My garden needs work. The grass wants cutting. The shrubs need pruning. The weeds want up-rooting or spraying or at the very least chopping back.
Of course, that isn’t what my garden needs or wants at all. My garden needs sunlight and water. Warmth. Shade. Daylight, night-time. Seasons. It wants me to forget that it is there at all, so that it can grow into itself and be what it really truly wants to be when it grows up.
We’re at odds the garden and I. I remember what it has forgotten. I remember its past life as tiny suburban woodland. In principle I don’t object to that as an ambition. In principle I didn’t object to it as a reality. Except in winter when I had to fight my way through the trees along where there used to be a path to the front door of a house as neglected inside as the garden was outside.
Even that had a kind of romance to it. The wizard’s cottage, deep in the woods, where the children were afraid to go on Halloween and the postman posted notes about stopping deliveries unless the way was cleared. There was a wildness to it that I almost loved. It was a place where vixens reared cubs, and once a deer hunkered down. It was a place where stray cats took up residence in an overgrown, falling-in greenhouse as a staging post to what was jokingly called the conservatory, as a step towards full adoption. I loved the romance of it.
But I was younger than him. The cottage would outlast him. Even the greenhouse and the conservatory would (more or less) outlast him. He wanted me to have the place after he’d gone. He wanted me to live in it. And I did not want to live in a place where the conservatory roof might collapse under the weight of snow or fox or the impact of cat, where I might wake up to a tangle of rotten wood and glass-shattered animal, bleeding, outside my kitchen window.
I did not want to live in a place where the birch tree that shaded the side window was rooted hard against that wall. Roots and foundations do not mix. I did not want to live in a place whose brickwork would be forced to follow the spiralling growth of glistening grey trunk. I love the shape of trees, but prefer my walls to be more or less straight. More or less is about it. There isn’t a right angle in this building, but that’s ok. I’ll allow slants and by-eye building. The walls are solid. But trees are fluid and hydraulic wins over static every time.
But – always there is a but – life does not flow in a series of ands and therefores, it leaps and dances around the buts and yets and maybes – but I did want to live in the cottage. Cottage. I like to think of it as a cottage. Of course it is nothing of the sort. It is a suburban bungalow. Semi-detached. In a small side street, off a larger artery, within hearing distance of the ring-road, and on the flight path between the airport and the hospital. During the lockdown year, I got used to the silence and lack of contrails when the planes stopped flying, just before I became accustomed to that silence being so often shattered by the air ambulance heading one way or the other, or a rescue helicopter, the one red, the other yellow, both ferrying the sick and the wounded and the quite-probably dying.
If I wanted to live there, the first thing I had to do was rescue the building from the garden. I called in my tree-man and told him to just take everything back to the ground and then kill it. Spray it. Rootkill. Dig out what you can and chemically murder the rest.
He tried, but trees die hard. They fight back. They are still fighting back.
The garden was laid out before I moved in and was, briefly, a vision of beauty and hope.
I spent a year documenting it. Every day I took at least one photograph. I wrote about what the picture made me think, mostly about life rather than about the garden. I am not a gardener. I am – at least I am becoming – a writer, a poet, a philosopher maybe, a thinker certainly, a hopeful life-voyager. I am still a student. More accurately, I am a student again. When I walked the streets of the city in the early September mornings, I felt exactly as I did walking to school in the new town where I grew up, and later being awed by the suburbs of Berlin, then starting a new year at UEA, later yet wandering through the woods on the outskirts of Karlsruhe, and my first weekend on the Nottingham campus.
There is something about being in a new place or at the start of something new and identifying as 'a student'. It gives you a license to just wander around and look with different eyes. Sometimes I think this is a tiny feeling of being an outsider (though I certainly don't claim that) - mostly I think it is a huge feeling of being a child.
Back in the garden, I balanced keeping it under control and letting it have its head. I wanted to see what it could become if we could reach a compromise.
During that first year, some things thrived and delighted me. Other things died and disappointed me. By autumn others again were hanging on, but I wasn’t sure what to do to see them through their second winter, or even if I should try. I remember saying that we would grow into each other the garden and I. I do not want it to be a life-long project, though I know that gardens are. I want to find a self-sustaining balance that draws me into it willing to do the necessary work, but keeps that necessary work as limited as possible.
I remembered that the universe keeps whispering Patience. I remembered that the garden was in far better shape than I expected it to be only one year on from my moving in. I remember that I am not planning to move again, so by default it is a lifelong project. A relationship where we are still uncertain of each other. Where we think we know what the other wants or needs, but aren’t certain how much effort to put in to giving it, or restraining it. I suspect this will evolve into the kind of co-dependent (as opposed to interdependent) relationship that the therapists warn us against.
