What if you had another chance to get it right?

Bramble & Briar #121

A breezy day in the big border at my Friday garden, with the tallest plants on loan from home

I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasions I do get around to making any new year’s resolutions, they’ll be in tatters by the end of the first week of January. When it comes to the garden, I’m protected from my natural fecklessness by the seasons, and so the snafu takes a little longer to set in. Garden based resolutions work on a slightly different timescale – you can plan what you want in winter, but you’re unlikely to have the chance to set it up, either for failure or success, until spring rolls around.

All the same, the first half of the year is loaded with promise and potential. For those first sluggish few weeks January and the interminable drag of February, there’s the possibility of things growing, followed – finally! – by the reality, until we get to May and you couldn’t stop the growth even if you wanted to, such is the momentum that’s built up, quite matching the pent up desire inside you that’s been waiting so long through the cold dark months for the outside to wake up and be productive once more, restoring your hope, in spite of whatever nonsense is going on in the wider world, that spring follows winter, time after time, and that nature will find a way. Why would you want to stop that, or hold it back? Of course you wouldn’t – except... oh, ok, things might be getting a little out of hand with the bindweed, and the cleavers, and the hedges are displaying a marked disinclination to be limited to the nice neat shapes you’d recently clipped them into. But that’s ok, there’s time to fix that, you’d rather things were growing than not growing. And now there’s peonies and the roses have joined in and suddenly it’s June, and the sun is shining almost reliably, and there are hoverflies, and bees, and butterflies, and damselflies and dragonflies though I’m not entirely sure of the difference except I get the distinct impression that the latter are quite a bit bigger, not that it matters, because the sight of them skimming over the birdbath and past the golden oat grass, and the verbena, and the Cephelaria gigantea is something to behold, and it’s summer.

And everything kind of stops.