seedlings; going out to the greenhouse, holding my breath as I enter, not wanting to disrupt anything, the stillness of life just coming into being.
Fundamentally, there is no arguing with the seasons when you are gardening – although you can get away with postponing things a little – I’ll sow those seeds or plant out those plugs next weekend. There comes a point when you realise that a delay is about to become a missed opportunity, a lost possibility, but like jumping into a flowing river, once you have your seedlings tucked up in the soil, you are carried along by the energy of the earthly calendar.
I particularly love gardening in early summer, when the growth force is at its strongest and there is so much to get in the ground. Once I’ve started I don’t want to stop. I carry on in the dusk till it’s almost too dark to see what I’m doing. As I finish off, the house is glowing with light and its warmth draws me back inside. The next morning when I steal outdoors, there it is – whatever patch I was working on has settled into itself overnight.
Of course, there is no way of gardening without experiencing ruined plans. Moments when you step outside in anticipation only to be faced with the sad remains of lovely young lettuces or lines of ruthlessly stripped kale. It has to be acknowledged that the mindless eating habits of slugs and rabbits can set off bouts of helpless rage and the persistence and stamina of weeds can be very, very draining.
Not all the satisfaction in tending plants is about creation. The great thing about being destructive in the garden is that it is not only permissible, it is necessary; because if you don’t do it, you will be overrun. So many acts of garden care are infused with aggression – whether it is wielding the secateurs, double-digging the veg patch, slaughtering slugs, killing blackfly, ripping up goose grass or rooting out nettles. You can throw yourself into any of these in a wholehearted and uncomplicated way because they are all forms of destructiveness that are in the service of growth. A long session in the garden like this can leave you feeling dead on your feet but strangely renewed inside – both purged and re-energised, as if you have worked on yourself in the process. It’s a kind of gardening catharsis.
Each year as we come out of winter, the greenhouse takes a hold of me with the lure of its warmth when the world outside is chilled by the March winds. What is it that is so special about entering a greenhouse? Is it the level of oxygen in the air, or the quality of light and heat? Or simply the proximity to plants with their greenness and their scent? It is as if all the senses are heightened inside this private, protected space.
One overcast spring day last year, I was absorbed in greenhouse tasks – watering, sowing seeds, moving compost, and generally getting things done. Then the sky cleared and with the sun pouring in, I was transported to a separate world – a world of iridescent green filled with translucent leaves, the light shining through them. Droplets were scattered all over the freshly watered plants, catching the light, sparkling and luscious. Just for a moment I felt an overpowering sense of earthly beneficence, a feeling that I have retained, like a gift in time.
I sowed some sunflowers in the greenhouse that day. When I planted the seedlings out a month or so later, I thought some of them might not make it; the largest looked hopeful, but the others seemed straggly and exposed out of doors. I watched with satisfaction their growing upwards, gradually getting stronger, although I still felt they needed looking out for. Then, their growth took off and my attention moved to other more vulnerable seedlings.
I see gardening as a reiteration; I do a bit then nature does her bit, then I respond to that, and so it goes on, not unlike a conversation. It isn’t whispers or shouts or talk of any kind, but in this to-and-fro there is a delayed and sustained dialogue. I have to admit that I am sometimes the slow one to respond and can go a little quiet on it all, so it is good to have plants that can survive some neglect. And if you do take time away, the intrigue on your return is all the greater, like finding out what someone’s been up to in your absence.
One day I realised that the whole line of sunflowers were now sturdy, independent and proud with flowers coming on. When and how did you get so tall, I wondered? Soon that first hopeful seedling, still the strongest, was looking down on me from its great height with the whole wide circumference of its brilliant yellow flower. I felt quite small in its presence but there was a strangely affirmative sensation in knowing I had set its life in motion.
A month or so later, how changed they were. The bees had cleaned them out, their petals were faded and the tallest could barely support its bowed-down head. Lately so proud and now so melancholy! I had an impulse to cut the row down but I knew that if I lived with their raggedy sadness for a while, they would bleach and dry in the sun and assume a different kind of stature as they led us towards autumn.
To look after a garden involves a kind of getting to know that is somehow always in process. It entails refining and developing an understanding of what works and what does not. You have to build a relationship with the place in its entirety – its climate, its soil, and the plants growing within it. These are the realities that have to be contended with and along the way certain dreams almost always have to be given up.
Our rose garden which we started making when we first carved out some plots from the stony field, was just such a lost dream. We had filled the beds with the loveliest of old roses, such as Belle de Crécy, Cardinal de Richelieu and Madame Hardy, but it was the delicate, heady and delicious Fantin-Latour, with its flat petals, scrumpled like pale pink tissue paper, that was my favourite of all. Soft and velvety, you can nuzzle right into its flower and disappear in its scent. Little did we know then that their time with us would be so brief, but it wasn’t long before they began to baulk at the conditions they were living in. Our ground did not suit roses that well and a lack of ventilation in the wattle enclosures made matters worse. Each season became a battle to stay on top of the black spot and mildew that increasingly assailed them and, unless they were sprayed, they looked sad and sick. We were reluctant to rip them out but what is the point in gardening against nature? Of course, there is none and they had to go. Oh how I missed them and miss them still! Even though not a single rose is growing in those beds today, all long since replaced by herbaceous perennial planting, we still call it the rose garden. So the memory remains.
Neither Tom nor I liked the idea of using chemical sprays but I had a particular fear of them because of my father’s illness. When I was a child, he developed bone marrow failure of a type that is caused by exposure to an environmental toxin. It was never entirely clear what had triggered this catastrophe but amongst the possible culprits were a long-since banned pesticide lurking in the garden shed and an antibiotic prescribed for him when he had become ill on holiday in Italy the summer before. He nearly died then but the treatment he received partially reversed the damage and, although he could not be cured, it gave him another fourteen years of life. He was tall and physically strong, so it was possible for all of us to forget at times that he was living with only half-functioning marrow in his bones. The illness was always there in the background though and when his intermittent life-threatening health crises occurred, all we could do was hope.
In that phase of my childhood, there was a garden that captured my imagination much more vividly than the one at home. My mother would take my brother, myself, and any friends in tow to the Isabella Plantation, the woodland gardens in Richmond Park. As soon as we arrived, we would run off and disappear into the massive rhododendrons to enjoy the frisson of exploring and hiding in them. So dense were the bushes that it was possible for a brief time to get lost and feel the panic of separation.
There was another more unsettling element in that garden. In a small clearing, deep in the woodland, we discovered a red and yellow painted wooden caravan, which had a sign carved above the door: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ We used to dare each other to defy the injunction but the thought of relinquishing hope was not something I could possibly have taken lightly. It felt as if opening that door might release the terrible dread I dared not name into the world. In the end, like all things unknown, the fantasy proved far more powerful than the reality. One day when we finally tried the door, it revealed