Junk planting - ancient washing machine, dolly tub, tin bath and galvanised bucket. Recycle, reuse, reinvent!

"...could certainly teach us all a thing or two about an element of gardening that we often neglect in our weeding obsessed, seed-growing, dead-heading frenzies - that is how to just stop and enjoy a garden. There is a lesson here on how to live in a garden, and use it for pleasure; how to sit back, take it in  and appreciate it; and take joy from sharing something beautiful with others."  
The English Garden magazine June 2012.

Huge potential - and inspiration!

Bean there, eaten that

"You just can't have an idea; you have to live your idea and learn from your mistakes - and you have to live your theories on the ground" 
Jochen Zeitz - Zeitz Foundation, Kenya

Graft or craft?

"What's more important - form or function? Where does art stop? Does raising a clutch of runner ducklings under a heat lamp constitute art? How about creating a wonderful herbaceous garden with long drifts of....plants...? Is art in the wallpaper we stare at, the bed we lie in, the food we cook? Should everything you use, every knife you eat with, every chair you sit on and every cup you drink from form part of a considered aesthetic?"
Grizedale.org

"All gardening is landscape painting" William Kent died in 1748 - but his contributions to the 'natural" gardening style which evolved into the English landscape garden cannot be overstated.

So good you could eat them

"How many gentle flowers grow in an English country garden?
I'll tell you now, of some that I know, and those I miss I hope you'll pardon.
Daffodils, hearts-ease and flocks, meadow sweet and lilies, stocks,
Gentle lupins and tall hollyhocks,
Roses, fox-gloves, snowdrops, forget-me-knots in an English country garden.
How many insects find their home in an English country garden?
I'll tell you now of some that I know, and those I miss, I hope you'll pardon.
Dragonflies, moths and bees, spiders falling from the trees,
Butterflies sway in the mild gentle breeze.
There are hedgehogs that roam and little garden gnomes in an English country garden.
How many song-birds make their nest in an English country garden?
I'll tell you now of some that I know, and those I miss, I hope you'll pardon.
Babbling, coo-cooing doves, robins and the warbling thrush,
Blue birds, lark, finch and nightingale.
We all smile in the spring when the birds all start to sing in an English country garden."
Old English Folk Song

TOUCHSTONES are...
a test or criterion for determining the quality or genuineness of a thing
a fundamental or quintessential part or feature
something that is used to make judgments about the quality of other things  

Ravishing radishes

Most gardens suffer from an "insufficiency of neglect" - Bill Sowerbutts 
late, lamented panellist BBC Gardeners Question Time

Fast gone foods

Manmade

Naturally made

Sadly, our now late Company mascot & therapist

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​"....gardens are about looking, certainly. But they are also about hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, feeling...and being, being in a place at a particular time of day, in one season in certain weather conditions, at a specific moment in a garden's slow arc of development. 
Such variables - apparently esoteric but in reality effortlessly understood by the person 'on the ground' - contribute to our perception of the genius loci, the sense of place, which can be so strong in a garden, especially if one is ready to become attuned to it, to rise up to meet it".
Tim Richardson - Author: 'Close: landscape design and land art in Scotland.'

​'I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual by creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride' 
William James - often referred to as the father of American psychology

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