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

[Music] 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 and 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 our 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 grey 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 will find something called a shed now a shed is a little

wooden hut or a little wooden house this 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 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 this 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 back-breaking 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 secateurs

secateurs are used for cutting particularly for dead heading 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 this is cutting them back

you can even even prune your trees as well so you cut them back um 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 time

in bigger supermarkets and you'll find all sorts of herbs ready for you to take home and either put on your kitchen windowsill

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 dams and 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 dams and 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 vegetables

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 alfresco so we love to eat outdoors on our barbecue and there's 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 i'm 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

pescetarian 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 frogspawn 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 born so every year we ended up with a pond full of frogs born and a whole garden full of these tiny little frogs i loved

it the dog wasn't so sure um 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 um little statues that i think are quite

old-fashioned now you might find some older people still have gnomes in their garden but i do think it's falling out of favor at the moment but a gnome it's a very strange word

it's spelt with a gn it's a silent g which is very odd but gnomes often have like um a red floppy hat and a blue jacket

and they are either fishing or um 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 on to 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 nosey 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 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 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 but 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 it's 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're interested in improving your

english and working on your pronunciation then why not check out my courses on www.englishlikenative.co.uk

until next time take care and goodbye