Gardening really marches to the beat of its own drum, in a lot of ways. You can put in hours of effort raking and weeding, but if that garden doesn’t want to grow, it won’t. Then again, you can leave your garden alone for weeks and before you know it you can end up with the most beautifully unexpected blossom.
A growing trend in maintaining a garden is doing exactly the opposite – not maintaining it at all. This is called ‘going native’. Part of this process is allowing your garden to be infiltrated by varieties of plants that simply blow in. This makes your garden a total random and spontaneous surprise. There can be seeds from just about any plant that could float into your garden, from Welsh poppies to red valerian. The less you leave the seeds, the more they will just grow in the garden wherever they want to. Through this process, you can have a range of plants growing through the cracks of your driveway paver or around the edge of your decking. As the wind and seeds do all the work, you can sit back and the beauties of watching the colour palette grow and change in your garden.
Of course, this form of gardening can easily get out of control. Therefore, while you allow nature to do all the hard work, you and your green thumb should be one step behind doing some small bits and bobs to stop things from getting out of control. From small trimming to pulling up a particularly overgrown weed, these little gardening jobs will stop the place from looking completely unkempt and unsightly.
If you love a garden, but don’t really have the knack for keeping it well maintained, why not considering giving the ‘going native’ strategy a go for a season. After all, you never know what kind of unexpected additions nature is going to give you as a present for your garden.
