Things are looking rosy

For those cursed with clay soil, roses are the perfect garden addition. Colourful, richly fragrant, adaptable and almost endless in variety, they define the word summer’

- Ursula Buchan

I CAN’T help it. Every time a friend tells me that they bought their house because of the wonderfully friable, medium loam soil in the garden, I gnash my teeth. How I should love to have bought such a house. But I freely chose to live in Northamptonshire, where there’s a good chance that any house for sale will have a garden on an unforgiving alkaline clay. This soil bakes hard in summer and is slippery, wet and easy to compact in winter. Sure, there are some village gardens round here that have been worked for centuries, so that they now give only pleasure and profit to their owners. But plenty have not and mine is one of them. The sole part of my garden that can boast a light, really workable soil is the border next to the redundant outside ‘privy’ and therefore, presumably, the recipient of shovelfuls of ‘night soil’ on moonlit evenings each summer until the 1950s.