Garden: A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, usually set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature.
A garden can have aesthetic, functional, and recreational uses:
Cooperation with nature
· Plant cultivation
Observation of nature
· Bird- and insect-watching
· Reflection on the changing seasons
Relaxation
· Family dinners on the terrace
· Children playing in the garden
· Reading and relaxing in the hammock
· Maintaining the flowerbeds
· Pottering in the shed
· Basking in warm sunshine
· Escaping oppressive sunlight and heat
Growing useful produce
· Flowers to cut and bring inside for indoor beauty
· Fresh herbs and vegetables for cooking
All from Wikipedia (Accessed June 2011)
A garden as a planned space.
How much is the space of Anyone’s Garden ‘planned’? At one time the buildings that were there were planned, laid out, and built, and, in some places, the plants follow and reflect the lines of the building plan even today. So, unwittingly, the builders were also garden designers.
A garden as set aside.
‘Set aside’ can be used to have positive or negative connotations - it can mean to discard or alternatively, to save. The term was much used a few years back when it was also used to describe a process of reducing agricultural production that was introduced, and later abolished by the EU. So ‘set aside’ can have connotations of ‘protected’ and ‘conserved’ or of ‘cast off’ and ‘abandoned’. Anyone’s Garden is set-aside mainly in the sense of cast off and abandoned. But it’s set aside status has produced species that people like to protect, such as orchids: Dactylorhiza sp.
A garden for us
When we sit in our garden we cooperate with nature by allowing the plants to grow – this is a kind of passive cultivation.
We observe any nature (birds, insects) that we find
We reflect on the changing seasons and we have really experienced what it is like to sit in a garden in a freezing February afternoon twilight.
But mainly, we use Anyone’s Garden to relax, not by having a family dinner on our terrace, but by arriving harassed and stressed by our week and particularly by the trials of the particular day, and slowly unwinding as we put out our chairs, and settle with flask, cake and chat.
Sometimes we read and relax. We don’t have a shed to potter in but we do bask in warm sunshine. When the sunlight and heat is oppressive we have no escape but to go home. We don’t grow useful produce. And we don’t display the flowers, they display themselves whether or not we are there and we can take no credit for them.
The Helleborine (?)
In February we were delighted to discover the small rosette of a plant that might be a broad-leaved helleborine. It was in tightly packed moss-dominated turf with close-growing ruderals such as Dandelion. 
Each time we visited anyone’s garden we took photos and resisted the urge to ‘garden’ by removing the Dandelion.
However, as April ended, we discovered one week, its blackened and shrivelled remains – presumably due to a late frost (although it had survived a bitterly cold winter).
This was the last of our Helleborine (or perhaps it may have been an orchid…)
The revisited and now familiar elements
Each visit, we find we become more attuned to the minutiae of the display of human and natural elements – this week, the electric kettle that was a feature in the south western quarter of the garden, had been smashed
… a brick in its broken centre.
Other constant features, like the mattresses, trainers, and the patterns of broken glass and pottery scattered in particular areas, are also recorded in our heads (as well as digitally).
So familiar are we with anyone’s garden that we are sure that we’d notice if these changed very much.
17th august
