The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
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If you are new to these blogs then this series of 'Writing by numbers without numbers' will make more sense if you go to 'Writing by Numbers without numbers 1', Scroll down for number 1
The address for all my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
How does your garden grow?
In trying to write
about how love starts, develops, changes, plateaus, and dies. I have
had to consider that there are extraneous circumstances that impact
on how I understood love to be. I thought love was pure; that it
conquers all. In fact, love seems to come in different forms and each
form can be appropriately used for only one purpose. The love a
parent has for a child that is not their own originates from an urge
to protect something cute and vulnerable. I read somewhere that the
reason that kittens and puppies are cute is so they are cared for by
their species. It could be a ‘chicken and egg’ thing though.
Anyway, in humans, I believe, our familiarity with a cute infant
grows into love for that individual. The important thing here is that
in almost every situation an infant to almost every person is not a
threat to circumstances that are invariably controlled by adults.
And, here, is where love has an injurious enemy; an individual’s
desire to control. Of course, we can’t have pre-school-age
politicians making laws for adults to follow. So, there has to be a
necessity to shape lives, but, I suggest, sometimes in shaping lives
we inadvertently shape love.
I chose to compare a
garden throughout a year with how love unfolds and changes. Weather
affects the garden and is inevitable.
These are the notes
I wrote after I had written my little love story about Toby, Mimie
and Kate. I know England’s seasons so I could quite easily use the
changing seasons as a template to how love in my story unfolds.
However, I always wanted to have a parallel story taking place
alongside, that mirrors what is happening to Toby, the protagonist,
so I had to dwell a little in my imagination and wax lyrical in these
notes.
It is Winter. The
nights are cold and mostly cloudy. It is usually damp; humidity is
always high during the cold months in England. Thankfully, the snails
and slugs are absent from gardens. There really isn’t much for them
to eat when the temperature stays below 5oC. It rains
quite a bit and sometimes snows across the whole country.
Snow can fall as
tiny frozen particles, which are more like the ice scraped from the
inside of a home freezer. Snow, as we commonly recognise it as white
clumps of frozen water, can fall straight down when there is no wind
and the temperature of the flakes are too warm to keep the six
fingered stars it naturally crystalises into when the conditions are
right. It can float to the ground and is toyed with by the slightest
hint of a wind when the temperature is just right. This is romantic
snow. This is the snow that children stop doing their school-work and
watch through the school-room windows, in awe. ‘It’s snowing’
they say. Their voices might just as well be welcoming Father
Christmas because right before them is a magic show that means that
they will have a new kind of fun. Different games will be played;
snowball fights; making angels in the fallen snow with their bodies;
and snowmen, women, children, and snow-animals will be made. This is
the snow that we see on Christmas cards and photos of winter scenes
when it lays atop branches and walls, and has bluish shadows, not
grey. This is the snow that creates a monotone landscape, with stark
silhouettes of trees and tiny cottages huddled on hillsides. This is
the snow that sits on the thatched rooves of cottages with smoky
chimneys on Victorian style Christmas cards and really exists in
Yorkshire and Wales. The promised warmth of the fire inside the
cottage makes us happy. But what if the snow is on a building with a
collapsed roof, or lies atop a still body. What if the snow comes at
the ground from an acute angle and is driven by a gale. What if
cyclists trying to get home are blown into ditches, or sheep are lost
on hillsides because they cannot see far enough to the next safe
place? This is the same frozen water but comes in the name of
destruction and ruin. A poet might make a romance from a blizzard but
most of us have no affection for it.
Snow can blanket the
ground and seal it off from severe freezes. This can save the dormant
bulbs and tubers for plants such as snowdrops, crocuses, and
bluebells. Many gardens have Spanish Bluebells as ornamental plants,
though these will poke their leaves into the sunlight early in the
year, it is not until early spring that they start to flower.
Once the temperature
rises and snow does not fall, we are confronted with rain, no-one
likes rain, except people who don’t like the lingering and
persistent snow that just lies around doing nothing and getting
dirty. At least rain move the snow on. Now in Spring, the wind blows
hard and drives the rain sideways and cyclists off course. When the
rain hits people in the face, it stings and cold and wet bone-felt
cold. Joggers and cyclists feel it on the bridge of their noses and
across their cheek-bones. Late Winter and early Spring is a season
which forces people to know it is there. There is even a folklore
character associated with Spring – Jack Frost. This sprite is
responsible for those magnificent mornings of white lawns and
parklands, when the trees are still bare but the sun is bright.
In Spring, we have
the first hopes of better weather when we see the still low sun melt
the frost wherever it can reach, but ‘Jack’ hiding in the shade
of walls, allotment sheds, buildings, and large trees, still persists
in his work. We see a stark contrast on the ground of white and still
dormant green grass where the sun has reached and melted the frost.
