This Garden

On keeping things alive

This garden. We first crunched down its gravel paths on an early summer day 15 years ago. Lavender in flower, peaches warm and fuzzy against the hot garden wall. Roses clambering up, up and over the top. It felt like some kind of dizzying cosmic display of splendour; at this time of year, it still does. That first summer we just sat around in it, stunned by its abundance, and watched the children run/crawl around with nothing on. We were guests in our own garden, an inherited garden of thought and care and beauty. It was an unrepeatable season of innocence.

Nearly two decades later and we have surely earned the right to claim it as our own. We have moved it around, planted and replanted, fought slugs and weeds, pruned and mulched and repathed and reseeded it. We have built a new kitchen which needed a different kind of garden, added generous new beds (honestly, how we could have thought that a good idea?). Yet the bones of it and most of the trees, shrubs and bulbs that anchored that first summer remain.

It is impossible not to be marked by a garden you have lived with over a long period of time. I’m not a natural gardener; it has taken me years to absorb any knowledge and understanding of how to make it thrive and as often as not, I fail. And yet, and yet, I am compelled to not just keep it alive but to try to help it flourish.

It has taken time, sometimes, it feels, stolen time. I have help - but still, so much time. Year after year, I have promised myself to read those books, see those friends, get to a play, a gig – or just to watch telly. And yet and yet, I tend to the garden. I cannot bear not to.

SO here we are, on a damn hot week many years later, roses and peonies blooming with all their might, irises just hanging on, a sea of cow parsley gently waving under the apple trees. In these perfect days, I try very hard not to think of the time spent on my knees at the altar of weeds, the lugging of compost, the nurturing of seeds. The unrelenting hour of watering at the end of the day. Of the books I’d like to have read, the paintings I could have seen, the work I might have done. Because yes, lucky me. Of course, lucky me. Instead, I give in to the heavy, honeyed air under the honeysuckle arch and the citrus-sweet scent of the philadelphus bursting into bloom. I listen to a thousand bees buzzing under the deep blue dome of the ceanothus and watch the swallows dip and swirl to the backdrop of an azure sky.

The drive to keep things alive is not something I noticed until I became a parent. You don’t, do you? Unless something awful disrupts it, the urge to extend existence is not a conscious thing; it is the buried drumbeat of a day. And then, one day, you find yourelf with a cat or a plant, or a tree, or some bees, or a scoby, or a child, or a sourdough starter – or, indeed, a garden – and your world changes.

Yes, the stakes are different, but the impulse is the same. Watch and listen, feed and water, be strict with boundaries, allow them space. Open the windows, open the doors, make mistakes, learn. It changes you, a garden. You are forced into a relationship with the seasons and the weather. You have to take control but also cede it. When your babies thrive, you shine with joy and pride. You fail, all the time. And then you try again.

So what will I be trying again this summer? I will be trying not to get wound up by 16 year old social (probably) smoking and I will try to make a plan for successional planting that actually works. I will try to give more produce away rather than leave it to bolt, and not sulk over a rejected suggestion of a dog walk. I will label my tomatoes but not their friends. I will keep seeds but not hoard family detritus. I will celebrate successes in a lowkey highkey way and try to dress appropriately. I will try not to dig too much. I will try keep my touch light and nimble. And every morning, I will try to take a few moments to wonder at it all.