I’m in the process of moving my studio furniture to a temporary storage. It is the one thing we did not do when said studio was built: cover the concrete floor with something more attractive and durable. It’s taken me a few years to gather the courage … it was neck and neck:  the awful dust the concrete caused versus the effort of moving out all my stuff. The balance tipped in favor of moving recently – how these mental processes work is still a mystery to me. But something shifted, and I found myself ordering planks and buying underlayment and suchlike.

Inbetween moving stuff I do light gardening stuff,  so as not to overload my arms and my back. Photo’s below are from this morning. I have the gardeners horror of slugs and snails, but this one looks very fetching, no?

I’m reading about gardening a lot these days – found a couple of very good books I may blog about later. Reading inspired me to ask myself a question: if our garden were to appear in one of these books, how would it be categorised?

– We’re in an old town, so we could be a town garden;
– We have walls all around, so we could be a walled garden;
– We have a balcony covered in creepers so we could be a hanging garden;
– We have an orangery  (yes, really!) with a number of citrus trees and palms  so we could be a mediteranian garden;
– We have a lot of plants in containers so we could be a container garden;
– We have a rooftop with succulents so we could be a rock garden;
– We have a lawn plus border so we could be an english garden;
– We have a beautiful greek urn in its own secret spot so we could be a secret garden;
– We have a number of fruit trees with grass underneath so we could be an orchard;
– We have flowers for cutting so we could be a flower cutting garden;
– We have soft fruit for picking so we could be a fruit garden;
– We have a trampoline and a treehouse so we could be a play garden;
– We have a homemade hot-tub so we could be a spa;
– We have a metasequoia underplanted with laurel and hawthorn and beech, so we could be a woodland garden;
– We have a few Derek Jarman-inspired sculptures so we could be a sculpture garden;
– We have a lot of grass and self-seeded wildflowers on top of a modern replica of an old city wall so we could be a wildflower garden.

In case you are thinking we have a huge huge plot – no, we don’t (800 m2). In case you are thinking the garden’s a crazy quilt – no, it isn’t. In case you are thinking Everdien went overboard with the categorising – here you may have a point.