We sow children
feed and water them
watch them grow
dig the earth
plant
water
watch things grow
feed water coax tend
and the leaves unfurl
the hands with fingers
to grasp grab bruise
or touch and gently enfold
their piece of the world.
Tag: gardening
What’s in a word?
A quadrille for dverse.
We call them all gardens,
billiard table seas, where ride-on mowers
ply back and forth like small oil tankers,
the military formations
of biologically-selected flowers,
all the colours of a photoshop sunset,
and the plot of earth,
half-tamed, timid and subtle,
where nature wanders.
Keep on truggin’
Trixie’s idea of how a garden trug should really be used.
Gardening
After the rain the sky water
blue cloud-foamed and flecked
earth damp yields weeds easy now
liberating occupied territory
and beneath ranks of goose grass
sow thistle tormentil and cinquefoil
treasures sown and forgotten
raise frail green arms in thanks.
Perhaps with a little sun
they’ll thrive.
Sometimes you have to
Sometimes you have to cut back,
Hack, uproot
to let in the light,
so what was meant to climb is not trapped,
creeping in the dark,
and what was meant to laugh
in sunlight and raindrops
puts down roots and digs into the silence.
Sometimes you have to chop out
a green shoot, a season’s struggle for light,
sometimes,
and then and then
when you have tended and staked,
pruned and watered
the good comes through
in a fruiting and shooting,
spreads leaf-palms
and tendril-climbs
to the sun.
Still chill
The north wind is still blowing hard here and temperatures have plummeted, down to I°C last night and only reaching 14°C in a blustery sun and cloud. Everything is suffering. Some of the grape vines have wilted in the cold, and the pyramid orchids that shouldn’t really have been out yet.
Last night we brought some of the army of plants waiting to be planted into the porch for shelter and today have been planting out some of the more vulnerable plants: four roses, a honeysuckle, one of the hydrangeas, a passion flower, a mock orange and an apple tree. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I took the photo a couple of weeks ago. The plant family has grown considerably since then and the porch is so full now you can’t walk across it.
Chill strikes deep
tender growth cutting
a scythe
before haymaking time.
Limp the flowers now
that bloomed too soon
and silent the hedge
where new things chirruped and mewled.
A handspin too far too hard
the breath of wind too cold
and spring turns inward
retreats what can
furls what was spread
face to the sun
and waits for better days.
Microfiction: Gardening
In the pot with the dead primula, something was poking through the withered leaves, not a single shoot, more like a brush sprouting.
I rescued the living thing from the pot full of death and flinched away from what lay on the trowel—no healthy root, but a clump of brown pods like pomegranate seeds emerged, dense and shiny, chitin-like, a colony about to hatch. The mass quivered. Was it the breeze? My trembling hand? I hesitated between destroying the thing and curiosity. Curiosity won.
I have put it in a pot in isolation at the end of the path, away from the flowers. I inspect it every day, watch the brush bristles shove higher, purplish brown, awkward-looking, thrusting in different directions. Today, small, flat leaves opened. Like hands waving. In thanks, or in threat?
Microfiction: Gardening
Today’s word from the Daily Post is ‘diverse’. Diverse is a term that’s getting a lot of air time lately. I’ll leave the more weighty definitions to other people and play with the more frivolous.
Irene was a gardener. Not like Fred Sutcliff next door who thought a garden was a square of green grass with a border of tea roses round it, and not like Enid Butler who thought a garden was what you had to get rid of if you wanted to keep cars. Irene had green fingers. She dug and mulched and composted. She took cuttings, split and grafted. She made raised beds, rockeries, herb squares and sunken water gardens. Every square inch was planted with something. She knew exactly where each plant would do best, and when it proved to be a stubborn bugger that didn’t conform to type, she moved it until it was satisfied.
Irene’s George had been more like Fred Sutcliff, but he had learned to leave her to the gardening and had stuck to his wood carving instead. Now George had passed on, but the garden was going from strength to strength. It became Irene’s private world.
Irene had a grand daughter, Julie. She had several grand daughters but Julie was the one who liked to have her own bit of garden to dig in. Irene encouraged her, giving her bits of geranium to plant, the odd packet of seeds. She explained which colours went best together, how to plant borders with the tall flowers at the back. Julie listened, and she dug, fed worms to the robin, caught slugs and tipped them over the hedge into Fred Sutcliff’s garden when he was out, and she watched the flowers grow.
