Never enough

The first post from Bramble & Briar

Photograph: Sundari Ferris

Welcome to the first post from Bramble & Briar, a home on Substack for the more confessional side of my garden content – writing, photography and even a smattering of audio – where I’ll be sharing more about the space beyond my own back door than I do anywhere else. I’m so pleased you found your way here (though you know I’m still going to do a quick panicked clear up half an hour before you arrive, cos even us laid back gardeners have standards). So, grab yourself a cuppa, and we’ll get down to business as I let you in on perhaps the greatest of my gardening challenges.

Click on the audio to have me read the post to you

My struggle – admittedly it’s not much of a struggle, but it’s relevant to how I garden, so bear with me – my struggle, I have realised, is that I have not been given enough life with which to be able to do all the things that interest me. I mean, I could be dull and just say I don’t have enough time to fit everything in, but I do feel it more deeply than such an anodyne statement would suggest. It’s almost a cruelty, I’d argue, to have a mind that finds so many occupations so very engaging, and only have the days allotted to one person in which to pursue them.

There’s a point in the movie Blade Runner where the murderous replicant Roy Batty, aware that his days are running out, tells his creator, “I want more life, father” (or something rather more earthy in the Director’s Cut), and I know just how he feels. Sticking with the scifi theme, if there really are versions of each of us in parallel realities, I would like to get in touch and share out the tasks; that way one of me could do all the reading and writing I’d like to do, another could become the skilful joiner I know I could be given enough practice, and yet another would spend all his time in the kitchen creating delicious meals with which to enchant and entertain friends – and this is just a fraction of the versions of me whose diaries I could fill from cover to bulging cover. One of us, of course, would spend all his time in the garden, and presumably also some poor sod would be out earning a living for the rest of us, doing the washing up and unblocking sinks (and I’m sure that we’d all be very grateful to him, but that version’s never at the forefront of our imaginings. Sorry, feller, but good on you all the same).

It’s not that any of this wishful thinking is symptomatic of an inability to focus. It’s more that – well, let me borrow the words of Oliver Burkeman, whose book on time management begins “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”. I’ve read a lot of time management theories and productivity hacks, embraced everything from GTD to bullet journaling in an attempt to Fit More In while sabotaging my efforts by spending quite so much time on researching productivity instead of actually doing the things, but Burkeman’s premise is refreshingly honest. You just can’t do it all. Some of us, if we’re blessed, will notch up a measly 4,000 weeks before we cark it, the first quarter of which we spend being told what to do by parents and teachers. When it comes to the rest, we owe it to ourselves to gain clarity upon what it is that we can actually achieve – half of our stress, disappointment and overwhelm coming from the dissonance between everything we’d like to be doing with our lives, and what’s actually physically, mentally and spiritually possible before we collapse in a state of frustrated exhaustion at the end of each day. (I’m sure Burkeman puts it better. You can find out by reading his book, Four Thousand Weeks. Time Management for Mortals, here.)

I ask myself, if I really did have unlimited time in the garden, would I go about things in a very different manner, or would it just be more of the same, but on a grander scale? More of the wild, chaotic tangle, only scrambling over handsome brick walls and flopping over herringbone pavers, instead of clambering through equally untamed hedges and intruding upon worn-out grassy paths? Or would it transpire that, given the time, I’d really be an unrecognisably fastidious kind of gardener – the sort who likes everything in its place, neatly manicured and primped to perfection? Oh god, how ghastly – I hope not that. It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever know, anyway.

So I wonder if I’ve developed my whole gardening schtick, written a book, established a coaching practice, on the back of the inescapable fact that I’m having to just squeeze my gardening into a life that’s full of other stuff which shouts more loudly. That I make a point of making peace with giving the garden licence to grow away in places more or less after its own fashion, because to attempt to do anything else is to put myself at the mercy of the frustration and inertia that so many who grapple with their gardens find themselves having to contend with. But then, given the benefits of my kind of gardening – the profound relationship with the natural world outside our back door, the liberating permission-granting, the endless al fresco cups of tea, the mindful moments spent in contemplation of breathing in what the garden’s just breathed out – I’m not altogether convinced that’s such a bad thing.