I’m drinking rose geranium tea. Oo how sophisticated. It has a very delicate flavour, so delicate I think I may be imagining it, and a very pale colour. Clear. I made a pot. I put three leaves into the pot and poured on boiling water. I have another sip. Subtle. Fine. Healing.

I like rose scented geraniums. I always have, well for a very long time. You can make pot-pourri with them. Pot-pourri is a bowl of dried aromatic leaves. Choose your most elegant Chinese bowl, fill it with dried leaves and place it on the hall table. A guest may run their hand through it and release a wonderful aroma into the hall. or you can do that just before the guest arrives to fill the hall with sophistication.

This isn’t what I wanted to write. I was planning on calling it the angry gardener – I may still do that – and it was to be a rant against tidiness. And then I sipped the phenomenal tisane and all the anger disappeared. But I do still have something I want to say. It is about tidiness and complication. And weeds. That’s three things. And food. Four. Sip, sip. Calm.

What will the neighbours think? That might be the nub of it. I can do what I like in my garden because I have been a gardener all my life, I’m 71 and I don’t give a ****. Of course that’s not true or I wouldn’t be struggling along here trying to convince you of something I haven’t even started to say.

One of my neighbours stores a mattress and other discarded furniture in their garden. I feel as if I have more in common with them than I do with the neighbours who have neat lawns or pretty hanging baskets. The furniture store neighbour hacks the grass down a couple of times a year and that’s the extent of their gardening. I want to say don’t do it. Leave the grass and in a couple of years you’ll be picking blackberries. Or invest in an apple tree. Stick it in the middle of the lawn and make a circle of thick cardboard at the base and cover it with manure. Do that once a year for a couple of years and you’ll be picking apples. I get manure free from a local stables or you can buy it at the garden centre. Or make your own. Well not exactly, though that would work! I mean pile up all the organic matter you accumulate in the corner of the garden and it will turn into compost all on its own. It’s not complicated.

As you might expect my garden is complicated. I’m making an edible forest garden in a 120 square meters of town garden. At last count I had over eighty different plants in the garden, all of them with some use or function. And I have hundreds of gardening books, and of course for us all there gazillions of useful videos and blogs ( here’s another) and stuff. TV programmes. It’s overwhelming so the non-gardener, the house owner or tenant reverts to doing what the neighbours do. They put weed mat and gravel in the front to keep down the weeds (it doesn’t work btw) and they cut the lawn regularly and plant labour-saving shrubs that the garden centre provides. The garden centre grows the thing that is easiest to propagate and looks best at the point of sale. And the ghastly cycle continues.

My garden has weeds. I don’t remove any plant unless it is interfering with something I want to grow. Bare earth has weeds on it, apart from the little patch where the sparrows have their sand bath. The weeds are not weeds. They are plants. They are successful plants, they are useful plants, often they are beautiful plants. A buttercup can tell if a child likes butter!

I think I’ve said what I want to say, more or less. I love plants, I love books, I love beauty. What beauty is needs to be reinterpreted. We’ve been hijacked. One small example, beauty is not a weed free perfect lawn with stripes, beauty is a bee on a dandelion.

It is very hard to change. My garden will probably be beautiful in a conventional way to some extent – although there is no lawn – but it will also produce a lot of food and be a home for a myriad of other life – birds, insects, ants, worms and much much more. And what I am trying to get across is that your garden can be like that too, without doing anything. Neat and tidy is not natural.

If you want advice about this and you live near me, I would be happy to help. Get in touch.