VIDEO: The garden is the perfect place to unwind

DO YOU ever feel the world is whizzing past, that it would be wonderful if things could just stand still for a moment, that you would love a ‘time out’ to just find your feet again for a moment.

Life and the world doesn’t work like that however, the world won’t stop so it’s up to us to pause. We all need time out every so often, time to ourselves to ponder and reflect.

The garden is a great refuge, offering that place of solace, where one can step out from the real world for a while and get back to that most basic of all endeavours, working with the soil.

How often have you started a ‘quick’ job in the garden to find yourself still out there five and six hours later, one task having led to another. Now is the time to dead head Camellias and Rhododendron and you can lose yourself in amongst the foliage and dead blooms as everything else is forgotten for a while.

Time too to cut back these Spring beauties as soon as they have finished flowering. There is quite a short window of opportunity for pruning Camellias, Rhododendron, Azaleas, Pieris and Magnolia.

Prune them over the next few months as the blooms finish; if left until autumn, it will result in the removal of next springs flowers, as these plants all produce spring blossoms from buds developed the previous autumn.

Beds need to be weeded now before you blink and the weeds colonise every square inch. Many of us tend to put weeding on the long finger not wanting to commit to the task but have you noticed that once you get the gloves on, the trowel, spade and hoe together and stick the secateurs into your pocket and go to pull a few weeds, how easily and quickly the time slips by.

It’s working with the soil you see, it’s therapy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just talking about work in the garden being therapeutic, no I’m talking about even leaving that to the side for the moment and really taking a breath.

I go out last thing at night just before I join the world of rapid eye movement with my cup of coffee and just sit down outside for a short while.

And no the coffee doesn’t keep me awake, I find myself turning into my father who used to bring a flask of coffee to bed with him in case he would wake so he could pour himself a cup to put himself back to sleep, but I digress, this nightly ritual has become important to me. It’s a moment in the day to myself, time to contemplate and just relax.

I have had to learn to stop seeing ‘jobs’ that need to be done, I have to not see the weeds and dead heading that await tomorrow and just admire.

It’s amazing what you notice when you pause; bats and late night birds flying above, the stars and whatever messages they have.

Amazing too what we must miss when we are so wrapped up in the real world and too preoccupied to notice what is happening in the natural world around us, bees pollinating, greenflies attacking, ladybirds fighting back, birds singing, children playing, and all the other magic that is happening every day in the garden.

There is a stillness about the garden and a stillness about night time that is calming. We all have busy lives and we all need these contemplative times to just ‘be’.

It doesn’t matter what kind of garden you have,whether it is a pristine, manicured contemporary, highly designed space or more like a wild flower meadow with scant attention paid to horticultural principles. It is your outdoor space and if a man’s home is his castle then a man’s garden is his refuge.

The late Gardeners World presenter Geoff Hamilton was developing a Paradise Garden in his own garden at Barnsdale in the UK.

If you have time, search YouTube to see these episodes of the programme which turned out to be his last before he died in 1996. Do yourself a favour and watch Geoff as he builds his hidden garden.