A few words about weeds and the call of the wild. Last month’s Chelsea Flower Show reminded me I am not much of a fan of overly ordered gardens or overly bred plants. My favourite flowered space is almost an accident.
There is a field by our beach hut in Denmark that is a yellow sea of buttercups, punctuated by marsh orchids, serenaded by sky larks, swooned over by lapwings. A newborn foal still unsteady on its feet staggers close to its mother. The hedges are full of feral lilacs and fragrant rugosa.
The Danes see the beach roses as weeds, alien invaders. Every year they raze them. Every year they return. This idea of a plant perfectly in tune with its soil and surroundings is everything I look for.
The spring cowslip in our meadow, the dandelions on the verges, the cow parsley that lines the road and our plot… Even my wife Henri has made peace with them, infected by my happiness.
There is a patch of the beach plot which has a mind all its own (sometimes aided by me with seed saved from last summer’s growth). One year there’ll be a bank of scarlet poppies, the next a wall of ox-eye daisies. Sometimes I might enhance it with a scant scatter of nasturtium and calendula, but what the centrepiece will be is always a mystery.
There are wild lupins in a corner, deep purple, single colour. They line lots of roadside. Wild chicory, too, a perfect blue, also cornflowers and wild carrot – the peace-giving flowers of recently disturbed ground.
Plot 29 has self-seeding sunflowers this year, to go with wild Tuscan calendula. Increasingly, I incorporate these spontaneous growths, though the dozen pink hollyhocks blown from Mary’s allotment may have to be found another home. I am not wild about them, to tell the truth.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
