Scattered

Bramble & Briar #100

I’ve reached my centenary here on Substack, my hundredth post. It’s instructive for me – perhaps for you, too – to look back at the very first post I wrote on Bramble & Briar, and see that I’m still wrestling with what and and how much can be achieved in the time we have available, and how we come to terms with the inevitable shortfall. Maybe by my two hundredth post, I’ll have some answers for you but, till then, I’m still here, puzzling it all out in the messy middle.

Blue skies and spaniel-flattened daffodils kept me company while restoring some order to the yew. I have designs for the bed in front of the hedge which I’ll tell you of soon

I’ve been going into the garden to work. You might think that there’s nothing new in this – surely I’ve been going into people’s gardens to work for years? I usually go into my own garden to sit, or stand and stare, to slurp a cuppa while gazing around me at what’s growing up and going on, or even to write – but not to work at the job of gardening. Not so much. Where’s the fun in that?

Actually, that’s not quite accurate, I do enjoy even the work involved in gardening; it feeds my mind, tones my body and gives my spirit the space it needs to roam between earth and sky. Lately, though, there’s been a lot more of the doing, and a correspondingly reduced quantity of the being. I have – necessarily, as I’ll tell anyone who stands still for long enought to listen – embarked on making changes in several areas more or less at the same time and consequently I’m starting to feel as though I’m spread in a vanishingly thin layer a few microns deep, over too wide an area to make much of a difference. My attention and my energies are scattered.

It all breaks down to this. I've not been taking my own best advice.

Just now, I’m even having trouble remembering quite what that advice is. I know that I feel best when I balance the time that I’m working away actively at physical tasks – pruning, clearing, planting, mulching – against that spent sensing my surroundings, breathing them in and wondering about what I might do next, if anything, in order to make my mark upon the space. Nature does what she wants in the world, we intervene, and we dance around one another, making adjustments and compensations, and it’s as true in the garden as anywhere else only here, perhaps, shown in sharper relief. At least, you, the gardener, is the one doing the dancing – even if the dancing in question is little more than gently swaying around the spot you’ve chose to occupy on the line that runs between minimal intervention and getting deeply stuck in.

For much of our time here, a combination of inclination and circumstance has kept me pinned towards the far left of that line, but even the laissez-faire approach to gardening has its rhythm. It’s just that the tempo is decidedly more laid back. I may decide that I’m only going to cut the lawn twice a year, but it will get cut on those two occasions. I may set an intention to coppice the hazel or to push back to the boundaries every four years or so, but the hazel will be coppiced, and the brambles and the sapling trees will be cleared out, according to that timetable. This approach has its implications. It allows me the luxury of watching the garden do pretty much its own thing for months, even years on end, without allowing myself to get lost in the constant busyness that attends a more traditionally managed garden space. But it does mean that when the time comes around to take action, there’s a hefty job of work to be done. Thankfully, my profession long ago robbed the garden tangle of any power over me to discombobulate, and I weigh in with glee and the certain knowledge that this thicket, that tree, or these overgrown margins will, in short measure, be tamed and processed and their exuberances packed away, shredded, or composted. And there is an almost frienzied kind of delight in the work, and in trusting your ability to get the job done. Right now, it’s a case of everything, everywhere, all at once, and it’s not even tiring, but I’ve noticed that I’ve been passing by the places where in the past I’ve sat and wrote, watched and listened, and there’s been very little of that happening for a while now. Understandably so, given the rhythm of the way I garden, but I’m wondering if it has to be quite so all-or-nothing, and whether, if – even now, even at one of those points where there is pushing back to be done – I can make a point of spending time out here when I’m not actively hacking or sawing away at something, and I can gather up the scattered fragments of my attention from the various different projects about the space, and regain that more holistic view of the garden that I seem presently to have laid aside for a season. It’s not that I want to interrupt the rhythm of the way my garden works, or even change the tempo – it’s just that I’ve got this feeling that if I can make the whole thing swing a little more, then I’ll be able to maintain my attention, energy and focus at more or less the same level, regardless of the level of physical activity, and so achieve that balance of being and doing that underpins all our most rewarding efforts. No more scattering myself from one bit of the garden to the next.

Many narcissus try, but none manage to be quite so serenely beautiful as Thalia. That’s just how it is. And yes, I am very pleased with the colour of the shed

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We’re wedged around a table at the back of an All Bar One, somewhere that wasn't quite Oxford Street but has yet to rise the grandeur of Marylebone. “How are you getting on with Substack?” asks my friend, cheerily, making himself understood through a mouthful of the small-plated nibbles we’re in the process of subjecting to a two-pronged attack. I offer up some old waffle in response – the kind of noises my mouth makes while my brain is working out what to say – and he sensbily bats this aside before continuing with an astute observation. “Your long posts aren’t painfully long, but your short posts could do with being quite a bit shorter.” Now, I’m habitually quite unreceptive to being given editorial notes, but this friend has commissioned me on more than one occasion and so I tend to set some store by his opinion. That said, I’m still yet to do much about it, revelling in the freedom the platform gives us to write what and how we want, and leave our inner critic parked up somewhere around the corner. It can be, admitedly, a liberating exercise, though not necessarily one that makes for the pithiest copy. Hitting my century feels like the kind of milestone that calls upon one to make some appropriate response, however trifling, and seeing as how I derive a ridiculous degree of satisfaction from hitting with precision any word count I’m given, I’ve decided to start setting myself a limit on at least some of my weekly posts. Which isn’t to say that I won’t set myself a different one further down the line if I feel it’s too austere but, with writing as with gardening, it’s amazing how our creativity can flourish as restrictions are imposed. That’s the plan, at any rate – starting with post #101.

In between leaping up and down a tripod ladder whilst harnessed to a hedge trimmer, and wrestling brambles from out of my Barnet, I managed to swipe a few sprigs of forsythia for the vase

Ninety-nine posts ago, on Bramble & Briar…