The edges are clear, there is no mistaking that the sun is winning
the battle for control over the earth. This is a mark of the earth
reawakening. Now the gardeners are seeing tiny shoots in the ground
and try to identify what they are; they don’t want to pull up any
seedlings that they want to keep and which they hope to nurture
throughout the rest of the growing period. They have hopes for a
colourful and satisfying outcome. But anxiously, they wait for the
time that a frost will not destroy their efforts to introduce new
plants to the soil.
This is a time of
speculation, of rising hopes and dashed dreams.
Excitement is quickly replaced by disappointment and submission. It
is a time of both wins and losses. Choosing which paths to take to
bring about a spectacular and rewarding showing of flowers or a hoped
for bounty of vegetables fills
growers up and down the country with fascination, discovery, sadness,
and triumph. Slowly, the tiny seedlings in the ground grow. They are
noticed but not yet identifiable except to the most fastidious and
rigid gardener who grows the same plants each year. The experienced
grower has long ago learnt to recognise and
differentiate the weeds from
the plants worth growing. Yet, the funky people, with their own
gardens, are looking at the use of the plants that live only at the
periphery of most of our attention; they want the wildlife to enjoy
themselves; to be able to reproduce and make more insects that
pollinate the local flowers. In these people’s gardens both weeds
and cultivated plants grow.
There is a respect for the weird, the unusual, and the temporary
aberrations in the world.
It
is late Winter and early Spring when optimistic people plant
seeds in seed-trays and let them warm on their window sills and other
places. Little moments of expectation of a good reward later in the
year cheer these winter-weary, sometimes lonely people. Many people
who want to grow plants, cannot be tolerated in their homes by
their partners and fellow renters
if they leaves traces of soil and seedling compost inside their
shared homes.
Spring
is a time for making plans, determining
courses of action, and
making decisions. It is a time of adjustment and temporary
disruption. Effort put in now will pay off later. Yet, there are
downfalls and tendrils of anticipated joy are shrivelled by the
changeable weather. A period of unexpected low temperature devastates
newly transplanted seedlings which have been carefully grown over the
two or even three months from seed. Mini heatwaves bring forward
flowering periods and give plants an obvious head-start. Now, if the
plants have grown too quickly, a dry period will mean the gardener
will need to water the garden. An expectation of an easy life and
letting nature provide moisture for the plants sometimes does not
happen. Artificial and
structured action is taken in the garden. The growth in the garden is
no longer organic. It does not find a comfortable place in nature.
Among all this human activity directed at producing strong plants to
enable a good floral display or harvest, the pests also
gather; the snails and slugs, menace to every gardener savagely munch
on the new and tasty favourite plants in midnight feasts. By morning,
they
have gone; only a few leave their presence known with their demise
spread on garden paths and pavements from the tread of late-night
teenagers, who now brave only chilly nights to kiss and vape.
Late
Spring signifies to the gardener that whatever they have sown, so
shall they reap (or less than what their efforts have
so far have achieved). There
is now no time to start new plants. There is no expectation of a
bright and colourful garden or a bountiful harvest if the first
efforts have not given adequate results. Except there is; sometimes,
there can be found young plants that other gardeners have started
early, but are left out for their neighbours to adopt. Sporadic
offerings in villages might include tomato, cabbage, pepper, and
courgette plants and a garden in late spring once cleared of weeds
and lightly dug, can change from bare brown soil to short rows of
young vegetable plants only a few inches high, or flower-beds
suddenly have their bareness neatly replaced with spots of young
leafy plants. For the buyer
of these plants, there is an expectation of pleasure that comes about
through not hard work or gentle nurturing. In
the garden, there are plants that have been collected from, or
donated by neighbours and other kind persons that have been adopted
and will be lovingly cared for, just like a human parent wants their
charges to do well in life, so a gardener with these plants gains
pleasure from providing care and nutrition. Not all of us are
‘green-fingered’ or amazing pet owners. Plants are least
expensive on our time than other people, just like, in the villages
and very small towns across the world, cats are easier to ignore than
are dogs, so in many gardens there are plants doing well and plants
doing less well.
The
Spring weather has sections made up of days of sunshine followed by
days of cloud and days of rain. There are troughs and peaks. One day
the landscape is turning green and a week or two later, the weeds are
tall and the buds of leaves on trees have opened. Gone is the
bareness and a parade of what is to come is experienced; Summer.
The
garden in early Summer has only some
of the effect that a gardener is ultimately aiming for. Of course,
there are flowers, but for many gardeners these are ‘fillers’
that have been specifically grown to preserve the space for the
‘grand show’ or the ‘extravaganza’ that 365 days of planning,
effort, and adaptation, will have brought about. At
least, that is the plan.
Summer
is a time of unified expectation of fair weather. This is when, as
children, we might lay in a field or a back garden and point out to
each other the shapes of the clouds against
a deep blue sky, and how
they resemble animals or faces. Rarely, would we ‘see’ houses or
motorised ships. If we are lucky, and only half child, we might see a
sailing ship from yester-times. Maybe grandad is keeping an eye on
the kids when that happens.
