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Back home after a few days away on the north Norfolk coast – salt marsh, sea breeze and Alexanders – and somewhere in the interim, the year seems to have turned. The vernal equinox will do that, of course, just as it removes any last refuge for those who refuse to acknowledge the presence of spring until the Ides of March are several days over their left shoulder and British Summer Time is knocking on the door (almost there). If I’m honest, the change began the day we left for our short break – packing up the car, the sun finally came out and began to dry the garden up, the forsythia burst into its indisciplined golden haze and the buds on the amelanchier threatened to open. We almost didn’t want to leave, but we did, and were glad for it, and got back slightly less than a week later to find the first of the tulips joining the hellebores, primroses, euphorbia and daffs. There’s even the odd tiny blue forget-me-not eye winking up at me as I wander down the path, and the fresh green tips on the new lavenders proclaim that the drowning they received over winter was insufficient to see them off.
There’s something about coming back to the garden that hits different – different from, say, simply coming back home, though that’s never a thing to be sniffed at. Getting out of the car after a time away, turning your key in the front door and stepping once more into that safe, familiar space – it’s instantly calming, comforting, and restorative. But a deeper reset lies beyond the back door, where it’s the garden that truly soothes the soul. I’m not quite sure anyone knows how this happens – something about the smell of the soil and the plant-filtered air, the bacteria we breathe in*, the welcoming embrace of a space into which you’ve poured out, scratched off, and wiped away so much of yourself that one of you sometimes seems like an extension of the other, only who’s to say which is which?
There will be those who say this is nothing more than conjecture, emotional claptrap of the kind spouted by just the sort of person who might find themselves captivated by immersing themselves in a tiny world within a world, surrounded by flowers and the birds and the bees. And I might be inclined to agree with them, the only difference being where their intention is to scoff, mine is proudly to double down, which I do by drawing attention to our being welcomed home in birdsong which sounds just like the birdsong elsewhere except somehow, I tell myself, the voices are more familiar. And anyway, history should have taught us to be cautious of disdain for truths yet to be tested by the intellectual rigour of the scientific method – willow-bark tea becomes aspirin and the joy of being close to the soil gets explained away by the discovery of a bacterium. The process doesn’t diminish the magic in its attempt to stick labels on it, to understand, to commodify and profit from it. It merely sticks a wry smile on the face of those of us who were open to discovering these things anyway, before they had to be proved.
I think I may have wondered a little from the point, but then, I realise, I’m not sure I had one to begin with, other than to say hello, I’m back, and isn’t it all glorious? So much to do now in the garden, and yet I feel the most important thing is simply to be there, taking the spring in.
* The soil-borne Mycobacterium vaccae, found to have many beneficial effects, including increasing our levels of serotonin and reducing anxiety, while research continues into its ability to improve our immune response to several conditions
After picking up the dogs, if we haven't been able to take them with us, the best part about coming home is doing a walkabout in the garden to see what's happened while I've been away. I love my house and I'm happy to be home again, but it's the garden I need to see.
Welcome back!