It took me a while to notice that the garden was no longer entirely mine.
Not in ownership. In influence.
When I first began planting here, the choices felt private. I worked from instinct and memory. I planted what reminded me of Ireland. What I thought would survive. What felt safe.
Then the garden club trip happened. I wrote about it in The Garden Club Trip and a Plant I Can’t Name Yet, though at the time I didn’t realise how much that day would change the way I plant.
Miguel pointed at a plant I had ignored and spoke about it as though it were inevitable. Elena sent me home with cuttings I hadn’t asked for but couldn’t refuse. Mercedes stood on the lower terrace one afternoon and suggested, very casually, that the rosemary might sit better nearer the stone edge.
I resisted that one for a week.
I told myself the garden had its own plan. That I didn’t need outside suggestions. That I knew what I was doing.
But later, while walking Max before lunch, I found myself standing where Mercedes had stood, looking at the same patch of ground. She wasn’t wrong.
The rosemary has since moved.
It looks more at ease now. Or perhaps I do.
There’s something unsettling about letting other people’s opinions settle into your soil. It feels like dilution at first. As if the garden might lose its thread. But the opposite seems to be happening.
Maria’s stubborn rose made me reconsider the bare corner near the steps. A conversation about irrigation over wine on Wednesday shifted how I space the pots on the upper terrace. Even Leti’s exaggerated compost advice has made me look twice at what I would once have ignored.
None of these changes were dramatic. No terrace was redesigned. No sweeping transformation announced itself. It’s subtler than that.
A plant placed slightly differently. A habit adjusted. A patch reconsidered.
I still move through the garden alone most mornings. I still notice the slope, the way water gathers where the stone gives way. But I’m no longer pretending the place exists in isolation from the people I’ve met here.
Their voices linger.
Sometimes I catch myself explaining a planting choice out loud, as if Miguel were standing nearby asking why. Sometimes I hesitate before shifting a pot because I can hear Elena insisting it would look better closer to the light.
The garden hasn’t lost itself.
If anything, it feels more layered.
It isn’t only memory of Ireland shaping it now. It’s conversation. It’s shared lunches. It’s small, persistent suggestions offered casually over coffee.
I used to think gardening was solitary work.
It doesn’t feel that way anymore.