I’m not one for new year’s resolutions – except when it comes to my garden
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With a new year comes new plans, but don’t forget to relax in and enjoy your garden at this time of year, too. I don’t love gardening to-do lists – they make it feel too much like work – but I do think there’s value in thinking about what you’d like to do with your garden this year. Perhaps you haven’t been out in it for weeks, or maybe just for a few minutes here and there, to add the sprout leaves to the compost bin. But while January might be the sleepiest time in the garden – perhaps a snowdrop swelling somewhere, but otherwise fallen leaves and perennials tucked well beneath the earth – it’s still the start of a new year.
![[Alice Vincent]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/03/28/Alice_Vincent.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I have never been a huge one for new year resolutions, but I make gentle exceptions for my garden. Gardening is a practice that exists in the temporal space of hope. At this time of year, we imagine warmer days and flick through seed catalogues (if you want something more substantial, I recommend Katharine S White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of the New Yorker fiction editor’s columns reviewing 1950s seed catalogues). The whole horticultural year unfurls before us: what will we do with it?.
Last year wasn’t, all told, a big gardening year for me. I wrote a book and the baby became a toddler who liked to stack flower pots. When I did get time outside I mostly used it to sit in the arbour, reading a book. Actually, that was something that I resolved to do this time last year – to spend more time being in the garden and less time doing. It taught me a lot, namely that a well-enough planned garden will look after itself quite happily, and that a good relationship with a garden is like any other: it benefits from time investment.
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