My Garden

Nightmares. Damp sheets, fevered skin, broken sleep. Frequent tears, sobbed into the shirt of a comforting shoulder, broken heart. Restlessness.

Restlessness leads to early mornings; boiling kettles, freshly brewed mugs of steaming hot tea. It leads to a tree stump in the front garden, quietly watching the dawn break and hearing the birds as they greet it.

An abandoned garden, reclaimed by the wilds after four years of being left to its own devices. In the dead of winter, it looks nothing more than a mess of weeds. A deadened mass of dirty brown vines have swallowed up the wrought-iron fence which needed replacing anyway, and bags of rocks have been engulfed by moss and nettles.

Another day passes. Nightmares, broken sleep, broken heart, restlessness. Hot tea, tree stump. Dawn, birds, wild garden. Daydream of what this garden could become. A vision flares into life.

First, clear the garden. Start by hand. No gloves. Get covered in scratches. Acquire gloves. Hands aren’t enough. No garden tools. No money to buy them. Scissors. Normal kitchen scissors. They’ll do.

Slow work. Hard work. Days pass. Bit by bit, the fence is released from the vines choking it. And with each new cut of the scissors, that broken heart is healed a little bit.

Gardening might not traditionally be considered a hobby that utilises scissors - and granted, I definitely use them less now that I have a few “real” garden tools - but they still have plenty of uses, and the winter I spent diligently cutting a dead, massively overgrown clematis out of a decimated fence with them is one which will probably stick in my mind for years to come.

I find beauty in this, not because of the work; weeding and clearing is boring, thankless work - but because of what it brings me. Time spent in quiet and peace, working towards a goal of creating beauty for the sake of it, and for no other reason than that.

My love affair with the garden has been a “will they, won’t they” kind of tale. I’ve “failed” so many times in the garden, a more sensible person might have given up - but something calls me back each time.

I phoned my mum to ask her about how my first garden came to be. This is what she told me:

I was six years old when I first fell in love with a garden; a garden I found inside the pages of a book. My grandfather had given me a book on growing vegetables - and I’d read it cover to cover, according to my parents. Of course, I probably didn’t understand most of it, but the book was the spark which ignited a passion for growing food which I would return to again and again throughout my life.

I spent the next few weeks pestering my parents for a garden. Sure enough, for my seventh birthday, they fenced off a small area of our back garden and turned over the soil. I enthusiastically set to planting my potatoes, carrots, onions and a few herbs.

I never did harvest much from that first garden. Mum wasn’t much of a gardener, and the weeds soon overwhelmed me. The one thing I do remember was carefully taking a pair of kid scissors, cutting off a handful of curly parsley leaves and setting them to one side. Digging through the earth with a trowel and my impatient hands, being rewarded with the treasure of a handful of potatoes. We ate them smothered in butter and mixed with fresh chopped parsley.

I learned my first gardening lesson - parsley and potatoes will thrive even if you abandon them.

When the weeds overtook it, I abandoned my little garden, and a year or so later, it was sacrificed to make room for a much more exciting summer pastime - a pool - and my first garden was finished.

It would be almost two decades before I dared to try my hand at gardening again. In a small bungalow with a pretty back garden, staff accommodation courtesy of a new job, I seemed to have landed on my feet. At a local plant sale, I bought a tray of 6 ‘Greyhound’ cabbages, and 3 ‘Sweet Million’ tomato plants. A few herbs - rosemary, thyme, oregano, crowded together in a pot. I had no time for trying to grow flowers. They were pretty, I reasoned, but served no purpose. Growing food seemed a much more worthy endeavour. I would grow beautiful food and eat it freshly harvested.

But it was not to be.

A blood test came back with some raised markers. A sudden whirlwind of tests, scans and various doctors talking at me ensued. I was terrified, numb, and struggling to process what was happening around me.

The cabbages were eaten to nubs before I could learn how to protect them. The tomatoes grew on in their pots, but they never made it past the first flowers. The garden died and with it, my dreams of becoming a ‘real gardener’. I just had nothing spare to give the garden.

A few short months after turning 25, I found myself lying in hospital, hooked up to a morphine drip, vacillating between hallucinating about a magnificent cheeseboard, (which I still long for, by the way) and sobbing my heart out over the loss I’d suffered. While my abandoned tomato plants shrivelled and died in the heat, my heart was shattering in a hospital bed. A tumour the size of both my fists had been removed, taking my ovaries with it. I’d had no time to come to grips with what was happening, no chance to explore other options. It had just - happened.

