Meetings with plants: the primrose

Bramble & Briar #99

Can’t remember how the primroses got here, but glad they did

He doesn’t remember how the primrose arrived in what he calls his garden. Try as he might – and I know he tries – part of him believes that, for a plant to appear, he must have brought it to the soil himself. Such a responsiblity to bear...

Would you think me unhinged if I told you that the garden talks to me? No – that’s not quite right. That’s how it feels, but it’s bigger than the garden. It’s Nature, talking to me through the garden, often about the garden. Sometimes, it’s as though I’m eavesdropping on half of a conversation about me, which feels entirely natural, as anyone who’s worked in a public garden will tell you. For that matter, anyone who’s worked in a private garden, when there’s company. People tend not to notice the gardener scrabbling about in the soil, and snatches of conversation – often pertaining to you, or your work, or both – get thrown about on the breeze.

So I’m feeling gently admonished because, it’s true, I have been trying to remember when I first introduced the primroses to the garden. I have half a memory of scraping out a hollow for their shallow roots by the greenhouse door, and maybe again over by the apple trees, but I don’t recall if that was an introduction, or a transplantation of a clump that was already here. I certainly don’t remember buying any primroses, but then the list of things I don’t remember is a lengthy one. Neither have I any memory of planting them next to the ring of Narcisuss ‘Thalia’ that girds the hornbeam, but there they are. Every time I look at the garden, they seem to have popped up in a new location.

I think the point is, firstly, it doesn’t really matter how they got here. And secondly, if I did introduce them, that was almost certainly pointless, if not a little presumptuous. They’d have made their own way here eventually, if they weren’t already present. They’re a part of the land on which the garden sits, and if ever someone had been daft enough to get rid of them by, let’ say, clumsily plonking a house and a load of building rubble on the ground, then drawing a veil over half the site by laying down a lawn, their inevitable return would be merely a matter of time.

I’m sure I didn’t plant any here

This spring, they seem to be here in number, occupying that post snowdrop gap and keeping me company while I wait for tulips to happen – the palest yellow petals, with a throat of buttery gold, hairy stems blushing pink and floppy, crinkly, bright green leaves. Rather like a giraffe, you’d never think of putting the individual parts of a primrose together to make the finished whole, but someone or something did and, somehow, it just works.

Casting aside the question of how the primrose got here, there’s the matter of increasing their numbers and, as with so much in the garden, while Nature seems to have this in hand, I want to get a little involved. My timeline being, after all, a little more restricted than hers. And so once they’ve flowered I’ll gently tease each clump apart and replant the divisions, until March becomes synonymous with a carpet of primroses, and the two gardeners tending to this space – one human, one entirely more elemental – can’t even remember between them who did what. Which is just how it should be.

Silliest little posy. Delightful