I wondered where my notion that the garden needs work (translation: I need to work at making it different) comes from.
That September, for the first time in over half a year, friends had visited. We were still in the strangeness of restraint. Not locked-down, but not free. Not panicking, but not comfortable. We ate in the garden although the weather was cool. We walked after lunch, for the movement of air as much as for the exercise. I am proud of my local patch: the woods, the river, the Broad, greenery and waterlilies and fish and wildness that has overgrown to hide the world. But (another of those buts) I don’t feel the same way about my garden. I know how hard my friends work on theirs. One I have seen and it is awesome. The other I haven’t, but I hear of the work that goes into it. Mine…is pretty much left to its own devices a lot of the time. I don’t take pride in it.
I tried to understand that this was because I was trying to look at it through their eyes. I saw what they would see as shortcomings, of work left undone. They hinted at things that need pruning, at decking that needs staining, subtly criticising, unconsciously telling me this is not what it would be if it were theirs. I try to reassure myself that it is not theirs, it is mine, and what I want it to be is not refined. I want to honour its wilder edges.
Another friend asked me over Zoom how it was looking and I said ‘scruffy’. He reassured me that everyone’s garden was starting to look that way. It’s the time of year. I didn’t have the insight at the time to say: no, sorry, that wasn’t a lament. At the time, maybe it was, a lament or a regret or a kind of apology to the world that I am not doing better than I am with this space that I am lucky enough to be custodian of. I didn't have the insight to understand that the garden is slowly growing into itself and I have to give it leeway. I have to allow it growing room, to show me what we might do together. I have to be patient and not jump in too soon.
Then Autumn morphed into Winter through weeks and weeks of rain and the uncut grass would soon be under frost or snow and the days would be short and I would not be inclined to do anything out there now. It would all wait for another spring, another rebirthing. The most I managed was to gather up leaves, and cut back the exhausted brambles.
On a February morning, we sat in the sun drinking tea. He was taking delight in the composition of the garden and, in a strange way, also in its shabbiness, its wabi-sabi-ness of reclaimed timbers still bearing screws and nails from a previous incarnation, the crookedness of it.
All round the edges things are growing that are survivors. Things grew last year, that weren’t there the previous one and the reverse is also true. I fully expect this year to be different again.
I look at the uncut grass. It’s stomped down where I was exercising in the snow. I’m itching to cut back the deadwood now, before the new growth struggles alongside it, but I’m wary that we’re not out of the frost season yet.
We make plans to add odd paving slabs where the turf hasn’t taken, a grass-lined hopscotch. I talk about emptying the raised beds and starting over – I hanker after a herb garden – so maybe not full deep beds, but stacked shelving inside to sit pots on. Which might limit the amount of weeding to be done.
My first planting of bulbs has come through the frost of a full moon night, and may survive. There are a few snowdrops. The crocus will be late if they come at all. But the bamboo is already in green.
Dark verdant spears tell where the grape hyacinth will flower, and the thistle promises not to let a razing to the ground to thwart it. The bird table bed will be as mysterious as ever. I’m hoping for campion and poppies later in the year, who knows what the blackbirds and maggies and robins have sewn for Spring.
I look at the work to be done, and do so very little of it.
It isn’t just that I don’t want to work as hard as it takes to have a pristine garden, a tidy garden, a suburban garden. It is also that I am delighted by the wild flowers that arrive and the insects they bring with them. I told one of my picnicking mates that I have grasshoppers. All very well until you find them in your kitchen, she said.
I can relate to that, but I remembered a bright green cricket that I once found on the wall of a bedsit I’d lived in, with no garden to speak of anywhere around. I have a mixed relationship with the life that lives in my garden. Barefoot at night can bring a stomaching-turning squirm when you hear the crunch of an unfortunate snail. I still squeal at spiders, before I figure out how to send them outside (where they clearly don’t want to be). I’m getting better at moths. I will never love slugs.
All of this discomfort serves to remind me of my place in the world. I am nothing special. I am just another creature manipulating my environment the same way the spider does who insists that my door way is the ideal place for a web, or the bees nesting in the garage wall.
It also serves to remind me that I am ALIVE and part of this system, changing and growing and retreating and staggering hopefully forward in this uncertain world, because there is no other way.
As for the grass…it’ll grow until I get around to cutting it. It’s probably happier with that idea than I am.