Life was a whirlwind for a while. As soon as I was well enough, I packed up my belongings into a rented van and drove 600 miles to Scotland, to be with my long distance boyfriend. On the front seat, I brought along with me a rectangular green pot of thriving rosemary. The other two herbs had long since given up.

This was my next lesson in gardening - rosemary can survive almost anything. So can you.

I spent many months in agony of body and mind, struggling to grieve a loss I could hardly fathom, sweating profusely in a freezing cabin in the dead of winter as surgical menopause hit me hard. Gardening was not really on my mind - I was busy processing heartache.

But, while I hid myself away from the world, I stumbled across a corner of the internet which would prove to be a light in a dark forest. Jessica Sowards, an American homesteader, sharing her heart on gardening and learning and faith. I’ve never been religious, but listening to her wax lyrical about the garden and the love she had for it, was desperately healing for me. It was Jess who, despite my previous gardening failures, gave me the courage to try again.

This time, buoyed by inspiration and seed catalogues, I overcommitted. I planted a garden at my in-laws’ that I was in no way able to care for, and I gave up quicker than ever. Nevertheless, the broad beans thrived; the purple podded peas survived, and the rainbow carrots tried.

Third lesson - some things thrive despite neglect, struggling doesn’t make you a failure, and the garden will always do its best for you, even when you yourself cannot. Plus, purple peas are beautiful.

After another year, we were able to buy a property. A run down, derelict, abandoned property, but it was ours. A true gift. That first winter, desperate to garden, I really did go to town on the weeds with nothing but gloves and kitchen scissors. My uncle sent me some tools as a belated Christmas present, and I shifted tonne bags of rocks, a barrow at a time, by hand, until I had a clear, usable space.

I built a raised bed out of pallets. It was hard work without power tools, and a mess, but I loved the beauty of it. The random, patchwork lengths and shapes of wood made a truly unique pattern that I adored. My horse finally saved me money by providing plenty of manure for the bottom of the bed. We used an old laundry basket to separate the myriad rocks from the free topsoil a neighbour bestowed upon us.

Most of what I planted was - not quite a failure - but a disappointing harvest. The real stars of that garden were the three sunflower seedlings a neighbour had kindly given me. I’d expected little things. That was the year I learned that sunflowers can grow eight feet tall.

Fourth lesson - tomatoes produce more if you prune them. Raspberries need a year to get properly established. Leeks can survive being buried under 2 feet of snow at -15C for 2 weeks. Flowers have no purpose except to give beauty - and that is enough of a reason to grow them.

This coming year will be the most minimal I’ve done in terms of effort put into the garden. I didn’t start many seeds, and I’m letting the raspberry and strawberry plants take over the bed they are planted in. That’s on purpose, though.

I’ve learned my limits. The landscaping can come first, the planting can come later. I know that if I focus on turning our disaster of a garden into a pleasant space to spend time in, the beauty of the garden will grow exponentially as I spend more time in it. As my internet teacher Jess is fond of saying “the best medicine for the garden is the presence of the gardener”, but it's also true in reverse: the best medicine for the gardener is the garden.

Earlier this year, when winter looked like it would stretch on forever, I planted a few radish seeds in an old Haribo sweet tub in my living room window. The handful of radishes I pulled didn’t even make a side dish for one, but the quick and easy endeavour brought me confidence in my ability to grow and helped me develop discipline in watering it often. Now, the plants I left intact have flowered crazily and seed pods are beginning to grow.

Even as I try to create a controlled, structured garden, I am enjoying the wild feel of my garden. My raspberry canes have multiplied exponentially and I can’t wait to taste the fruits when they appear. The enjoyment those three sunflowers gave me last year have encouraged me to add beautiful plants to the spaces in my garden, for no other reason than to enjoy them. Beauty, just for the sake of it, is wonderful and is allowed.

But truly, the biggest gift gardening has given me is healing. Losing the ability to have my own biological children through a series of messy, devastating, painful appointments and surgeries truly broke me, for a time. Those restless nights, sweating through yet another set of bedsheets are what sent me out into the wintry garden at 5am with a steaming mug of tea. And those sunrises, those dreams of creating beauty, the sensation of how incredibly right it feels when I sink my bare hands into the earth. These things have saved me.

At the end of this month I will turn 27. It seems fitting that my journey with gardening is now getting to a point that I adore it again, two decades after that first birthday garden. The garden has seen me through incredible loss and shown me hope and joy and beauty when I thought those things were lost to me. How can you express gratitude to a garden? Through loving it, and being in it.

Fifth lesson - nature will always find a way.