KW 15 Gardens as a store of time and memory

It's not FOMO if you are actually missing out.

It has often been said that to grow a garden is to believe in the future. But a garden is also a memory of the humans who made it. It bears the sweat and the scars of the gardener. Be it a hobby balcony, or a battleground against broken society and the quiet violence with which ready-made culture separates us from our connected nature, it contains the fingerprint archive of someone who tried, adjusted, failed, and persisted.

Convenience is passivity. The struggle against it defines a fight only in contrast with a the genius lie of modernity. Have we really spent 100,000 years of evolution hunting the ambition to do less, to gather more moss?

I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. The Big Book of gardening Instagram says that at some point in the first few weeks of Spring you have to take a blue-skies-through-budding-branches photo. This is my contribution to the genre.

April has started exactly on brand. Most days we have scratched at the lip of warmth and sunshine, with double digits of Celcius being the afternoon norm. The weather prognosticators promised that we would have no frosts for the next few weeks, and so I left the seedlings in the polytunnel overnight. Once they sprout, most seeds have three requirements - keep them moist, but not wet, give them as much light as possible, and do not freeze.

In the night, that very night, Boreas the god of winter and ice, the cruelest of the winds sprang up with a might we have not felt around here all winter, blew all the heat out of the ground and the air, and we awoke to minus 5. Two tomatoes and one pumpkin survived his breath, everything else bent a frozen knee, departed this place, and was no more.

And so we start again.

The undisputed masters of doing less.

I should know better. I do know better. The mistake was mine and while I might occasionally rail against life inside the barracks, I do still believe in the project and there are still plenty of successes to keep me going.

March and April are also the months of the soft fruits. Every year, I recut the edges of the beds, pruning and trimming and re-newing where I can. I have been wanting to dig a 9th and possibly final, possibly penultimate bed, and moving the strawberries into it. It is partly aesthetics, which are important, and partly to make some room in a couple of places where it starting to get a bit crowded. Strawberries should be dug up and replaced every four or five years anyway, and in their place I want to train loganberries and blackberries. About 30 years ago, I was first introduced to Oma’s swirling, cascading whorls of trained blackberry vines - great swooping concentric circles of bush, thick with the tempting dark swollen fruits destined for jam jars and the cool dark cellar, and I have been wanting to emulate it ever since.

I don’t need more jam. It is the only food, bar a few potatoes and a couple of kilos of dried beans that I still have left from last year. I haven’t counted, but there must be at least 30 pots still on the shelf. Delicious, sugary fruit conserves through the winter, but also much beloved of guests. It is always good to have a few jars left for visitors.

So I dug up the strawberries, and found the best young plants set by runners last year and potted them up and have installed the supports for the wire. Today, I will move the loganberries, and go down to the wild blackberry bushes by the lake, and find a good new plant to take over the second half of the old strawberry bed. I’m not sure when I am going to be able to dig the new strawberry bed, but they are going to be ok in pots for a while.

There is nothing in the garden that has the memory of a tree. It remembers who planted it, how it has been loved, and sees everything that happens around it. In the foreground, the tiniest of all the trees at the barracks, growing for pine nuts, and in the back, the now well over 3m tall redwood. I have great hopes of the nut trees and bushes this year.

And so I shall crack on. There is so much to do right now and in the next week or so, it is best not to think about it. I m going to try to get a load of carrots in the ground. I will have to re-sow all the dead things, of course and at some point, I have to clean down and scrub up the choppy chop. There seems to be some sort of internal block against doing it, so that needs to be expelled first. I will try not to spend all week in the soft fruits again. It is quite rewarding, though. And it has a very low investment of mental energy. I sit on the ground pruning and weeding and making the edges straight all day. I can do that even on the bad days.

So here is looking forwards to a good, hard working week in the garden, creating some new memories, building both literally and metaphorically, and remembering and reminding that life does not come from a shop.

See you then, and please be kind and lovely to the best of your abilities

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo