My eclectic taste in reading has led me to old garden books and a quote that appealed to me about gardens apparently written by Gertrude Jekyll about a century ago.

‘A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience careful watchfulness; industry and thrift; above all, entire trust.’ 

There is, of course, an enormous history of gardens. The Romans always travelled with a chest full of herbal plants, starting the growth of herb gardens all over southern Europe and Britain.

Many of these plants originally came from places like Egypt where they had already established many culinary and medicinal uses of these plants.

This all means that gardens were more than just the aesthetic surrounds of our home as we see them today. In the pre-industrial economy, gardens were an important part of the food and health systems.

So, they understood that if you plant sage, thyme or rosemary around cabbage it will do well, planting borage near strawberries will also help them grow and parsley encourages bees. 

These days we call it companion planting but in days gone by it appeared to be a haphazard mixture of plants – herbs, vegetables and fruits in different areas of the garden.  Thus, like many of the things we now do on the basis of science, there was an historical precedent.

We often talk about understanding our soil and one ‘old wives tale’ was that if you want to know when to sow, take your trousers off and sit on the ground.

Essentially this was about understanding if it was warm enough to start spring planting.

There are, of course, lots of old gardener’s tales. 

One I particularly liked was about old shoes. Back in the day when they were made of leather, it was recommended that you pull them apart and remove any rubber, plastic or metal and bury the leather bits in the garden. Apparently, they are highly recommended for peach trees.