Ann-Marie Powell

Here's the text with line breaks removed and paragraphs cleaned up for pasting into your webpage (I also fixed "oat my desk" to "at my desk"):

I could tell you about my medals and design awards. The books I've written. The TV. After thirty years of designing gardens for other people. I probably should, and I am grateful, genuinely for all of it, and quietly astonished some days that this is actually my life. But honestly, that's not what this page is for.

What this page IS for: what I actually think about gardens. It's about what's actually left of a gardening life once you've done the day job, the school run, the washing, and rung your aging relations to check they're managing. Colour comes into it too, obviously. Mostly, because it's what my brain seems to think in, whether I'm at my desk designing a client's planting scheme, choosing what to wear in the morning or nose to soil in my own borders trying to work out if something's a self-seeded beauty or just a weed trying to muscle in on the technicolour action. Here, I chat about what happens when a garden designer stops designing for five minutes and just watches. And, since last year, I write about what it means to garden your way through losing someone you absolutely love to pieces.

These are the words I sit down, think about and give proper time to. They're not the quick, dashed off, regurgitated ideas you might see in other gardening media. These are the ones I've been cogitating over for weeks, sometimes months, before I've got them right.

Once a month I'm also here with Laetitia Maklouf, doing something we've called How Not to Garden. It's not really about restraint for its own sake. I mean, who has three hours to potter any more, without feeling guilty about it anyway? So, it's about not wasting the time you've got, not wasting a smidge of border, not wasting a single pot, on anything that isn't earning its place. Laetitia does it in whatever she's wearing, skirts and all, in and out in five-minute bursts, grabbing her moments where she can so it all doesn't become overwhelming. I do it by vanishing for a whole Sunday afternoon when I can steal one, and coming back with dirt on both knees and absolutely no idea where the time went. Neither of us is right, which is kind of the point. We're just both fighting for the same glorious time out there in our gardens, under the sky with our plants, the bees, the butterflies and all the other wonderful gifts nature gives us gardeners.

Comment under each article if you fancy it, I read every single one, and I genuinely love knowing what's happening in gardens that aren't mine. It's always brilliant to compare notes, and even now, I'm still learning from other gardeners. Plants and people, that's my bag.

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