream.

When we moved to France, I had no idea what an obsession the garden would become. I would never have thought I’d become a bulb catalogue sort of person, the kind of woman who ordered gardening books on Amazon. I associated that with old ladies in straw hats, but one of the enjoyable things about being in my 40s is that I no longer feel the need to apologise for loving my garden.

Gardening is one of the most rewarding, contemplative experiences open to anybody. From a windowbox to a 2-acre orchard, planting things and nururing them and watching them grow keeps you in touch with the seasons and the cycle of life.

Vita Sackville-West, for all her accomplishments as a writer, was far greater as a gardener, and I like to think there’s a connection between her and me and all the women gardeners of the past and present. All sharing those private moments out in the twilight, dead-heading and listening to the birds.

I am not a bedding-plant gardener. I am lucky enough to have a large garden, and shrubs and trees are what interest me, and of shrubs, above all, roses. Which is strange, because I grew up almost hating the things.

My friend Julie’s dad had the archetypal British rose garden – serried ranks of what I now know to be tea roses and floribundas with their angular petals and brilliant colours, each in its naked patch of earth, pruned to within an inch of its life, not a weed in sight and not a greenfly either. Freud would have had a field day.

I never knew then of the existence of the Old Roses – Ispahan, Duc de Guiche, Belle de Crecy, with their furling petals. Or the striped roses like Rosa Mundi or Ferdinand Pichard. Or the once-flowering ramblers beloved of the Edwardians, or the sweetbriars with their apple-scented foliage.

I’d never heard of the viciously-thorned rugosa roses whose leaves turn yellow in autumn, or of the gigantic Rosa Filipes Kiftsgate, whose original plant at Kiftsgate Court is now 40ft high and 60ft wide. But the more I read about roses, the more I wanted them, and slowly, gradually, five years ago, I began to plant.

I don’t have much money to spare on the garden, but there are now 35 varieties of rose, and 17 of them are species roses – the wildest forms of the rose. They are all very beautiful in their different ways, but it is a beauty that has to be looked for. Rosa Pendulina is the smallest, with her purple stems and sparely-carried bright magenta flowers like corn cockles: Rosa Filipes Brenda Colvin is the largest, and her thuggish behaviour takes over more of our fallen pear tree every year – much to our delight, I should add. Rosa Rubiginosa (the Eglantyne of Shakespeare) fills the garden with the scent of Granny Smiths apples after rain, while the amusingly named Rambling Rector, who smells of white linen, covers the ground with thousands of tiny, perfectly heart-shaped petals at the end of June.

All of my roses are my favourites, and I’m glad to greet each in turn as they flower, but my favourite-most favourite is Rosa Roxburghii, currently in her third year. She is a small rose (for me) at only seven feet when fully grown and last year, for the first time, she flowered, exchanging, after all-too-brief a period, her modest crumpled petals for enormous hips covered in spines – hence her other name of the Chestnut Rose. The whole of the bush is gnarled and ancient-looking, and her leaves are tiny and frondlike. When she’s not in flower, I think many people wouldn’t take her for a rose at all, but for something more exotic, perhaps Japanese in origin.

It is very pleasurable to think of gardening when you cannot garden, because of frost or snow or – in my case, a streaming cold. So although I only ordered yesterday, I am already planning my next order, to be fulfilled in autumn.

To order David Austin roses, click here.

Mmn. I have a feeling I did something wrong here…

As so often when I try something new, the first attempt is a dismal failure. My bokashi compost is a load of old skank.

I was so excited when I bought these things – two ‘family size’ bokashi bins that were so clean and neat and – I fondly thought – would save me the endless slog to the compost heap and back in my leaky Uggs (note to self  – next time put the compost heap closer to the house).

I dutifully layered my household scraps with my bokashi starter, and drained off the liquid to use as drain cleaner, but being me, managed to fill both bins (two month’s capacity) in a week. This is what happens when you decide to make 40 jars of apple compote.

Still, so far so good. The fermenting compost smelled very nice (since it was mostly apples) and the liquid actually looked quite a lot like cider. Come to think of it, it practically IS cider.

Anyway. The only problem was, it didn’t seem to be breaking down. And now, after leaving it for three months, it’s become perfectly apparent that it isn’t. I tipped out both composters just now, and all that’s in there is a compressed brick of kitchen paper and food scraps, looking pretty much as it did when it went in. Nothing like the pictures of what it’s supposed to.

Oh la. Back to the drawing board with this one. Doubtless I didn’t use enough bokashi or something…