It’s all gone suspiciously quiet out here. Just me, the birds, and the faint drone of traffic noise from the A-road a mile or so over the fields. The occasional London-bound train, or aeroplane lining itself up for landing at Gatwick. Autumn seems to have surrendered its struggle over the landscape to winter, the storms for now have passed and it’s all feeling a little anti-climactic. The sump of the year, dark days bottoming out so that even the weather seems disinclined to get up to anything overly creative. Less than a week till the light beings to make its way back. My Swedish friend down the road messaged me on Friday morning, “Happy Lucia! Today Swedes celebrate light in the darkness”. St Lucy’s Day, 13th December, falls on the shortest day in the Julian calendar which Sweden seemed, till the eighteenth century at least, fascinatingly reluctant to abandon. The rest of us wait until the 21st for the winter solstice, but that week or so bookended by the two celebrations seems to be aligning with the strange lethargy that’s descended on the outside world.
I’m not knocking it. A little celestial peace and quiet is precisely what I’ve been hoping for lately – I can get almost all the way down the garden without sinking in it up to my ankles (will Father Christmas bring me that herringbone brick path this year? I fear my name has once again been too regular a feature on the naughty list). Tulip planting has finally begun, though there’s probably just as much still to do, and that’s fine while there remain opportunities aplenty to get these in the ground, though time, I’m reminded, is never a thing to be taken for granted. Now, in the garden, in the slump of this temporal sump, these doldrum days at the arse-end of the year, you could be forgiven for thinking that winter will stretch out indefinitely. But time, we come to learn, scorns to move in a linear fashion, and flips when we’re least expecting, the calendar whipping around to a fresh page with neither ceremony nor sentiment. And all the small, isolated, apparently insignificant tokens of approaching change begin to accumulate, these little, easily-overlooked blips in the day piling up into a body of evidence suddenly impossible to ignore, and when is now and now is long gone.
Here are two changes from this past week in the garden – the first mostly my doing, the second, nature’s.
MEN came to take away Shed Number 1. Plus an accumulation of car wheels and tires I’d managed to collect (including a spare Defender wheel with a brand new tire on it that I’d completely forgotten I had stuffed in there when I sold the Land Rover). There’s now a whopping great gap in the garden, waiting for me to build a new base for an ever-so slightly larger, but decidedly more waterproof, replacement. There’s also at least one ash tree sapling that needs dealing with in order to make space for the new building.
Hellebores rank very highly on the short list of my favourite plants. It’s rare for ours to be in bloom quite as early as mid December, but there, out the corner of my eye as I marched back in along the path, was the unmistakable flash of pink. This small bed is where the garden begins in the new year – sarcococca, hellebores, snowdrops and, the garden’s own contribution, lesser celandine. I’d noticed when cutting greenery for the Yule wreath that the buds on the sarcococca were beginning to swell, but the hellebores have stolen a march on everything else and bloomed first, beginning the new year before the old one’s quite done. It all falls under the aegis of winter, but still, I feel we could do with slowing the pace a little, before we hurtle into 2025. At least let’s get the solstice...hell, let’s get Christmas out of the way first, and spend a few days thereafter spinning our wheels in Betwixtmas fug. Not that I’m ever less than delighted to see a hellebore, but don’t let it be a sign of the winter being shorter than it should. The light is coming back, and I need this welcome time of wintering. I think the garden needs it, too.
You have the best voice in the world ❤️