Click below to have me read this post to you (handy while you’re washing up, or mixing a cake)
Gardening will make a philosopher of every one of us, if we let it. Right now, and not for the first time, it’s forcing me to contemplate the notion of time, and how it converges upon the garden. It’s a significant intersect, not one of those glancing Venn diagram intrusions where one set reluctantly kisses another, like a two fat bubbles careering into one another’s path as they inadvertently hitch a ride on adjacent currents of air. Instead, Time and The Garden meet head on, dancing around inside our heads, upon some cosmic plane or, quite possibly, both, locked together in an intimate embrace which nonetheless allows for significant variation in the nature, if not the degree, of connection.
Anyone who’s been gardening for a few years will have noticed that time in the garden doesn’t move at a steady, linear pace, but surges in fits and starts. Just now, at the beginning of April, we’ve experienced one of the key shifts in the gardening calendar, which has nothing to do with how much it’s rained (a lot) or how warm it has or hasn’t been, but on how March manages to add a full two hours of light to the day. The pace of change has, well...changed, and in the space of four weeks, we’ve gone from not quite being able to decide if we’re still labouring under the spell of an interminably long, grey winter, peering daily at the ground, at each twig and branch for the barest evidence of burgeoning animation, to being assaulted by signs of life on all sides with each step taken along the garden path. And the truth of it is that, while it’s glorious to have such abundance (anyone, they say, can have a garden that looks good in spring*), we know that it won’t last, that we’ve got about eight weeks of the freshest and fullest growth and that towards the end of this spell we’ll be wishing we could reach for the pause button to give it a good slap. That, or forgo some of the glut, and space it out through sparser months.
But garden time doesn’t work like that. The mechanism is spinning up just now, and in a matter of days we’ll be at Blink-and-You’ll-Miss-It o’clock. Tulip ‘Purissima’ is already throwing herself with abandon at every ray of light, flinging her petals to the ground with wanton glee (she really is the funniest flower in the garden – always the first tulip in bloom, always the giddiest when warmed by the sun), the mid- to late-season tulips are shaking a leg, and shoots that have spent the past few weeks tentatively pushing their way up through the soil are now leafing up and beginning to form flower buds. According to that most gorgeous and fleeting of timepieces, we’ll be soon be measuring the passing of the year in paeony hours, and that’s not just the end of the beginning but, in some way too tinged with sadness to give much thought to on this sunny Easter afternoon, very much the beginning of the end, for another year at least. But we’re not there quite yet, and when we are, there will be roses to keep us company through the ebb and flow of the rest of the growing season, until the garden folds back in upon itself for winter.
Gardening teaches us that time is fluid, that it pools and eddies and that we aren’t limited to travelling steadily upon a single current. One afternoon’s work in the beds and borders will have us variously immersing ourselves in the moment, lost in the soil under our nails (as usual, I’ve worn holes in the fingers of my gloves) and the plants we’re either lowering into, or extracting from the ground, and travelling back in our recollection of how this planting combination looked in previous seasons, then immediately forwards to how it might be by the end of summer, or this time next year, having made this tweak here, or that one, there. There’s a lot been said and written (not least by me) about gardening mindfulness but, while the garden is the perfect venue for meditation, the act of tending to a patch of soil forces the gardener to leave the security of the here and now by holding in their muddy hands not only what is, but what has been, as well as what it could become. And a gardener does all this, almost without thinking, and with no machine more complex than a wheelbarrow or a pair of secateurs.
* this pre-supposes that anyone can have a garden, which would be wonderful if it were true but, since it isn’t, probably tells you all you need to know about how much store to set by the saying. What is true is that any patch of soil will never be more fabulously furnished with bright, fresh green growth than it is at the peak of spring, when almost every plant’s energy is concentrated on the twin tasks of expanding its coverage of leaves, the better to capture the sun, or producing flowers to attract pollinators, and barely anything has had the chance to go to seed.
The audio recording of the time traveling post is a brilliant touch!
Poor Belle Epoque, never beating the meaty accusations. 🥩