Towards the end of April, I begin to get back out into the garden. I do a bit here and there, but without enthusiasm. It takes the beginning of May and a friend – without whom I could easily sink – coming round to help with one of the jobs I cannot quite manage alone, to reignite my motivation.
There are those friends who find out what you want done, and then do it. And there are those who can somehow, without seeming or maybe even meaning to, talk you into doing what they figure is the better option. The problem with the latter kind is that they know more about some things than you do, so you’re never sure whether they’re right or not.
And to be honest, on this occasion, I have no strong views. Ok. Do that.
In this particular case, I wanted the shrubbery’s height reduced. In the end, we took it back to the ground. That was not my plan. One of the bushes was clearly diseased and struggling though and that one I think probably did need a completely new start. The other? Ach well, it is what it is. I now get to restart that corner of the garden. Rethink it maybe. It needs digging over. There are things to dig out. Maybe I’ll dig it all out. Literally start afresh. It wasn’t what I intended to do, but I remember that the shrubs were not intended to be there either. So I am choosing to look on this as an opportunity to re-shape that corner of the back end.
Or give it a wild chance to do what it wants.
A Saturday in May. The sun is shining. I lose half a day to Walden, one of those books that I feel I ought to have read a long time ago. Now, I have read it and wonder why it is so lauded. It has not earned a place on my shelves. It held my attention for as long as it took to read, but not a page corner was turned down, nothing demanded that I go back and read it again.
I find Thoreau wears his research and his education heavily. He quotes in Latin and laments that we cannot all read ancient Greek, even while he is arguing for a simpler existence and the life of the woodsman. I had fallen for the myth of Walden, of Thoreau living alone in the woods, the solitude, the isolation, the hand-wrought everything of his existence. It seems it wasn’t quite like that. He had help. He had donations. He had a classical education. Even while living at the Pond, he had visitors. He walked into the village, it would seem, quite often. Yes, he lived a simple, mainly solitary, life in a shack he had constructed (mostly) by himself. He calls it an experiment, so perhaps it was always intended to be time-limited, which makes any kind of existence more likely to succeed.
I confess I find the language of his day – or perhaps of his erudition – at odds with the precept of his message of simplicity.
I am disappointed by the book. I had fallen for the fairytale of it being a description of a solitary life, lived in close connection with nature - a life, not a couple of years. Yes, there are passages that approximate that, but on the whole it is not a description: it is a sermon. For every line that says he does not expect all to do as he as done, there are pages upon pages of why he really thinks we (all of us) should.
Then, in conclusion he says that he left the woods for the same reason that he went into them, because he felt he had other lives to live. There it is. In that one statement, he undermines everything that has gone before. In conclusion he says, without being so explicit, that his life in the woods was not enough for him, that – in essence – he was disappointed by it.
The useful messages I take away from having finally read Walden are those I already had from very short quotes – and those from the end of it. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavour to live the life you imagine, and you will succeed more than you might envisage. And also: If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
My castle's built way beyond the foundations. My shack is somewhat bigger than his, my life considerably less simple, but I have what he seemed to believe was unachievable: a stage of
life where leisure outweighs work and where the work that remains is a pleasure to be doing, and has meaning for me, even if he would deem it frivolous.
I am house-keeping, garden-keeping. I am not building anything more, merely tending, without a view to profit, except what I gain in the doing of it and the being in it. What Thoreau misses is that whatever the work, it may allow for contemplation, even the work of the mind, even the work detached from the closeness to nature he insisted we embrace and he himself soon rejected.
What he also misses is that there is a time for non-contemplation. There is a kind of meditation akin to simply being that exists in simply doing. To give oneself a job to do today, just one, and allow that one to be enough, there is a satisfaction in the having done it. Beyond that there is also a peace in the doing of it.
In another context a few days later I read someone else stating that the key to well-being is to set yourself one task for the day and treat everything else as a bonus. I remember my little on-line group during lockdown which included the instruction to set “one plan for tomorrow, because one is enough”.
This is something I have known for a long time…and yet I still have a tendency to overload my lists. It is good to be reminded.
I take a deep breath and begin to recalibrate. I set myself to the cutting of grass. Not even all of the grass. Only the two patches that make up the majority of the back end. I won’t dignify these rough scrubs with the title lawns. One of them is seriously being undermined by a geranium take-over. The other battles bravely against thistles. I mean to re-seed them when we get some rain.
That much I got done that day.
And then this little more…
I went around the edges cutting down the gone-to-seed grape hyacinth. In places I pulled up them by the bulb. They spread copiously enough. I got down on my knees to thin out everything under the witch hazel to give the iris growing room. I spent a little time looking at the flowering holly and the blue butterflies that settle only for split seconds. I pulled nettles out by the root and they lashed at my arms. I cut brambles back to the ground where I don’t want them to spread, and they responded with tiny painful spelks that embedded in my fingers and needed to be squeezed
out, washing away their sting with cherry red blood.
There are dandelion clocks. This early in the year. The alkanet is taking over. That too will need to be dug out from between the fruit trees, though I am loathe to tackle it while the insects are feeding so heartily. I have always thought of forget-me-not as being a low-growing plant, but put it among nettles and alkanet and ragged robin and it strives for the sky as much as any other lowlander will.
The day was warm. I worked but two hours, maybe two and a half, in total – including clearing a
little more rubbish from the garage – and then I set up the table, complete with a cloth, and glass of fridge-cold Henry Weston’s Vintage, and sat back to simply get more sun on my skin, to read poetry.
This is the outland of my castle. It is not in the air at all. It is in a quiet suburban street. And it is not so much a castle as a sanctuary. And it is not a time-limited experiment, it is a chosen life.
