Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
from Hamatreya, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s a particularly winterspring thing: one part of the garden is fully embracing the moment, basking in the perfection of floral splendour and the youthfulness of fresh, green leaves, while another... well. Let’s just say it’s not yet quite come to inhabit the fullness of itself.
And this is okay, in spite of an annoying inner voice that wonders why I don’t have snowdrops and hellebores everywhere so the whole garden can go ZING right from the get go. In answer, I’d have to say that, much as I love snowdrops and hellebores – and I do really love them – I don’t think that I want them in every part of the garden, even if I could afford the time and the effort that such a scheme would demand. Which leads me to another realisation: I’m not just ok with the attention being drawn episodically from one part of the garden to another as the year progresses; it’s a rhythm I actively seek out. Rather than everything, everywhere, all at once, that holy grail of succession planting with its endless carousel of seasonal interest, I need space where the energy is entirely different, where the players are not so much waiting in the wings as staggering in through the stage door, slightly hungover from the night before, and trusting in the magic of greasepaint and good lighting to make their eventual entrance as spellbinding as it could possibly be. (This picture of putting on a show – the idea of smoke and mirrors and illusion, of wobbly scenery flats, props and trap doors – it’s all quite useful if we should ever find ourselves thinking that the garden we’re making is real.)
I’m aware that I’m aided in this rhythm thing – this refusal to demand a constant stream of pizzazz – by an ability to find fascination in those weedy portions of the soil that barely qualify as ‘interest’ in the gardening books but where, as far as the garden itself is concerned, there’s plenty going on. Largely green of hue and decidedly less ostentatious in flower than the bits I’ve planted – with the exception of the bindweed’s trumpets in summer, which are pretty, um, parpy, for want of a better word – they’re always remarkable in having the healthiest, most exquisitely detailed and interwoven communities of plants in the garden. Nature nonchalantly showing me how it’s done, without so much as breaking a sweat; it would be rude, if it weren’t so impressive.
What is rude is me mindlessly and quite randomly pulling bits of this community out of the ground and shoving it on the compost heap – mostly wood avens and creeping buttercup just now, accompanied by seedlings of goosegrass and hairy bittercress. But I’m making way for the important work of mulching, most notably in the space around the roses which, admittedly, does need to be cleared of old foliage and anything that might harbour the spores of the dreaded black spot fungus, not that this is something the wild roses ever seem to worry about. Anyway, it’s done, the roses have been mulched (which makes me feel a little better about denuding the soil of the cover it already had) and I can tick another seasonal task off my list, continuing to pretend I know what the heck I’m doing. Which, after all, is what gardening is largely about, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
A delightful read, as ever
Your sentences are always a joy to read. What an exquisite writer you are, Andrew! And the undercurrent of humour, which I love.