A Very British Life: Gardens - The English Like A Native Podcast

Hello everyone, and welcome to the English Like a Native podcast.

The podcast that's designed to help you to improve your English.

This first series, 'A Very British Life' will dive into the

nitty gritty of life in the UK.

My name is Anna, and in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about gardens.

We Brits love our gardens.

Most households will have a front and a back garden.

Now the front garden tends to be smaller than the back garden.

And often the front garden is looking onto the road.

So we don't tend to favor our front gardens too much.

The front garden is also quite a functional garden.

It will often double up as a driveway, a place to keep our car and it just serves

to make the front of the house look nice.

Often the garden is surrounded by a border.

So we'll see a fence or a wall, or you might see a hedge

surrounding someone's garden.

We have hedges around our front garden and we love a privet hedge here in the UK.

A privet hedge, a privet is a type of bush, which is very, very green.

It has very dark green leaves and it stays green all year round.

And so this is usually the hedge of choice to act as a border for our gardens.

And if you have a nicely manicured hedge, then it can look really lovely, very tidy.

But if you let it just grow wild, then it's going to look quite messy.

And unfortunately that's how our hedge looks at the moment.

It's all overgrown.

It's huge.

I mean, I think it's about 10 foot, maybe 15 foot high.

It's ridiculously high, too tall for us to actually get up and

cut the tops nice and level.

And yes, it's just become a little bit out of control.

And moving on to the back garden.

We love our back gardens.

It's a place for us to have some outdoor time in private because us

Brits we're quite private people really.

And when we have a sunny day, we love to get outside and bear our skin to the sun.

We do love sunbathing.

I know that a lot of other countries and cultures think it's a little

strange that we like to burn ourselves to a crisp, but for some reason, I

think perhaps because we have a lot of gray rainy days when the sun comes

out we just want to make the most of it and get that lovely tan going on.

So in most British gardens, you'll find something called a shed.

Now, a shed is a little wooden hut or a little wooden house.

A shed can have a few windows in it.

It will always have cobwebs and spiders in it.

And in that shed, you will often find some deck chairs or sun lounges or folding

garden chairs, which will be brought out on a beautiful sunny day for everyone

to lounge around and enjoy the sunshine.

Now a, a young family, a family with young children will likely also have a paddling

pool, which everyone likes to dip their feet into and throw the children into,

to keep them nice and cool and occupied.

Now the shed will also have lots of tools, tools for looking after the garden.

We are keen gardeners here in the UK.

I myself, am what we call a fair weather gardener.

A fair weather gardener is someone who will only enjoy gardening

when the weather is nice.

I'm really not interested in going out into the garden to do lots of backbreaking

work when it's cold and dark and raining.

It's not my thing, but many people love their gardens and

love their gardens to look good so they'll have all sorts of tools.

They'll have rakes to rake up the leaves.

They'll have lawn mowers to mow the lawn.

Interesting that we call it, mowing the lawn.

It's basically cutting the grass, but we call it mowing the lawn.

We like our lawns to look nice.

And actually we'll spend a lot of money on lawn feed and seeds, grass

seeds, sometimes even fertilizer to make the lawn look beautiful and

green and in this country, because we have a lot of rain it's possible for

us to get really lush green lawns.

Now there'll be other tools in this shed as well, for looking after the borders.

So you'll have like little spades, and little forks, and all sorts of

things for pulling up weeds, because that's one of those regular tasks that

you have to undertake is the weeding.

You might find a pair of secretes.

Secretes are used for cutting, particularly for deadheading or pruning.

Deadheading is when your flower has died and you need to then

remove the dead head of the flower.

So you deadhead your flowers and you prune your bushes and your plants.

Cutting them back.

You can even, even prune your trees, as well.

So you cut them back towards the end of the season, once they've

finished flowering and they're dying off, you cut them back.

So they grow back nicely the next season.

Now, many of us garden owners at some point in our lives are

inspired to grow our own food.

Often we'll start with something easy, like herbs, you can buy ready-made already

potted up herbs from the supermarket.

You can often find a mint plant, a basil plant, perhaps some thyme in bigger

supermarkets, and you'll find all sorts of herbs ready for you to take home and

either put on your kitchen window sill, or actually plant out into the garden.

So this is where most of us start.

People who become more keen, might have something like a fruit tree.

Now, currently we have a number of fruit trees in our garden.

So we have an apple tree and a couple of damson trees, which initially

we thought were plum trees, but they're not plums they're damsons.

And so we were collecting apples and making apple pie and we collected

some damsons and made a lot of damson gin, which is actually great

as a gift for people at Christmas.

And we've actually acquired a couple of cherry trees as well.

Although we haven't seen any fruit from those yet, hopefully next summer.

Now, people who are really serious about growing their own food might even

opt for something called an allotment.

An allotment is a patch of land, basically like a garden, but

it's not attached to the house.

You'll often find a big strip or patch of land that is separated into a number

of allotments and people can rent the, the land in order to grow their

flowers or their fruits and vegetable.

If a Brit has a garden and the sun makes an appearance, as long as it's

relatively warm, you can guarantee that you'll see lots of barbecues coming out.

We love to eat al fresco.

