Ah, the great British summer. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to escape it all with a holiday, or maybe you’re staying at home and have volunteered to look after someone else’s garden. Depending on whose garden, this can be a holiday of its own. Other people’s gardens can offer plenty, novelty chief among them. If you don’t have access to your own open space, looking after another’s garden is akin to borrowing a dog for the weekend, offering you all of the good bits (lazing around, dining alfresco, counting butterflies) with none of the bad (mollusc-based concerns, tidying sheds, fox poo). If you do have a garden, someone else’s can offer opportunity for stealing ideas as well as new perspectives on your own. Perhaps your beds aren’t doing too badly, after all.
If your pal’s enough of a gardener to enlist you to look after their space, chances are you’ll have an over-eager list of instructions to follow. If not, these are the crucial ones: if it’s been dry, water the containers, the veg patch and the roses; don’t go mad watering the beds or the lawn. Make sure you’re watering the soil, rather than the leaves, and do so either in the morning or the evening – anything done in the middle of the day will evaporate before it hits the roots.
If your adopted garden is full of flowers, deadheading will be key. It’s frustrating to come home and find you’ve missed everything flowering and gone to seed. Deadheading is not only quite satisfying but also comes with the spoils of a bunch to take home with you – fingers crossed for sweet peas or dahlias. Use kitchen scissors if you can’t find the secateurs and cut back anything that’s shrivelled, brown or crispy to encourage new growth. If your friends are coming home in the next day or so, cut the flowers and leave them in a glass on the kitchen table.
Harvesting fruit and veg is absolutely more in the wheelhouse of my fellow columnist Claire Ratinon, but if your friends grow the stuff then there will be things to pick. Courgettes will be plentiful, and only turn into watery marrows if left on the vine; ripe tomatoes should be gently picked and fattening peas and beans can go into a bowl, too. A salad for you, and perhaps a few bits in the fridge for your friends to return to.
Ultimately, though, the gift of looking after another’s garden comes in the reciprocity inherent in good gardening. Gardens are things to be shared, not kept to ourselves. It’s in the same spirit as offering a division of a coveted plant, an envelope of seeds from a flower you admired the last time you were there, a portion of a glut – or a glass of chilled wine on a warm evening.