Читать книгу The Organic Garden - Allan Shepherd - Страница 26

Unless you’ve just bought a new-build house, you’ll come into a garden as a small link in a great chain of people who have come before and who will enter after. New-build gardens come without any of the emotional and physical clutter of other people’s plants, sheds, ornaments and rubbish to worry about. If you’re starting work on an old garden, it’s rarely advisable to tear the whole lot down and start again. It takes up more energy, materials, time and money and is not environmentally, financially and emotionally sustainable. Decide what you can live with and work with what you’ve got.

Whether your garden is new or old, it takes a good year to get to know it well enough to really start pulling a plan together. Plants are either sun-loving, shade-tolerant or semi-shade tolerant and the shade cast in your garden will vary from month to month over the whole year (see page 68). You’ll need to learn how other weather conditions such as rain, wind and frost affect the garden (see pages 72–85), because they will all affect plant growth too. If you’re planning to put in fencing, hedging or any structural elements, you’ll need to site them carefully to make the most of these conditions (see page 38). You’ll also need to know what kind of soil you have – clay, sandy, boggy, dry, stony, rich, poor, acid or alkaline – and what sort of plants will grow there (bog-loving, drought-tolerant, acid- or alkaline-loving, and so on). For the sake of clarity I’ve put all this important information in Chapter three.