Picking up where I left off last week, what is there actually growing here, between the things I (had) planted and the things that have just taken up residence, how many of them can I name and how do I relate to them?
Relate is an interesting term when it comes to us (as individuals) and the plants, fungi and other animals we share our space with. We talk a lot about nature-connection as something that we yearn for, need, benefit from, but how much do we talk about our relationship with individuals within that non-human community?
When it comes to people, we know that interpersonal relationships, social, romantic, sexual, familiar, collegiate and wider interactions are beneficial, but we are also very clear that the closer the relationship, the more important it is.
We sometimes do that beyond our own species, if we have companion animals for example, or even working animals. We may even have a particular tree that we tell our secrets to. Or a river that we trust with our anger or our sorrow. But on the whole, we don’t tend to think about our relationship with the non-human as a relationship with individuals, in the way that we do with people. We might use the word connection – as I have done for decades – without realising that
you cannot have connection without relationship.
I’m beginning to think that this might be important.
If I want to care about humanity – then it seems that I first need to care about specific individuals, those I am in direct relationship with – and only then I can expand that outwards.
Relationship – specific and personal exchange – would seem to precede a sense of wider connection with community, and beyond. It seems to me, today, as I figure my way through this on the page, that when we talk about connecting with nature we assume that is a one-way thing. It is about us receiving. Relationships, on the other hand, are always two-way streets: the giving and the receiving…not always in equal measure, not always at the same time, and mostly not in the same ‘currency’ but overall a relationship only survives if, overall, over time, we give at least as much as we receive. To quote an old maxim that has long since fallen out of favour: from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.[i]
It seems, then, that the same applies to the not-human wider world. If I want to care about nature, about the planet, then first I need to care about specific individuals. I need to be in relationship with them. Specifically and personally. As a precedence to a wider connection.
How to do that?
Well, I guess learning who and what they are has to be one place to start, which brings me back to where I came in today. Who lives on my plot? I need to get to know them.
Before I move on though, I will just say that I actually do relate to the non-human folk around me. I talk to them. I greet them. I comment on how they seem to be and what they’re doing.
I’m sure that “little one” is not the most respectful term in their world, so I can only hope they know it is affectionately meant, even though it is applied generically to bugs, birds, cats, any small moving
creature.
The non-moving ones get other appellations, “beautiful one” being the most common for my favourite oak and also for unexpected beauties of both the seeming-static and more-obviously-moving kind.
I confess that “old man” is sometimes used in terms of aged trees, which is potentially doubly insulting because I don’t know how to tell the gender of trees.
“You” is interchangeably used in all other circumstances as in “hello you” between any and all species.
Oh, except for Magpies. I do salute solitary magpies as respectfully as I was taught to do as a child, wishing a good day to them and their family. Mr Magpie or Mistress Magpie (and yes, I have to guess), but I would never address a magpie as ‘you’.
I get it though. It would be more polite to learn a few more names…to be a bit more familiar with
who and what they are. So I decide to make a start…with the ones I sort-of already know…and then the ones I don’t. I will start here and now, but this is something else which could take a while.
I make a plan to go round each of the five segments of my plot (four bits of garden and the driveway), and begin by listing what there is – and searching for the names of the things I do not know and just take it from there. No doubt there will be different things in different seasons, and the things that stay may change through the year.
There are trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, mosses, lichens. There are plantings and incursions. There are things that return reliably every year, and nomads who – like some of my friends – just rock up when they feel like it and then disappear for a while. No explanation needed. There are the ones I let be and the ones I really daren’t.
I start with the smallest segment – that tiny connection between the public space and my own: the driveway.
Don’t imagine some long sweeping approach to a country house: this is a suburban bungalow. The drive is just over one-car long and barely a little over one-car-with-open-door wide. It helps if the passenger gets out on the road, so the driver can leave enough space on his side to exit the vehicle. It’s a tight angle and we don’t need to go into the story as to why it has evolved that way.
There are paving slabs for the actual driving onto, bits of breaking-up concrete path to the outer edges and a central strip that has been variously gravelled and chip-laid and other ineffectual remedies tried. I have spent years trying to stay on top of ‘weeding’ it. I have now given up.
In one corner, very close to the garage and hard-up against the wall of the bungalow, there used to be a birch tree. It was cut back to the ground eight years ago but, well, if people tell you that if something does not have light it will not grow, just remember that does not apply to trees. They start life underground, they are well capable of re-starting life underground…and we all know that brickwork is no match for the hydraulic nature of well-established root systems. I worried about that root. Cracks on the inside of the wall suggested it might not be an ill-founded worry.
