LAURENCE LLEWELYN-BOWEN argues that our treasured plots have never been such a much-needed haven

Well, thank goodness for that! After many long, sunny, spring weeks, Britain’s garden centres have reopened. And it hasn’t come soon enough.

All those unmown lawns, privets that need to see a good pair of secateurs, bare patches of land hungry to be planted out — at last they can be tended to.

But even if we haven’t been able to do all the gardening jobs that we’ve needed to recently — and the garden centres have restrictions — those of us lucky enough to have these spaces have still found them to be our salvation in these grim times.

And, many of us have fallen in love with our gardens for the first time.

When I look back on this crisis in the months and years to come, it will be with sadness, remembering those we lost — including some good friends in our village here in the Cotswolds — but with fondness, too, for the halcyon days I was suddenly, unexpectedly, able to spend in the garden. And I think many will feel the same.

I am fortunate to have spent lockdown with my wife Jackie, my two daughters and their husbands, and my grandson. I am usually away filming for much of the year, wishing that I could spend more time with my family. And now, at last, all my filming has been cancelled. 

I am seeing my two acres of garden as I never normally see them, noticing plants that I didn’t even know existed.

I am struck by how bountiful the whole thing is. For the first time in years, I found myself creating patterns for my designs taken directly from what I could see in the garden. 

The snake’s head fritillary in our little woodland is beautifully delicate, fabulous like something from the late designer Alexander McQueen.

I’m delighted to have something so funky and gothic growing so close to the house.

Most of my working life is spent indoors, designing interiors. I like the certainties of interior design — if you put some wallpaper up, it stays. 

It doesn’t suddenly grow three feet, and you don’t need to worry about keeping it alive. But over the past few weeks I have realised for the first time what a truly creative, joyful place any garden can be.

Though I like a formally designed garden, my wife Jackie is in charge and she prefers a more natural approach: ‘sweet disorder’ as the poet Alexander Pope called it.

She has won and our garden tumbles sweetly and disorderedly all over the place, although I have made a stab at making it more geometrical, clipping our hornbeams to look like shipping containers, fussing over the pond, making sure the spurt of the fountain is correct.

I used to be annoyed it didn’t look like Versailles, with raked gravel and lots of statues. Like many people, I was dissatisfied with what I had. Now I am simply grateful.

The other day I took my little grandson for a walk in our garden and found bluebells and other plants I normally never notice. We sat there together and I drew them; I will always remember it.

We all need our own space from time to time and the garden provides a place where we can go off on our own — often with a gin and tonic in hand, in my case, while Jackie escapes to her greenhouse where she is growing radishes, carrots and courgettes that we will soon be eating.

There is something ridiculously satisfying about munching your way through vegetables you have grown, even if they look less appealing than the ones in Waitrose.

I am not the only one. Garden-seed suppliers have been unable to keep up with the boom in demand as people rush to grow their own vegetables and flowers.

In the strange new world we are entering — where even Chelsea Flower Show is being held online — it seems likely that many of our soon-to-be-permitted meetings with friends and family will be in the garden. (Thank goodness the summer is starting and we’re not heading into December!)

As a result, there will be an increased rush for barbecues and garden furniture, and for plants that bring joy — nothing austere or contrived like steel planters or elaborate water features, but blousy and jolly: peonies, geraniums, roses, wisteria (until you have a wisteria you don’t know how beautiful and sexy they are) and maybe even some cheerful gnomes.

And for woodland planting, Jacob’s ladder and wild garlic: plants that are not quite domesticated, but important for wildlife. If Victorian designer William Morris put it in one of his fabrics, it will work in an English garden.

Despite my weakness for formal gardens, there is nothing quite like a looser, more British approach. A few years ago, I’d go crazy if things hadn’t been clipped or mowed to within an inch of their lives. But now I prefer to leave bits alone, to let wildflowers flourish.

The British love their gardens to be tiny slices of the landscape. They are not bubbles, out of step with their surroundings as in most other countries: oases that need endless protection and tending.

The classic British garden has a higgledy-piggledy charm.

