
Welcome back to another edition of my random ramblings…how are ya?!
One of my favourite quotes in life is from The Secret Garden which reads;
If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Incase I haven’t mentioned it before, I love being outside in nature and gardening is so soothing for the soul.
Anyway, this is the third Fleeting Thought, it’s been like three months since the last one (where have those months gone!!) and I’ve written a haiku about new leaves- you’ve been warned!
So here goes…
I’ve finally taken the plunge into organised gardening (it’s been one of my life goals since forever!) it seems to create much more work than my regular type of gardening which has always generally consisted of one of two simple methods (1) open seed packets and scatter at will or (b) buy plant, dig hole for plant, plant plant.
Actively trying to ‘plan’ it is actually quite difficult and I take my hat off to those clever enough to design entire gardens. I love flowers and nature – but not weed killer, so my garden is never gonna be as well tamed as a Wimbledon tennis court.
Something I wanted to have a go at was properly designing my very own pollinator Wildspace for bees, butterflies and creepy crawlies. I’ve been making notes of different butterfly friendly plants so that I can try to entice as many of them as possible into the garden. Save Butterflies is running an initiative to try and create 100,000 Wild-spaces be they meadows or a few pots on a balcony, so this is my input to create a little slice of bug heaven. My aim isn’t for it to be perfect – there are just a few specific points I wanted in the design (mainly that the tall things went at the back!). A lot of inspiration has come from adventuring through the local woodlands and country walks, seeing all the different types of plants springing up at random is lovely and there’s so much colour.
Just to put it out there, digging a flowerbed that’s 4 feet wide and 24 feet long isn’t fun…and took forever!!!
My plan (to use the term loosely – I don’t have it written down anywhere) includes trying to create a ‘base’ plant range of perennials that I can just plant and leave to it and have sections were I can add ‘every year’ things like corn flowers, marigolds and poppies. It’s definitely a long game because it all looks so insignificant and probably won’t be flowering in all its glory until next summer (or maybe even the one after that!).
Some of my included perennial plants are Lady’s smock for Orange tip butterflies, Thistle for Painted Ladies, Birds foot trefoil for ones like Clouded Yellow and Common Blue and violets for some of the Fritillary types. I’m hoping that it will eventually look pretty and support a little slice of nature.
I’ve also left in situ a batch of nettles for some of the UK’s most common butterflies the Small tortoiseshell and Red admiral and have purposely planted cabbages for the Cabbage butterflies (because why not).

So now for the poem…
Little striving leaves
reaching up towards the sun
life is new and bright.
Watching the new growth as little green leaves pop through the dirt weirdly fills me with a great sense of achievement (even though I’m not really doing anything) nature is truly miraculous like that.
Hopefully it will end up looking how it does in my head, but if not then I’m sure it will still look and smell great.
So I think that pretty much wraps things up for this week, as always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!
Ps. Next week I’m hoping to post some exciting bug photography!