My Garden, me and my ADHD

My rambling unkempt garden with untamed jasmine over the love seat, olive trees and self-built weaving, unfinished path.

I love my garden, it’s long and rambling and brings me joy.

Gardening is a great activity — it’s physical, and requires some thought, so it helps calm my jumpy nervous system, whilst keeping my brain busy.

The garden has a plan of sorts.

The section nearest to the house has old Belfast sinks filled with fresh herbs — perfect proximity to the kitchen so I can grab them on a rainy day — and not so far away that my struggles with object constancy won’t let me forget their existence entirely.

Belfast sinks with (overgrown) herbs near the house

By the herbs there’s a giant table which a neighbour built for me. It seats about 18 people (I love to cook for a crowd, so this is perfect for me, although in the UK climate it doesn’t get used that much).

The flower garden comes next. There for beauty and ease (all perennials — plants that come back each year — no need for new planting and tending of vulnerable seedlings that will die when my poor working memory means I forget to tend and water them.

Perennials, once established look after themselves and bring colour and scent. And they keep on coming back each year!

There’s a lawn that doesn’t get mown frequently enough. It’s always my intention to keep it short, but something more interesting, and less triggering of my hayfever (yes, allergies are thought to be more frequent in those with ADHD) always gets in the way. As well as the flowers, the beds are full of weeds; bindweed and blackberry canes run riot wherever my attention is not.

I have a jasmine which rambles over the trellis that shades the love seat. When in bloom, it fills the garden with its heady scent, and I love its delicate white flowers that scatter themselves on the untended lawn. My failure to remember to trim it back each year has already pulled one fence over. I was so sure that after my wonderful neighbour and I cut it back, and he put in a new fence, I’d never be so irresponsible as to let it grow that big again.

Then there’s the shed — full of useful and not-so-useful stuff that I’ve accumulated through impulsive buys or picking up things from the street that others have discarded, and then not using them. It’s just an extension of the clutter-filled cupboards, shelves, hiding places in the house.

Pond and rockery in its early days before the pondweed I planted took over and choked the environment.

I built a small pond — I love the sound of flowing water, it soothes my adrenaline and cortisol-addled nervous system. It has a small solar-powered aerator, which is now so covered with overgrown pondweed and rushes, that it has limited access to the sunshine and rarely bubbles anymore. The whole thing is clogged with weeds and needs dredging…

Yoda oversees these beds — another impulse buy. I’m not even a Star Wars fan, but he brings calm to the space, reminding me to pause, breathe and contemplate, which is something my jumpy ADHD brain isn’t so good at.

Yoda contemplates life (and the strawberry patch)

My vegetable beds are inconsistently used. I was given Jerusalem artichokes by a generous neighbour a few years back. “Make sure you dig them up and move them each year or they’ll take over”, she suggested. That corner of the garden is choked with artichokes now. I must get out there and dig them up…when the ground is dry enough to do so and I’m not distracted by a thousand other tasks…

The greenhouse is cracked and full of junk. I haven’t grown a plant in there for years (it needs a thorough clean after a bout of tomato blight about five years ago). Half the space is taken by an old bench from the house of my childhood. For a couple of weeks, when I first put it in, it was a beautiful place to sit on a rainy summer’s day, a place to enjoy being outdoors, warmed by the sun, listening to the rain as it nourished the plants. But the glass panes are cracked and have shifted out of place and it’s no longer water-tight.

The far end of the garden is out of sight and out of mind. It’s wild and overgrown and bears witness to yet another of my unfinished projects — I started the path back in 2020 during COVID — I got almost all the way to the top — maybe 1 ½ metres (6 ft) to go. But I haven’t quite found the time or inclination to complete the last metre or so of path. That’ll be partly down to my perfectionism — the path is FAR from perfect — I didn’t put in a weed-proof membrane, so the perennial weeds make it impassable at points in the year. I really ought to pull the whole lot up and start again, so the prospect of finishing it imperfectly fills me with a sense of gloom. And re-doing it…well that seems pretty unlikely!

Raised beds of vegetables and the dreaded end of the path which remains unfinished, despite the best will in the world to finish it off. It’s now so choked with weeds that I’ll have to clear them before I get round to finishing it!

It is also evidence of my avoidant nature. I spend much time avoiding completing things. After all, I’m not up there much during the UK’s long wet winter, so what I can’t see doesn’t bother me — until I go up there and then it fills me with guilt and dread.

At the end of the garden is the garden room, which I had built to house my grandmother’s piano. I couldn’t bear the thought that the piano would have to leave the family, and my house, with its tiny, cramped rooms had no space for it, so I had a room built at the end of the garden, where my piano sits for weeks on end, un-played.

I know the piano is there, but the barriers I have to overcome to reach it are most of the time simply too great. Imagine it: I’d have to a) decide to play b) find the key for the room, c) open the back door, d) walk down the garden, e) note, with guilt, the chaos around me and the unfinished path, f) avoid the temptation to start pruning, digging, weeding, g) unlock the door, f) go inside, g) turn on the heating, h) find the music before I can i) sit down and play. That may sound like a long list of nothing to a person with a neurotypical brain, but to someone with ADHD, who panics at the idea of a multi-step process and is easily distracted, it’s reason enough never to set foot in the place.

So my wonderful, rambling, tamed yet untamed garden is a clear reflection of some of my ADHD challenges…