Having visitors over to enjoy our gardens is one of the small pleasures that we gain from working our yards. The kids can roll on the grass and play hide-n-seek amongst the shrubbery, while the parents meander through the beds smelling the blooms and chatting about the weather.

It’s a wonderful occasion and one that should be embraced regularly.

However, it’s often a different story once they’ve left. As downtime, walking through the garden after the crowd has left can be very energizing but it can also be quite depressing: broken tree limbs, pots that were knocked over by the children playing, and somehow the hose ended up in the gutter after being detoured through a grove of birches. What’s with that?

One often has to stop and wonder whether the pleasure of entertaining outweighs the resulting devastation. Surely our gardens should be rugged enough to cope with a few visitors!

Forethought is often the key in this situation. You may think that it’s a tad OCD to lock up your plants but unless you do chances of them surviving the onslaught are minimal, at best. Here’s a few thoughts to consider;

• Make sure ALL your gardening tools are stored away from duelling boy children. Otherwise your wheelbarrow will become a chariot, rakes and hoes will transform into lances and garden forks will embed into some 12-year-old’s skull. A quick risk analysis should define that these items need to stay out of harms way.
• Border off certain parts of your garden. If you have an area where your plant containers are grouped then use some form of barrier to keep your visitors away. Rope, extra chairs, tables, benches – whatever you have to form an impenetrable fence around this area.
• Read the “Riot Act” before your visitors embark on their garden adventure. Point out “No-Go” areas and discuss hazards to be wary of.
• Put away any fragile whimsy. Determine the chances of breakage and if high then find an alternative storage venue for them while your visitors are around.

They should help you prepare for the entourage but what about once they’ve left? How do you go about ‘cleaning up the joint’?

My starting point is with a long, rich coffee – you may need something stronger. Then it’s time to take a tour of the yard assessing the damage – hopefully there’s none, but let’s be realistic. If you prepare yourself for the inevitable then hopefully you won’t be too shocked when you come across your prized dahlias ceremoniously dangling upside-down.

In most cases it’s usually something small and quite often easily replaceable – especially if you prepared for your visitors as mentioned above. A snip of your shears here and a righting of a container there and miraculously your garden survived. Here’s some other tasks that you may need to do, or would be helpful to do;

• Turn the sprinklers on. After your plants have been bashed and bruised by some pre-adolescent juveniles, giving them a quick water will help them recover better. They won’t need much but it will certainly help them catch their breath and de-stress.
• Take your shears with you as you assess the garden. It’s far better for a plant’s recovery to remove any broken limbs cleanly than to allow them to remain vulnerable to disease.
• Give your plants a quick liquid fertilise. This will also help them handle the stress of being bruised and assist in their recovery process.

Now that that’s all done it’s time to sit down and enjoy a slow-er drink and in no-time at all you will be entertaining again. But probably NOT this week…