Warning: those of you who like your gardens to be well-manicured should look away now!!
It's just over a month since I moved to my temporary home - which means a month since this haphazard, fair-weather gardener took on the tiny garden here, bolstered by appropriately distant advice from two green-fingered sisters. A gardener had pruned the blackberry and rose bushes last autumn, but otherwise, everything has flourished, untamed and untrammelled - much as it did under the house's last long-term inhabitant, a sister who died last year aged 94. Some of the garden was clearly planned - the magnificent white clematis trained against a fence, the lavender, the roses - but mostly, nature has clearly shaped the landscape. Here, the boundaries between lawn and flower-beds have become blurred, with flowers - and nettles - stealthily annexing what might once have been purely grass, while the beds themselves have turned into gloriously tangled, overgrown riots.
It's been an especially mild spring, and so everything - especially the weeds! - has flourished. So, I’m tackling them, plus nettles, bindweed and brambles, though - as I shared here a few years ago - my somewhat laissez-faire definition of weeds doesn't include anything pretty or producing flowers. I'm also keen to attract butterflies and bees: thus, various flowering nettles have earned themselves a reprieve, and I’m going to wait and see what a few other currently unidentified plants turn out to be before deciding whether they stay or go. The bees, I'm glad to see, clearly approve, contentedly buzzing around the green alkanets, which are cheekily taking advantage of my rather indulgent watch.
Meanwhile, daisies and little violets are scattered, confetti-like, around the overgrown lawn, which is also dotted with clumps of primroses and primulas, disporting themselves like picnicking groups in a park. Here and there, there are tufts of what look like wild strawberries... petunias and sprigs of mint, and something golden-flowered (maybe celandine?) growing boldly out of a wall. And then - oh joy! - there are bluebells... such an abundance of bluebells: peeping through lavender here, standing guard over the primroses there; and all around, generally colonising beds and corners and various spaces in between.
I'm in London, only a few miles away from the centre; and yet, here I can step out of the back door into a wildlife-friendly, gloriously countrified garden, resplendent in its late spring finery. Add in blue skies and a backdrop of birdsong, and this feels a whole world away from the city centre, certainly, but also from a frightening, deadly pandemic, exacting its heavy toll. Can the two co-exist? Yes, for those who need to find and take much-needed delight in sunsets and small beauties - which for me, in this little garden, means bees and bluebells and unfolding, burgeoning new life. Here, every day, I can see spring, and everything which speaks especially of the hope and promise of the Resurrection.
Bloom where you are planted, we sometimes say; and indeed, the clematis has been doing just that, beautifully. The roses will, too, in due course: as the saying suggests, they have been put somewhere, and have made this the place of their flourishing. But all those bluebells and alkanets and primroses have taken this a step further. They are blooming where they have chosen to plant themselves; blooming wherever they like.
And me? I have come here for the duration of the pandemic's isolation and lockdown - so this is where I have been planted. I'm not the only person spending this time outside my normal environment, whether through choice, work or circumstance. But even those still in their homes are effectively inhabiting a new space, in which relationships, work patterns and once-simple outings and errands have been changed in countless ways. So I ask myself: [how] am I blooming, in this new place; in this new way of working, relating, emerging - of being? And you - how are you blooming wherever you are planted...?
I'm in London, only a few miles away from the centre; and yet, here I can step out of the back door into a wildlife-friendly, gloriously countrified garden, resplendent in its late spring finery. Add in blue skies and a backdrop of birdsong, and this feels a whole world away from the city centre, certainly, but also from a frightening, deadly pandemic, exacting its heavy toll. Can the two co-exist? Yes, for those who need to find and take much-needed delight in sunsets and small beauties - which for me, in this little garden, means bees and bluebells and unfolding, burgeoning new life. Here, every day, I can see spring, and everything which speaks especially of the hope and promise of the Resurrection.
Bloom where you are planted, we sometimes say; and indeed, the clematis has been doing just that, beautifully. The roses will, too, in due course: as the saying suggests, they have been put somewhere, and have made this the place of their flourishing. But all those bluebells and alkanets and primroses have taken this a step further. They are blooming where they have chosen to plant themselves; blooming wherever they like.
And me? I have come here for the duration of the pandemic's isolation and lockdown - so this is where I have been planted. I'm not the only person spending this time outside my normal environment, whether through choice, work or circumstance. But even those still in their homes are effectively inhabiting a new space, in which relationships, work patterns and once-simple outings and errands have been changed in countless ways. So I ask myself: [how] am I blooming, in this new place; in this new way of working, relating, emerging - of being? And you - how are you blooming wherever you are planted...?
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