I’ve worked on my garden for 21 years – now I’m opening it up to the public

This week, poet and artist Frieda Hughes was persuaded by the National Garden Scheme to host special events in her back yard

The National Garden Scheme

I was a special event in a different context:

No poetry haggled out of words, or art

Coiled across the canvas and made shapes of.

If King Charlies were to visit I could not have tried harder;

The twenty-five who’d paid to examine my landscaping and topiary

Were each as important as he. My held breath during a period

Where not much was blooming, was released

At the last minute flowering of six-foot-tall lilies

That had unfurled their skirts of brightly coloured silks,

The pink and crimson froths of the astilbes,

The brilliant purple pourings of campanulas

From gaps, nooks, crannies, flowerpots and cracks in pavers,

Astrantia, dianthus, alstroemerias, lavender, linaria, Veronica

And the first agapanthus. From the visual silence of many greens

Sudden screams of colour blazed from the oddly made flowerbeds

And strangely shaped pathways that I’d carved from a one-time field

Into a map of the inside of my restless head.

“Oh, so beautiful,” they said, unable to imagine

All the jobs left undone that were so evident to me

And that I must finish before the second one.