So we love to eat outdoors on our patio and there's a, a mix of barbecues

you can get, you can either get the disposable ones from the supermarket.

Or you can get a free standing barbecue, usually on three legs that you pop

in the middle of the garden, or some very serious barbecuers will actually

build a barbecue into the garden or get one of these gas barbecues.

They're quite expensive.

But if you know, you're going to be spending a lot of time outdoors in the

summer, cooking food on the barbecue, then it's definitely worth the investment.

So we love to cook food on the barbie.

We often just treat it like lunch or dinner.

So we only have one meal on the barbecue.

We regularly will cook things like burgers and sausages, sometimes kebabs.

Perhaps, if you are a vegetarian or a pescatarian, then you'll have halloumi

or you'll do some fish on the barbecue.

I know in other countries they take barbecuing much more

seriously than we do here.

We love a barbecue and we do lots of barbecues.

Sometimes even if the weather turns on us, we'll still persevere with a barbecue.

But I know for example, in Brazil, when they do a barbecue,

the food just keeps going.

They continue to make food all day long.

It's a huge event that lasts the whole day, perhaps the whole night

and in comparison, our barbecues are a little bit disappointing, we

just cook up a few burgers and a few sausages and that's us done.

As a child, living on a council estate, we often had fun barbecues

inviting all of our friends and neighbours around to join us.

They were fun.

Thinking back to those, those days of living in the council houses.

I remember we had a pond in our front garden.

Many, many UK houses will have a pond or a water feature.

And so we had a pond in the front garden with a few fish in and one

year I found some frog spawn in the local valley because we had a valley

just behind our house with a little stream and I found some frogs spawn

and I brought some back and put it in our pond so we could watch it grow

and develop into frogs, which it did.

And it was amazing seeing the change and the teeny little frogs, all jumping

around the garden was fantastic.

Certainly gave our dog a bit of a shock.

But that meant that every year, those frogs would return to the

place where they were born to lay their eggs and their frogs spawn.

So every year we ended up with a pond full of frogs spawn and a whole garden

full of these tiny little frogs.

I loved it, the dog wasn't so sure.

But it was very, very fun for me as a child with all these

little frogs jumping around.

Now, my mum also really enjoyed making a scene in the front garden, around

the pond with something called gnomes.

So gnomes are little men little statues that I think are quite old fashioned.

Now you might find some older people still have gnomes in their garden,

but I, I do think it's falling out of favor at the moment, but a

gnome, it's a very strange word.

It's spelled with a GN.

It's a silent G, which is very odd, but gnomes often have like a red hat, floppy

hat and a blue jacket and they are either fishing or just being cheeky really.

So my mom made a whole little village.

Around the pond.

I remember there was a little bridge and there was a number of different

gnomes, all doing different things.

And as a child for me that was amazing.

I had such a great imagination and I really enjoyed imagining them being alive

and interacting and having great fun with, with the frogs and all the fish.

And on the subject of wildlife, it actually brings me onto quite a sad note.

Really, as a child in the north of England, we would always see hedgehogs.

It was just like a regular thing.

Like seeing a bird in the sky, you would always find a hedgehog crawling

around or curled up in the garden.

And it was wonderful to see, obviously we never handled them because we

were always told that they had fleas and you shouldn't go near them.

Plus they're really spiky.

So you'd only pick them up if you had gloves on.

And nowadays as an adult and living down in the London area, I haven't seen a

hedgehog for maybe 15 years maybe longer.

And that makes me really sad.

I did some research recently and found out that hedgehogs are

really on the decline with the rise of foxes in more urban areas.

And with us building on all the kind of green areas, it means

we're making it very difficult for hedgehogs to thrive and survive.

And so there has been a huge decline and people are trying to save the

hedgehogs, but it doesn't look good.

Now in the south.

What I do see in my garden a lot are squirrels and we have a number of

foxes that will come into the garden and just nosy around or use our

garden as a toilet, which is not fun.

They also will sometimes make some horrendous screaming noises when they're

mating in the middle of the night.

I think that's the worst part about foxes, but otherwise they're really cute.

Really nice to look at.

And I, I know my son absolutely adores them.

When he sees a fox in the back garden, he goes crazy.

He gets so excited.

And we have lots of birds as well.

In London, interestingly, we have parrots.

Now the, the story goes, I'm not sure if it's true, but the story goes that

someone had a parrot in a cage, in a house, and one day they let the parrot

out of the cage, both forgot that the window was open and the parrot flew out

of the window and then managed to breed.

And now we have this huge population of parrots that live in and around London.

So when you go to the parks here, or if you sit in your back garden for

long enough, you'll see five or six green parrots just flying overhead.

It's incredible because they're not birds that you would often see here in the UK.

Now, the other birds that we see are little tits, little tits are quite

cute, and we have magpies and pigeons.

These are the birds that I can see in my back garden right now, actually.

So there you go.

I hope that gives you a good  idea of the gardens in the UK.

Feel free to write a comment down below and let me know if this sounds

similar to gardens in your country.

If you are interested in improving your English and working on your pronunciation,

then why not check out my courses on www.Englishlikeanative.co.uk

Until next time, take care and goodbye.