I’m fortunate enough to work from a posh outhouse in the back garden. Known as The Hut, it could grandly be called A Studio, but is, in reality, a large shed with better-than-average insulation, some bookshelves and a fan heater. I get to have a potter in the garden as part of the “commute”, but recent weather has meant my current options to get to work are: gingerly cross the patchy lawn (which I intend to reseed next week, before we go away, so it can germinate in peace) or take the less-direct gravel path. The latter would be the sensible option, except that my euphorbia is absolutely rocketing away, and offers a sort of thigh-high wash of its own.
You’d probably recognise euphorbias even if you didn’t know what they were; in the final, bright days of winter they are a happy, often-neon beacon of hope and promise. My Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii are currently exploding out of an old agricultural water trough that I tried, and failed, to turn into a small pond (I never could stop the leaks), but they previously lived in the gravel garden, until they grew too big for their boots. If I was trying to contain them, I failed: they now rise resplendently to chest height, frequently threatening to engulf the toddler whole (crucially, never when the stems are cut – the sap can be quite nasty on bare skin and in eyes).
