Have you been watching the Chelsea Flower Show this week? Perhaps you fought your way through the crowds on the site itxelf. Several of the good folks who came to our gardening club plant sale yesterday were keen on the idea of naturalistic planting and pops of colour. Planting for pollinators all year roundis much more popular these days. Those of us who grew up with cottage gardens, where veg nestled cheek by jowl with cutting garden flowers would have felt right at home at Chelsea this year. May really is a great time for a flower show and a plant sale.

"May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope" wrote Emily Brontë and that is certainly true in my garden. Whilst the spring bulbs have gone over, everything is lush and green. Perennials are reappearing to fill every available space; there are plenty of seedlings to plant out; the dahlias are underway; paeonies are blooming and, if I’m lucky (or vigilant), the roses are free of blackspot and greenfly for a while. 

I popped into the new Grow for Life garden up at the local hospice on my way back from school this week to scope out the site for my new little cutting patch and got myself stung by the patch of nettles growing at the gateway. It was my own fault - dressed for an exam briefing/motivational speech to year 13 prior to their first A Level exam rather than gardening. This is one week when we should be celebrating nettles and can legitimately pretend that any nettle patch in allotment or garden is by design rather than default.

It’s Be Nice to Nettles Week, a “vibrant annual event that shines a spotlight on the humble nettle plant” and encouraging us “ to appreciate the ecological and health benefits of nettles”. May is all about wildness rather than cultivation with No Mow May as well as this celebration of nettles, so I am leaning into it.

It’s been the best year for our front garden laburnum tree. I planted it not long after we moved into our current home and despite its deserved reputation for being beautiful but poisonous, it was a deliberate choice.

Full disclosure: this was the house I never wanted to move into. There is a particular grief in moving to a house you didn't want. Not the grief of loss exactly; more a persistent ache of resignation, of accepting that life will be different from the one you had planned. There is nothing wrong with our house in purely practical terms. It is absolutely fine. The rooms are fine. The street is fine and not too busy. The neighbours are friendly. It’s a short walk into town and to school when the children were little. Everything is fine. But fineness, when you had wanted something else entirely, can feel gently suffocating. Like living in a a world of pastel shades when you want jewel colours.