It’s a bit of countryside, smartened up — given a polish and a tidy, but not obsessively manicured. You could put a picket fence around almost any bit of British countryside and create a charming garden, a perfect microcosm of the flora and fauna of these islands, with indigenous plants such as primrose and cowslip, or anything we might see in a hedgerow.

We don’t need our gardens to look like golf courses, all striped lawns and hard edges. Let the garden go where it wants and help it along the way. The interiors of our houses may be a mishmash of styles and periods from around the world — but our gardens are beautifully British.

A few years ago, there was a craze for making your garden into an extension of your house, with decking, decorations and furniture. Now people have rediscovered the joy of a natural garden with native British plants that grow gloriously.

You can try to coax hothouse flowers, but why not plant foxgloves with their delicate bells, delphiniums of rich purple hues, or easy-going sorrel, borage and cornflowers? Or my personal favourite, ferns.

At this time of year they have ridiculous rococo curves, like Chippendale furniture. In two weeks, they will become umbrellas of soft cloudy foliage. We have a lot of shady space so finding plants that are happy in shade is important.

Ferns have a magical, fairytale quality to them. They are cropping up in my design work, which reflects my garden.

You can watch the summer unfold in the changing hues of your flowerbeds. In our garden, we are coming to the end of the lilac-blue season with the bluebells, that wisteria and euphorbia.

Then there will be lots of purple and greens that remind me of the colour schemes in my early years in the 1990s presenting the interiors show Changing Rooms. 

At the end of this month, these will give way to pinks such as roses, lilies and geraniums. Near the house we have beds of ‘hot’ colours: crocosmia, dark-purple delphiniums, roses and stripy tulips. They all look wonderful and hot colours are comforting.

Farther from the house the colours are paler. Lilies grow surprisingly well in the Cotswolds, and I love dark-pink hydrangeas.

Trees, too, give continuity. We have big mature cherry trees, magnolias, and a mulberry tree that replaced an ancient one that died. 

It must have been about 500 years old, planted about the same time as the house was built, we think, which was 1570. It had rather alarming, contorted faces on its trunk and it seemed to be in good health when it suddenly keeled over one autumn.

I felt terrible that it had happened on my watch, as if I had somehow let it down. It was almost like a death in the family.

We also have what I grandly call a lake. A large pond, really. It is filled with beautiful lilies in the summer, but it can get choked up, so now and then it needs to be cleared.

Twice a year I wade in with visions of being Mr Darcy. It’s thigh-deep in most places, but suddenly the depth changes and I’m in right up to my chest. Every time it takes me by surprise. 

For many people, perhaps furloughed at home or forced to live in isolation, the days are now bleeding into each other. Lives are on hold and we feel trapped, as if in an enormous egg-timer, watching each grain of sand fall, every day feeling like the last.

Others are trapped in flats and my heart goes out to them — I hope they are able to get to the parks as much as possible and enjoy the wonderful weather.

But look to the garden — or to those parks — and you can see time passing. The leaves of the oak tree unfurl, the blossoms burst from the boughs. Nature’s rhythm is unaffected by the chaos in human society.

For many of us, this crisis is a much-needed chance to reassess our lives, to change things that are within our power to change, and take responsibility for what we do.

Gardening is all about responsibility. A beautiful garden can be created with the most basic tools: trowel, fork, spade, a lolly stick for planting. Wildflower seed packets are ideal, even in a window-box. 

Go crazy and see what can happen. Gardening requires optimism, patience and faith — qualities that will help us now. It’s easy to grumble about the garden, the lawn mowing and weeding that have to be fitted around the rest of our lives.

But now, for many of us, such chores can become pleasures, with a sense of achievement and control that nourish the soul.

It may seem as if I am trying too hard to find the positivity in what is a frightening and horrifying situation. But it can take a shock such as this to make us realise what is really important.

This time next year, we must remember these months. Yes, it was frightening and we lost people we loved. But we had time to take stock, savour the simple pleasures and watch our gardens grow.

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s new interior design programme School Of Flock is on YouTube and via llb.co.uk