Finding Time to Garden
I’ve had a baby! Little Laurie (Laurence) arrived 4 weeks ago and is thriving! The last month has flown by and every moment has been filled with the joy and exhaustion of being a family of 4. It’s been a good few weeks since I last wrote here but life has finally settled down so I’m back!
Yesterday Toby took Arthur to football, Laurie fell asleep in his crib, I poured my coffee and just like that, I was alone in the garden for the first time in weeks. I’ve been in and out in the last few months, mainly to help Arty strip the veg patch of nearly 900 cherry tomatoes one handful at a time, and to hoof buckets of veg scraps to the compost heap, but between ‘pregxhaustion’ and clutching a newborn, I hadn’t touched the ground in nearly 2 months. Yesterday, coffee in hand, the world stopped spinning for a moment and it was bliss. Taking stock in the warm September sun; tackling some woefully overdue weeding. Best of all, having my hands in the soil again after 9 months of wearing gardening gloves.
10 minutes later, Laurie woke up and the spell was broken.
At the moment, it feels like there is never enough time to do anything, let alone enough time for the garden. But the garden shows no sympathy for the stress of early maternity and refuses to wait for me, galloping wildly ahead without me. Every time I step outside the list of what needs to be done grows longer. Rather like my tummy I find my ‘post-partum garden’ looks nothing like it used to and falls far short of any societal ideals. But none the less I’m still super proud of what we’ve managed this year. We’ve grown an awful lot of veg and even if some corners of the garden are looking neglected, when I look out of the kitchen window I can still see flowers.
One of the greatest charms of gardening is that our creations exist independently of us. Unlike a ‘finished’ piece of art, our relationship to our garden is a continuously developing one: the art we create in a garden is open-ended and our medium has a life and opinions of its’ own. This enriches the art of gardening but makes it an exhausting and exacting hobby at times. Unlike so many past times, there’s no quick fix, no cheating, and very little control over the time frame for getting things done. Much of gardening consists of critical day to day jobs which, when skipped, can have disastrous consequences (RIP to the trays of seedlings I left un-watered earlier this spring). You can’t really take a break: If you decide to leave the garden to itself for 6 months and then return, you pay for it and at the back of our flower beds I’m now facing mountains of well-established weeds as penance for months where I couldn’t bend down!
The pay-off is the huge satisfaction of knowing that what beauty there is in your garden is the result of hard labour. When I flick through images of people’s private gardens and allotments on social media I find myself quite moved by the sheer scale of collective human effort that has gone into them. No one can grow vegetables or arrange bunches of cut flowers from the garden without showing up week after week, digging, weeding and watering for months beforehand. I’m full of respect for all those gardeners who squeeze in time for their gardens between work hours or kids or whatever else life throws at them.
I’ve just started to volunteer at Brockwell Park again which feels fantastic, and so far Laurie sleeps contentedly in his pram while I get busy gardening, but how long that will last, who can say. I look forward to a time when I have long, uninterrupted spells in the garden, but for now, it looks like my relationship with the garden will continue to be one of snatched moments of freedom to get on with things. Perhaps gardening will still feel this way long after all my children have flown the nest. Perhaps it is this that makes gardening feel like such a luxury and a pleasure: making time in the garden has come to represent making time for myself.
And on that note, Laurie has drifted off and I have some foxglove seedlings in urgent need of potting on, so I shall wish you a pleasant day, close my laptop and dive outside before it starts to rain.
