Laetitia Maklouf - The Five Minute Garden

How to garden
in next to no time

Laetitia Maklouf

For my Rotter, with love.

Let me tell you a story. Its about a garden. The garden was large for its city location, and its owner had made sure that every inch of it was full to bursting with flowers. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the placement of each plant. Nature weaved its merry tapestry in the borders and the place buzzed with life. It was beautiful and magical and overgrown; a law unto itself, and people loved it, soaking up its summer bounty. But its owner spent her time swinging wildly between love and loathing for her garden. She loved the wildness and the colour, but it also made her feel panicked and overwhelmed. The grass grew out of control and her children opted for the park instead of the garden; there was nowhere to sit and relax, or eat, or walk about. The garden had got away from her and the balance between human and nature, represented by a garden, had got wildly out of whack.

This was me a few years ago, looking forlornly out of the window, with three small children to look after and wondering if I would ever have time to stay on top of the garden, along with everything else that needed my attention. It seemed impossible; I was accustomed to gardening at weekends or setting aside entire days to deal with the garden, spending hours at a time getting things back under control, only to find myself in the same situation a couple of weeks later. I stopped gardening altogether for a while, and then I made the commitment to redesign the garden with the intention of minimising my workload. The flowerbeds were dramatically reduced, and I kept to a painfully tiny palette of plants to fill them. I got rid of any and all containers smaller than 40cm (16in) wide and put in a path around the edge of the garden so that Id have easy access to the flowerbeds from both sides. And guess what? The same thing happened. That first summer, as I was enjoying the new space, that old feeling of being overwhelmed returned, just as strongly as it had before, except that this time, because my garden was no longer wild there was nowhere to hide, and when I ran out of time to tend to it, it actually looked worse than before; bare and unkempt s opposed to abundant and messy.

I realised changing my garden wasnt enough; I needed to change the way I interacted with it too. So, I decided that instead of trying to carve out large tracts of time in my busy life once in a while, instead I would go out and do something small every day. I looked carefully at my schedule and realised that in all honesty, I had no more than five minutes every day to give to the garden. I started to go out every day, rain or shine, whether I felt like it or not, and do something for my garden for five minutes. I would pick random things the quickest, easiest things first, and then I began to tackle larger endeavours, five minutes at a time, over a period of days. Sometimes I would spend more than five minutes, caught up in the moment, and find I had actually done an hour. Often I would do less than five minutes; three minutes of weeding squeezed in right at the end of a day, or two minutes of deadheading snatched while the children werent pawing at me. After a couple of months of this, I looked outside and realised this approach was working far better than I could ever have imagined. The garden was cared-for and inviting, and the lawn was mown, and my children were playing on it. But more importantly, I was enjoying my own space too actually sitting down in my own garden. Finally, it was doing the job for which it was intended; to be a happy space for me and my family to enjoy.

The purpose of this book is to take the decision-making out of the process and act as a springboard to catapult you out into your outside space; its packed with five-minute things you might want to try over the gardening year, which you can pick and choose at random when you have five minutes to spare. These little bursts of activity are set under different headings: Spruce, Chop, Nurture, Fuss and Project. I tend do one thing from each heading over the course of the week. You can find the formula I follow at the back of this book (see ), but everyone is different, and the important thing is just to begin just pick one thing at random from the relevant month in this book, and go out and start on that, because at some point in the very near future, youll look behind you and realise how very far you have come.

Happy gardening.