I read or heard this somewhere ages ago, although I’m totally unsure where. The where is irrelevant really as this statement is very true.

When learning about your garden, or in my case the school grounds that I look after, there are so many things you can’t know when you first turn up. Here are just a few:

• Where does the sun sit across the day and across the year-which areas always have sun, which always have shade?
• What areas are always, or nearly always, dry due to being in the rain shadow of a building?
• What is the plant, or plants, that you have never, or rarely come across that you know next to nothing about-in my job there is always at least one, if not several, at every school I’ve worked at.
• Where does the water flow to after rain-sometimes it’s as clear as day, others not until the rain appears
• There is nearly always a real nasty weedy area in school grounds, that has been left and left-and takes a long time to fix (although they expect that you can spray with chemicals and the weeds will be dead minutes later-not best practice and weeds take days to die at best).
• What hedges grow like crazy and which barely do anything-some of this is weather dependent but even then some just like sitting still!

There is also the opinions of people-as private schools you do get so many that are quite happy to share their thoughts, both good and bad, thinking they know best. Of course it’s nice to get compliments, but the not so nice ones are an irritation. I say this because those that comment are not looking after the school grounds, they look after a home garden and feel their opinion matters more on then they do! That’s the way of life though I suppose.