In Celebration of Black and White
I spent a decade involved with the University of Bristol, as a student, researcher and teacher, and one aspect of academia I loved was that life fell naturally into discrete projects – completing a thesis, submitting a paper, finishing a teaching block – everything had a tangible and indisputable ending. The drawing of a line under whatever had been completed enabled me to reflect on what had been achieved, celebrate what had come to an end, breathe a sigh of relief and rest a little on my laurels. There was a certain satisfying black and white-ness about it. Running a business, on the other hand, had the chromatic quality of varying shades of grey – a relentless daily treadmill of problems and irritants, unyielding and unchanging.
After a spring with hardly any meaningful rainfall, followed by a similarly dry summer with relentless heat, I was once again reminded of how running a business feels — life had settled into that familiar, unwelcome daily treadmill routine. Apart from the odd day of rebellion, I spent hours and hours trudging about the garden and far-flung borders hauling endless metres of hosepipe, moving from standpipe to standpipe, in order to keep my plants alive. The prescribed quota of 10,000 steps was reached without even thinking about it. But this week everything changed. This week I have once again experienced that delicious black and white satisfaction of a line being drawn.
First, we experienced several days of heavy rain – REAL rain. It’s been many months since I’ve listened to raindrops hammering down on my velux windows, and it’s music to my ears. The lawns have been transformed almost overnight from dried-out brown to an intense verdancy – as if someone had crept in during the night and laid AstroTurf – and the borders have burst forth with roses and dahlias beaming and colourful alongside the newly lush grass. As pleasing as these effects certainly are, what is truly life-changing is that after months of daily watering, I am now released from its tyranny. I can stack the hosepipes up neatly for the winter, put away the spray guns, return my one decent sprinkler to the potting shed and stop debating – finally – whether to invest in another one. Line drawn, I am done!
The second line-drawing moment – and the reason for having to keep the garden watered and alive in the first place – was that I held my final National Garden Scheme “By Appointment” event of the year. My visitors were a group of delightful ladies from North Carolina in the US on a week-long garden tour in the south Cotswolds, completely undeterred by the rain. With their genuine interest in all things Pond, they were a pleasure to engage with and one lady even remarked that our garden was her favourite of the week. A truly uplifting end to my first Open Garden season! Having kept the garden in visitor readiness since May, I am now happy to be packing away all my Open Garden paraphernalia … bright yellow signage, bijou tables and chairs, SumUp card readers, Emma Bridgewater mugs … and I can allow the garden to let its hair down.
The black and white-ness of the line having been drawn allows me to reflect on the plants I kept alive – now thriving in the rain – the charming people who visited the garden, all 400 of them, and the £4000 raised for charity. In this laurel resting mode, I sit happily in my kitchen watching the rain hammering down outside with no urge whatsoever to pull on a raincoat and start deadheading.
13th September 2025