Eventually, my dear friend set to and dug it out. Left to my own devices I would have filled the resultant chasm with rocks and virgin soil. Given my own free will, I would have concreted it over. He chucked in some compost, some reclaimed earth and planted some scavenged lemon balm. I let it grow. A neighbour occasionally harvests a little. I cut back to the ground each year, and let it come again, hoping thereby to keep it where it is. It’s having none of that…slowly creeping down the drive, in the cracks between the broken concrete. I don’t use it, but I do occasionally pick leaves to crush between my fingers just for the scent of it. There is a balm in that alone.
Other things have moved in.
Dandelions, obviously. One day I might set-to and harvest them. Probably I won’t. I have tried dandelion-root coffee-substitute. Frankly, it tastes no better than the chicory version my Mam used to buy. By which (sorry!) I mean pretty disgusting. I wonder what the flowers taste like, but I feel the bees and wasps need them more than I do.
I grew up during those years when gardens were meant to be controlled and tidy and anything you hadn’t decided to put in – usually only for a few months – had to be uprooted. I grew up in those years when we were taught that things like dandelions and daisies were unwelcome. For some reason, dandelions more so than daisies.
As a small child I would pick daisies from the back lawn. If I made a chain of them I would be allowed to wear it until bath-time. Then it would be hung on the washing-line post, where the white petals would bleed pink with the sunset and all would be dead by morning. If I gifted them to Mam, she would put them in water in an egg-cup on the kitchen window sill, which did not help. They would still bleed sunset and die overnight.
My favourite secret space as a child was a patch of waste ground lain to grass, where daisies grew like a clear night-sky having fallen to earth, such a profusion of stars. If I was not born a romantic that little field - that I could only get to by trespassing on the old line and scrambling through brambles, or by propping by bike against the locked gate and climbing over - that was where I became one. I never shared it with anyone. I was never chased away from it. I never did anything there other than sit and marvel at it, and pick a few daisies, and believe in fairies, and make a chain to hang about my neck.
Decades later, Dad had me copy out a poem for his sister’s (my godmother’s) casket:
I have seen the way she went
Home with her maiden posy
For her feet have kissed the meadows
And left the daisies rosy [ii]
Daisies were acceptable. Dandelions were not.
There are a few daisies in the driveway this year. First time.
My neighbour sometimes crops out a handful of dandelion when she has stopped to chat. I have no idea whether they end up in salad or in the rabbit hutch. Another friend will grab as much as is still around, for her torts.
No-one speaks about daisies.
Another first this year, the dog violets, viola riviniana, have undermined the garden wall to emerge in the drive, and their paler cousins, viola reichenbachiana, have wandered in from somewhere else to take shelter in the warmer spot by the wall.
While the Greeks tended to associate the deep colouring of, I guess, the dog violet with mourning, in these isles in all their varieties they speak to early blooming and rebirth and spring. And yet their colouration doesn’t go unnoticed. They are a fey flower, a bridge between the otherworld and the mortal, but less to do with mourning, and more to do with faithfulness, love, devotion, possibility.
To be honest, I am simply pleased to see them creeping along the edges.
In other cracks the dove’s foot crane’s bill spreads its feathery wings and opens its abundant leafage and tiny flowers. How can a single flower gain a double-bird name, when nothing about it resembles either avian? Lots of leafing gives birth to tiny flowers: pale lilac shifting to white with deep blue anthers.
And of course, the forget-me-not steal in wherever they can. For the first time I wonder if there is a significance in the colouration of their heart coronets, some white, some gold. I don’t bother to look it up. Instead I remember all those Springs when Clive asked me what are they called, those pretty little blue ones? All those Springs when I simply said I did not know, and didn’t bother to even figure out which ones he meant. Until the Spring he wasn’t around to ask…and I asked a florist to see if she could find enough of them, late in the season, to make tribute to put on a coffin.
Some eight years on, I wonder if he knew all along what they were. I wonder if his asking was a request of a different kind entirely. If so, all I can say is this: me and the garden are still in negotiation as to what it will become…but the forget-me-not flowers return every year.
And I have not forgotten.
I have stopped weeding the drive way. I have decided to simply strim it. I’ll pull up the grass and such-like around the inspection chambers. I’ll go along the outside of the garden wall and pull and spray. I’ll continue to cut the deadwood out of the lemon balm. But for the rest I’ll strim down to the ground, occasionally, and it can all take its chances.
And I will stop every now and then to notice what there is, and try to remember to look it up if I know nothing about it. I feel eventually it will settle into being something soft around the edges, which is a good thing.
[i] Karl Marx
[ii] For the first time, as I write this, I decide to web-search to see who wrote it. Alfred Lord Tennyson, is the answer to that one. It comes from Maud, a monodrama. I’m strangely disappointed to learn it is not entire as it stands. I read more fragments of “Maud”. I’m not inclined to read the whole of it. I’m not sure what it says of me, that as a single piece, one my Dad chose for his sister, I loved it. Placing it in the context of the renown of Lord Tennyson, it somehow seems a bit ‘twee’.