Julie’s mother thought it was a funny sort of occupation for a little girl, but she was indulgent, and for Julie’s sixth birthday she gave her a miniature set of gardener’s tools, plant pots and a great armful of packets of seeds. The flowers in the pictures were dazzling, every possible colour imaginable. Julie was entranced.
“You’re lucky, being an April baby.” Irene beamed at her. “We’ll be able to plant out your seeds straight away. We’ll see what your mum’s chosen, and I’ll have a think about where they look best.”
Irene helped Julie clear her corner of the garden, pointed out which seeds should be planted where, which ones weren’t really suitable, and left her to it. It was June before she realised that Julie had gone beyond her remit. Julie’s flowers weren’t obvious at first, growing randomly among the carefully chosen borders and arrangements. But as they gained in size and confidence, and especially as they came into flower, Irene realised the enormity of what her grand daughter had done. Pale pink sweet peas clambered among the bright orange of monbretia, red poppies danced through purple phlox, bold flames of nasturtiums swallowed the delicate blue geraniums. Everywhere colours clashed. The discordant tones of creepers crawled among the delicate spires of lilies, through the rose trees, rambled down the rockeries.
“Look,” Julie said, pointing to the nasturtiums that climbed to her head height along the thorny stems of a pink rose. “Aren’t they pretty?”
“It’s a mess!” Irene said. “They’re all in the wrong places. You can’t mix colours together like that. And you can’t let them climb where they want either.”
“Why not?”
“Because…it doesn’t look right, all those different heights and colours growing next to one another.”
“They do in the field.”
“Exactly! A field is wild. This is a garden.”
Julie gave her grandmother a disappointed look. “I like wild best.”
A bee buzzed past. On its way to the rose, it sampled a sweet pea.
“See,” Julie said. “So do the bees.”
Street gardening
In the dirt by the step
I scraped a shallow hole
So narrow and discreet
The Mayor will never see
And shake a disapproving head.
I will plant some seeds there
And in the dusty summer heat
Will watch the green shoots climb
And purple flowers hang their heads
Above the pigeon-scratching street.
The dog-proof garden
Spring is half-way through, so I thought it was about time for a gardening blog.
Since I can’t live in the middle of a forest in splendid isolation, I stick to close focus, on a very small garden. We live in the centre of a city that prides itself on its low level, low density habitat, where behind nearly every house wall lies a secret garden. Most of the gardens are tiny. In fact, in a previous existence I wouldn’t have classified them as gardens at all. We are lucky enough to have found a house with what passes for a ‘vast’ garden. In reality it is rather smaller than our last garden that I already considered pretty minimalist.
Among our other blessings, or self-inflicted curses, is a dog. Sort of. There was a fork in the evolutionary scale when the big mammals decided either, to eat grass and trade paws for hooves, to become herbivores, or to keep the meat-eating habit and the paws, and become honest to goodness carnivores. Finbar is a product of indecision at this parting of the ways: a dog that cannot quite resign himself to not being a horse.
A big dog that thinks he is a steeple chaser, in a small garden, is not good news for delicate plants. Especially as when he isn’t chasing an imaginary cat round the place, he’s grazing on anything green and leafy. When Finbar arrived, the path that runs all around the garden became a race track, and the flower beds in the middle became shortcuts to the finishing line. Last year I decided to bow to the inevitable, and rethink the whole concept of the town garden.
Looking at the result this spring, I thought our solutions might be useful to other gardeners faced with the same adverse forces of nature.
First, forget the lawn. You don’t need one, that’s what parks are for. In our climate, with very hot, dry summers, a determined dog will turn it into the Gobi Desert for you in next to no time. For sitting or lounging outside, build a deck. You won’t notice the difference. It also gives you somewhere to put the plants you have rescued from the dog track.
Next, forget about scattering seeds to fill in the gaps between large clumps of perennials. What the hooves don’t destroy, dog urine will. If, like me, you can’t resist planting seeds and watching them grow, plant them in pots with the other flowers, or underneath the rose bushes.
Put as much as you can in pots, at least until they get big enough to look after themselves. Plant rosebushes strategically, to protect the more delicate plants behind. Use pots as a barrier, and make sure you don’t leave large enough gaps for dog to try pushing his way round.
Use all sorts of containers to give variety, and kid yourself you filled your flowerbeds with pots out of choice.
Old garden furniture, and specially designed plant racks help keep plants out of harms way.
So far, so good. We are only just getting into the growing season, but I will update at the end of the spring with news of casualties.
