March 2020
Nearly two weeks of lockdown (we started a week early thanks to a child having a temperature for one hour at school) and what I observe in my children is really more of an exhale. The anxiety has passed, they’ve had their meltdowns, I’ve had mine, we are now - already - into our everyday normal, because we’re back to our old everyday normal.
As I watch them the word that keeps coming to me is grounded.
Violet potters over to the makeshift mud kitchen, just a few containers and pots and utensils I dug out of my already stripped-down cupboards (divorce has brought out my inner minimalist) scattered across what I grandly refer to as ‘the allotment’, a large raised bed of very fertile peaty soil.
Fringed with quince and damson, both in full bloom, it hosts a huge rhubarb patch, some rosemary and sage, relentless wild strawberries and a crop of lilies that exploded into fiery trumpets seemingly overnight last summer, spraying livid orange pollen everywhere. Other than that it’s currently unused, and the girls can easily dig into it, so for now it’s theirs.
‘Shall I make you some lunch, Mummy?’
She picks up a peanut butter tub. ‘How about a salad?’
I say yes please, Vi, and can you put lots of flowers in it for me? I gesture around the garden and say she can pick anything she likes.
Off she goes, already in that delightful state of flow, picking and contemplating and considering. The salad is soon joined by a mud latte, made by adding dried powdered mud to an old mug of water, and topped with quince blossom. Finally a trifle, gloopy and packed down into a plastic container and decorated with forget-me-nots and the pompom-like Japanese rose that, much like the orange lilies, seemed to appear out of nowhere overnight.
I get these rushes of joy when I contemplate my garden, and particularly today as it’s about a year to the day since I first came here, first saw this house that would become my home, first laid eyes on the white star magnolia tree that looked like a smaller, more perfect version of the one in my neighbours’ garden when I was growing up. I fell in love with the house from the online listing, a true digital romance, when I walked in the front door I was home, when I went into the garden it welcomed me because already I belonged.
I think even when I am very old and my cold dead corpse refuses to be dragged out of my front door, I will still wonder how I did it, how the nothingness that was all that was left of me in early 2019 came to have all this. Well, I do know, it was the generosity of my sibling and the belief of a few friends and the love - the deep-rooted knowing - of this exact landscape.
My house is a gift and this garden is the biggest gift of all, I call it the gift that keeps giving because of how I feel about it and how it keeps surprising me with orange lilies and Japanese roses but I also love how I can give its gifts to my children - yes, you can pick that, yes you can touch that, yes we can eat that, yes, yes, yes. It’s all yours, it’s all ours, it’s of us.
Lunch is served, and Violet talks me through the spread, and explains carefully how each dish was made, and I listen and ask questions.
I think about the power of this little action, in this little place. I think about all the many skills and experiences that came together for Violet today, from her species identification and language to her communication, her dexterity, her role-modelling - she can already cook but the mixing, stirring, pouring and picking are all skills that can always be honed - her use of judgement, her aesthetic eye and design, her sharp observation, her instinctive knowing of what grows where, what goes where, where to look, what’s changed.
The bigger picture, her knowledge of life cycles and ecosystems, food chains and complex webs of interconnected species and habitats and places.
She points out some of the forget-me-nots are pink and purple, not the usual blue. ‘Is it like those big flowers that change colour with the soil?’ she asks. We discussed colour variation in hydrangeas according to soil pH last summer, every time we walked past huge blousy bushes of them on our way to the woods.
I think about her sense of purpose and agency, the physical aspect of the work she chose for herself, the to-ing and fro-ing, the pacing out her landscape. I think of the sensory information her body has absorbed, the scent of the sage as she brushes past it, the texture of the dandelion stalks, the colour variation of the forget-me-nots, the sound of the army of tits raiding the bird feeders I have to refill on a daily basis, the clatter of a woodpigeon’s wings as it clumsily takes flight.
I think about all the hours and days and years that led up to today, all the time we’ve spent outside together and how much I had to change and adjust and give up, for that time. For the privilege of watching my child make a garden salad on a spring day during a global pandemic.
I think about purpose, and how helping forge connections between children and the outdoors is undoubtedly mine, and that maybe one day I’ll need and create an evidence base for what I already know, and what that evidence might look like.
That sounds and feels like a lot of work and I like work, but today it’s spring, and I have a garden salad, and there’s a global pandemic, and everything can wait, because I haven’t forgotten any of it at all.
