Saturday 7 May 2016

Finding the earth within.


Since I was eighteen I've gardener professionally, since as early as I can remember I've had a connection with growing plants of my own, a life of greenery I feel I can cultivate and connect with. From my first collection of cacti as a boy to the old rockery in my parents garden, the adoption of forgotten house plants and during my apprenticeship regularly arriving home with a rucksack full of discard tired display plants. For near thirty years I've grown and tended plants trying to capture that state of nature I find so beautiful. I've built landscapes in back gardens,  turning the urban soil to produce something close to an oasis. My spare time would be spent tramping forest and hillside, mountain and country lanes before returning to the city and attempting to in some small way recreate the verdant creations in my head.

I love gardening. On a summer’s day there’s nothing like it. Or there hadn’t been until I moved to the outskirts of the Forest of Dean. Now I work in gardens measured in acres and set to a backdrop of the very state I've sought so long to emulate. It's not just gardens I get to work in, there’s woodland, a woodland, a small poorly managed plantation that needs drawing into a healthy balance and I realise now that gardening will never quite be the same again.

When I'm in the woods there's nothing else, everything is woodland and I realise what I was missing in the garden. When you work a wood you quickly come to realise it's all one thing, the soil is as part of the woodland as the trees, the fallen leaf playing as much a part as those still on the tree, one side the same as the other as though a coin. When you garden you garden plant by plant, border by border but there is none of that in the wood, when you work the soil in one part you effect the health of a tree in another. Most importantly and humbling when i work the woods i become part of it in a way I never can in a garden, the soil ingrained in my hand a sign of the exchange that's taken place. My blood and sweat now mingled with the woodlands living earth, my breath absorbed by the trees, head down my senses fill with the words of the wood, the talk of the rustling leaves, the smell of moist air, the taste of damp earth caught in the wind. I forget where I end feeling myself absorbed by the nature of nature, the air rising through the atmosphere the soil sinking ever down, myself as much a peg as the trees around me. All those years of garden cultivation a mere amateurish fumbling of nature, a yearning to recapture the connection I’d lost with the land, to feel a season because one’s truly in it, to know the soil as intimately as a close friend, to grasp how beautifully perfect nature is.

I am humbled.

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