The garden is a richly layered thing, all manner of history, hope, expectation, expertise, will and agency converging upon the same patch of ground. Taking just one level, there’s how it was, how it is and how it might be – ask a sympathetic gardener to stand still on the spot for a moment or two and they can picture themselves treading the ground within each of these realities, moving between them at will. It’s what we do – quantum theory has nothing on the sons and daughters of the soil – but we also recognise that how the garden might be, quite what it may become, has much to do with a balance of powers, that will and agency I lobbed in there at the top. And the stakeholders involved, in descending order of agency, are: nature herself; the human gardener; everyone who has an opinion upon how this particular garden should be (the family, the neighbours); and everyone else who has an opinion upon how gardens should be in general. For such an ostensibly peaceful construct, the garden has a heck of a lot going on.
Nonetheless, there’s really only two layers I find myself flipping between on a day-to-day basis – the garden I’m trying to make, and the garden that nature wants to grow. Creative sparks fly and wonderful things come into being when the two coincide, though sometimes it can feel as if each exists independently, superimposed upon one another, the stacking order shifting moment by moment according to who has the upper hand at any given time. In no aspect of gardening is nature’s will for the space more evident than in the plants she chooses to grow there, known to you and to me variously as weeds or wildflowers, depending upon how cooperative we’re feeling on the day, or how fond we are of any particular plant. I have a relatively high tolerance for the plants most people think of as weeds; for the most part, they were on this spot before we were, historically comprising the freely-available contents of our medicine cabinet, larder, and the key to the biodiversity of any site. I tend to find many of them quite pretty too, but when I can’t manage to bring myself to swoon over their appearance, I’m generally able to marvel both at their resilience and the kind of confidence that only comes from something that knows it’s on home ground.
Right now an intricate tapestry is knitting itself together a few centimetres above and below the surface of the soil, a filigree of detail so baroque as almost to defy representation. Certainly my camera needs a little help, the lens’s motor whirring as the autofocus tries to reach a decision (I habitually leave its winking eye wide open, just to make things more difficult for myself). I tell it to lock on to this or that, a forget-me-not here, a violet there, a twining stem of cleavers or the palmate leaf of a creeping buttercup. Peering at the screen, the violets look as grumpy as I’d be if I’d been left out here in the cold, little purple faces sour and puckered up like they’ve been sucking on a lemon, and I delete these shots from the card. It’s hard to pick it out in the green tangle, but by far the greatest contribution being made to the melee is coming from the speedwell (Veronica persica), intent upon claiming as much ground as possible before it consents to flower. In a few weeks you’ll be able to pull it out by the handful, which you might do if you’re temperamentally inclined to tidiness, though I’m not sure I’ll bother that much. It won’t be here for too long, and it’s really quite pretty, as well as being both edible and useful to the herbalist. One more bit of the garden bound for the teapot.
My ability to get lost in these details goes some way to explain why the garden is as it is. I will tell the visitor, with something approximating a flourish, that we’re embracing a looser look here, which we are, but that makes it sound as though I set out with this as an aim. The truth is, I scribbled a plan of what I wanted the garden to look like on a piece of paper, I even cut into the ground to bring this pattern into being but, while I was there, working away and waiting for the vision to manifest, the garden showed me something richer and more complex, and pulled me in, deeply, to a different level. I surface every now and again, with a half hearted effort at steering things back towards what I think a person should want from the space, but as time goes on it becomes more of an effort when there’s bark to gaze upon and weeds to watch in the growing. There are some fairly significant alterations planned for this year – mostly garden building related – and these will require me to haul myself up and out and inhabit that human layer for a while. It’ll be diverting, even fun, but I can’t wait to see what the garden’s going to do with the changes.
Another fine read, thank you - and i very much like that image where the focus is beyond the flowers
Very insightful. Really resonates with me.