AS I line up stone edging to the meandering path, a nagging doubt seeks to hinder progress. A sensible observer might query the need for another path and for taking even more ground into cultivation, but my doubt does not come from increasing the extent of an already labour-intensive garden. There are numerous new plants to be accommodated and besides, this is a sunny corner with some of the best loamy clay in the place to allow it remain as part of the car-park just seemed a disgraceful and irresponsible waste.
Gardeners are good at justifying their little indulgences and extravagances, an endearing idiosyncrasy non-gardeners do not always understand.
This new bit of garden will not be a burden and will be kept quite simply, I assure myself as I quell the lingering doubt - which hangs over the matter of layout and design. The truth is, it has not been properly thought out: we have simply moved out the hedge and extended the informal path system. Perhaps it did not actually need any more thought than that, but nonetheless, the haste to make place for more and more plants subjugated thoughts about design, and the mania for collecting won out.
My doubt about the meandering path stems from an increasing pleasure and delight in formality - in straight lines or bold geometric shapes, a firm architectural layout which gives structure and bones to the garden. The geometry itself is not the whole pleasure - the other half comes by overlaying the formal plan with very irregular and informal planting. There is nothing new or startling in this, the blending of classical and romantic themes - a straight or boldly curved path where the plants can lean and flop out or a neat, trim hedge enclosing a billowing mass of foliage and flowers. Giving a garden, or a section thereof, such a treatment also requires thought on plant choice as well as on colour schemes.
My new corner allows an indulgence in those baser instincts or gardening, hoarding and collecting. Instead of being normal human being who must make do within the confines of walls, hedges or fences and accommodate choices and selections after long consideration, I have the luxury of trespassing into a green field. This moving of fences and an every migrating beech hedge - fortunately it will soon be too big to move any more - does not necessarily make for better gardening...
Perhaps I can justify my informal layout and informal planting as part of the modern craze for wild gardening. In truth it is merely an extension of what has gone on at that end of the garden for the past 25 years. It may be of interest in that it is something which might be adapted to any small garden. There is no grass and so one burden of maintenance has been removed.
Instead, a roughly rectangular area, sometimes in the shadow of a selection of dowdy trees, sycamores, ash and willow - not anyone's first choice - has a meandering pebble path through mixed planting of ornamental trees, shrubs, species roses and assorted ground-cover plants, herbaceous plants and bulbs. The informal scheme works very pleasantly, making a light, woodland effect with open, sunny clearings. The stone edge to the path has in many places disappeared under creeping plants which break up the path line, adding to a wild effect which is further enhanced by seeding foxgloves, which give a slightly mad and haphazard appearance in early and mid summer.
So a copycat exercise is under way and a relatively easy and inexpensive - apart from the cost of plants - path is down.