Blue
skies tell us that we can allow ourselves to be confident that our
efforts towards a scheduled day of fun will be reciprocated. We might
go to the beach or the seaside. In the garden, the plants will
sunbathe and be visited by insects, but like us they will begin to
feel thirsty. In the plant world, this is an indication that it is
time to flower. Early flowers in Spring will have been triggered by a
lack of rainfall. In the
garden, the tomato plants
that are still in plant pots and
didn’t get planted in the
ground or taken by neighbours from outside gardeners’
homes, will be in advanced
stages of fruiting if they have experienced a wave of drought and
flood period. Plants in pots
in early summer will usually experience this. Little
fruits on the plants are
there but these will never
reach a satisfactory size, and will only be considered to be the
result of laziness or lack of planning. In any case, they sit by the
shed, half-forgotten but not fully discarded because no-one has the
heart to just kill them by dehydration. The lawn, green if it has
rained occasionally needs cutting and is the chore that almost
surpasses the pleasure of
having a garden lawn. In
many gardens there is only a lawn and it is cut only because there is
some notion that we will be judged by others that
we are unruly in our minds,
if it is left to its own devices. So, we must tame it; keep it
constrained; stop it running riot and having too much fun.
Summer
weather in England brings with it many changes that most of us never
recognise. The roads, denied a wash from falling rain become dusty.
Yet, we come across this dustiness most acutely in the countryside,
right outside our towns and cities. On dirt tracks, rutted by the
farmer’s tractors when the ground was sodden in the two previous
seasons, the dust can be kicked up by a shoe scuffing the ground. The
smell of it is different to when it is wet; and different again, when
it has been dry for a while and recently wetted by Summer rain, than
when it has been cold and wet for long periods in Winter and Spring.
The smell of the dust blends with the scent from the heated weeds
happily growing on the verges. We don’t notice it much if we smell
it every day, but as soon as it starts to rain so much dust is thrown
into the air that almost everyone can ‘smell’ the coming rain, if
they are downwind. For
a few precious moments we have a new experience before the ground is
wet and lays gratefully quiescent as it waits to return to its
preferred state of being just moist. Of course, deserts across the
world have adapted to being arid and much prefer very little water,
but in England, there is a sigh of relief if the rain follows a long
dry spell, Near ‘droughts’ in England, followed by steady
rainfall often brings out children in swimming costumes and adults in
shirts, shorts and t-shirts from their dry and safe homes into their
garden where they dance with feigned
glee mixed with their
sudden release from the
oppressive dry heat.
Autumn
has the same aspect to it; dry heat is now
past and there is a fullness to the air, but
there is no celebration in the garden by the children. Damp
soil and fully grown plants give off a scent that tells us all that
the conkers on the Horse Chestnut trees are almost ripe and will fall
onto the pavements below. The plants are seeding and the last
tomatoes are ripening on the plants largely stripped of their leaves
to encourage this last push towards an edible product. This is a time
when, in England, the sun gives a different light to us. It is a
light tinted with yellow; a softer light, but fuller, despite there
being a significant shift from the full spectrum of light that
originated from the sun. Autumn is a time of contentment; still warm
in its early stages, people are still wearing shorts and skimpy tops
but now there is a frisson of cautiousness in us, a slight chill that
without us knowing it, excites us; attracts our attention; not like a
glass of iced water in Summer accidentally split on us that gives us a
delightful shock; more similar to a very rapid wave of goosebumps
that passes before we acknowledge it.
As
early autumn progresses towards mid autumn there are more days of
cloud but the days of sun are warm and humid. This is when the
gardener finally reaps something
from their many hours of
effort. Root vegetables are pulled from the ground, cabbages
are cut as they are needed,
and top-fruit is picked; apples; pears; plums; blackberries are
plucked from gardens or, for some of us, from roadside trees. This
is when the person picked up for work in the morning who takes the
same amount of time to eat an apple when they get in the vehicle has
thrown it by the roadside and a row of apple trees have grown. Often
considered to be vandals of the countryside by people in following
vehicles, gardeners and scavengers laud them as heroes.
The
leaves turn from green to reds, yellows, russets, pinks, burgundy and
finally brown, and fall from the trees. If we are lucky, we might
have a period of dryness that lets us rake up the leaves in the
garden in mounds that creatures like hedgehogs enjoy, or in our roads
and streets get pushed
around by passing traffic and fickle wind. Inevitably though, they
will get wet and never
dry out. Slowly, the thin parts fade and there is only the skeletal
veins of the leaves, which collapse among themselves over the next
weeks. Some of these last until Spring but only a tiny few. Autumn
was once when we would preserve fruit by fermenting or pickling. Meat
would be salted to last over the Winter. Autumn is both a time of
bounty and a time of
planning for the coming
meagreness of Winter.
