A compost heap can reach sixty degrees
A working COMPOST heap steams on a cold morning, and the heat is not the sun. Bacteria breaking down the grass and peelings release energy as they work, and in a heap big enough to insulate itself the temperature climbs past 50°C and sometimes past 60 — hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold a hand in.
That heat is the point. It kills weed seeds and diseases that would otherwise be spread straight back across the beds, and it speeds everything up enormously. It also explains why a small heap never quite works: below roughly a cubic metre the warmth escapes faster than the bacteria can make it, and the whole thing sits cold and sulks.
A teaspoon of soil holds more living things than the planet holds people
SOIL is not dirt with seeds in it. A single teaspoon of healthy garden soil contains something in the region of a billion bacteria, along with several metres of fungal threads, plus mites, nematodes and protozoa — more individual organisms than there are human beings alive.
They are doing the work. Fungal threads extend far beyond a plant's own roots and trade minerals to it in exchange for sugars; bacteria release nutrients locked in dead material; earthworms move the whole profile around and drag leaves down into it. A gardener spreading MULCH is not feeding the plants so much as feeding the things that feed the plants. The good stuff comes out of the ground rather than a bottle.
The first garden gnome came to England in 1847
Sir Charles Isham, an eccentric baronet, brought a set of terracotta figures back from Germany and installed them on an elaborate rockery at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire. He was a spiritualist and appears to have meant them seriously, as representations of beings he believed were really at work underground.
His daughters disliked them and shot at them with an air rifle after he died. One survived, hidden in a crevice — Lampy, the oldest known garden GNOME, now insured for a sum that would buy a small car. Every gnome ever placed beside a PATH or a POND descends from a Victorian gentleman who was not joking.
The lawn is the odd one out
A LAWN is the only thing most people grow deliberately in order to cut it down and throw the cuttings away. The habit comes from the grazed parkland of large estates, where a smooth sward advertised that the owner had land to spare and staff to scythe it — and the mower made that look affordable to everybody.
It is also close to a desert for wildlife, so leaving the mower in the SHED through May has caught on: counts on unmown lawns find far more flowers and far more insects feeding on them, mostly from the clover and daisies already there. Most of what a gardener calls WEEDS are simply wildflowers growing where they were not invited.
The rest of the plot is in the grid: the TROWEL, SPADE, RAKE, HOSE and SPRINKLER, the FENCE, HEDGE, PATIO, GREENHOUSE, FLOWERBED and BENCH, and the SEEDS and BULBS going into the GARDEN now for something to BLOOM later.