Small and container gardens: 2 Leisha Kinnear

Jul 23 2008 by Val Javin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

LEISHA Kinnear is a bright young mum with two sons and a busy family life.

LEISHA Kinnear is a bright young mum with two sons and a busy family life.

She’s also just 30, loves heavy metal music and confesses to a liking for some things Goth. Not perhaps the prime candidate to be a whiz in the garden then, but you’d be wrong.

“My friends call me a saddo for enjoying my garden but I love it,” she says.

And the garden that she, husband David and children Kyran, six, and Taylor who is three, all share proves that there is not age barrier to being a star in the world of horticulture.

Leisha’s part-time supermarket job leaves her plenty of time to spend in the neat plot tucked away behind the family home at Lepton.

A Jolly Roger flag flies on the miniature house which signals the boys’ corner of this very family orientated garden. It even sports the number 66A, an echo of the Kinnear’s own house number. Here the boys play with their trucks in the gravel, keep an eye on their own patch of ground and make sure that friends don’t kick their footballs on mum’s flowers.

Leisha’s green-fingers probably came from her gran who is also a gardener. But her design skills, her eye for colour – there are striking combinations of bronze foliage plants and even black grasses, their dramatic effect lightened by touches of white, silver and blue – are all her own.

“I like to see different shades of green and I like unusual things. I like to bring things back from places like Harrogate Flower Show that maybe other people don’t have.”

She has canaries in large cage outside the back door, has bird feeders around the garden and is working hard to create the kind of environment that will bring still more wildlife into the garden.

As to those friends who think her passion for gardening is just a bit unusual for someone her age, guess who are the ones who like to sit out there!