Flowers are evil, they make me sneeze.

I've never been much of a garden person. God knows my parents tried to get us interested, even gave us our own little corner of flowerbed & veg field, but both me and my sister turned out pretty apathetic towards gardening. I did, however, always enjoy the fresh veg and fruit you could find all over the garden. In my teens we moved from a house with a field in the back to one with a proper (and quite fancy) garden, so the space allotted to veg & fruit was quite a bit smaller. My parents desperately tried to grow things for a while, but most stuff refused to ripen in the shade, so by now they're down to a few no-hassle berries, salad and herbs. I never really had a garden afterwards, so I stuck to keeping a few herbs on the windowsill until they died of neglect or overuse. Then, about two years ago, I ended up living in a nice old house with a decent sized garden.

The thing is, though, that it's a flower garden. With the exception of a few strawberries and an ancient cherry tree there's nothing you'd usually eat around. There's a rose garden, and some nice little flowerbeds, and a few trees, but it seems like the house, in its late 20s grandeur, turns up its nose at the mere notion of growing food on its grounds, like a lowly poor person who has to do such things. At least our neighbour downstairs – lovely, but ancient, rich & old aristocracy – seems to think so. She's usually excited when we talk about ideas for the garden, and while she didn't object to us planting stuff, it was clear it wasn't something she was overly happy about.

We'd been talking about it for a while, but lately “we could” turned into “we should”, so we picked a sunny spot, and today (finally!) headed out to buy some plants. Not a lot, really, but it's still quite exciting. Lots and lots of herbs (nomnom), and I caved & bought some stuff that's hard to find (fresh peas), or expensive (artichokes & chillies), or of a bad quality (tomatoes :( ) over here. Maybe I went a bit crazy. We both don't really know what will grow here, since we're from up north where it tends to be cold & rainy, but there definitely ought to be peas. We'll see about the rest.

So apparently I can get into gardening as long as it involves food. I don't really “get” flowers. I mean, its nice to have dots of colour in the garden, but there are easier ways to achieve that than nicely groomed flowerbeds. I guess my ideal garden would have a patch of grass for sitting-in-the-sun, and food, mostly berries, veg and herbs, maybe two nice fruit trees for a hammock. No flowers. Flowers are evil, they make me sneeze.

So I guess the obvious question would is, what would your ideal garden look like?