Getting stuck into the garden.

Garden as sanctuary.

For many the garden is a place of release, of refuge, a place they can escape the world on the other side of the fence and immerse themselves in their own world of thought and nature. Being a gardener by trade means I get the chance to do this every day, letting the mind unravel whilst the sun rolls across the day and I lose myself amongst the plants.
Today my mind chose to settle on a recently watched TED talk (link at the end) about the means of rising above bullying and being the person you are. I know I've mentioned before how complete the garden makes me and how I never feel more me than when down amongst the plants, soil trapped in the folds of my hand and all my senses filled with the garden. I'm well aware of the fact I'm not a people person and that working alone suits me, a point made even more prominent when I see the faces of those trapped in a job they don't enjoy. I haven't always been lucky enough to work on my own however...

Many, many moons ago I was a schoolboy. A typical, scraggy teenage schoolboy at a typically inner city school, Birmingham to be exact. In this school I have to be honest, I didn't do great. I didn't do bad either, but I tended to muddle along on the middle ground, neither failing or excelling. Nothing new there you may think, this is a story repeated over and over the world across however it's all the more real when you're the one living that story.
Now most children at school I would hazard to guess generally have something they do well in or at least try to. I hate to stereotype but a lot of the boys I remember who weren't interested in the academic side tended to be fairly into the sports side, especially if that involved football a sport I've never really seen the point of. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in anything it was more I didn't have the motivation for going for the best grades, it was more about the acquiring of knowledge rather than the correct application that drew my efforts.
I had a curiosity in the outer edges of subjects rather than the central curricular part, in English I wondered what the historical Macbeth was like and how would it have looked in those days to see a forest of men disguised as trees creeping across the land towards you. I have know idea what they wanted in my exam but it certainly wasn't any of that. In Science I wanted to know what the possibility of extra dimensions meant to our views of reality and even though I included a page of ponderings on such thoughts my teachers would apparently have preferred the correct homework instead. In P.E. I wanted to know where the best place to stand on the pitch was so as to never encounter the ball! All this did not lend me to making many friends, certainly no long term friendship were ever created, however it did open up a whole range of opportunities for the bullies. The weird long haired hippy with no interest in sports or academia does not belong in an inner city school.
There were no real vocational subjects, cookery class left the school before I did, woodwork was just a way to fill a bit of time and tick a box. Nothing to ever get your hands into. I learnt everything of use outside of school, the biggest lesson from inside school is that the world is really just one giant classroom. There's still the clever ones, the sporty ones, the ones who don't quite fit in and the bullies. The bullying doesn't stop when you leave school, it's still to be found in the modern workplace, in the street, on television, in everyday media, even amongst friends. So many people and faces saying who you can and cannot be, what you are, what you're not, what you should be, that there is barely enough time to hear your own thoughts.
This is where the garden comes in, this is where you can find sanctuary from all those voices, this is where I belong. The meek city schoolboy who was lost in a world of concrete, noise and education, sat in a stuffy classroom staring out the window now stands tall in the elements surrounded by acres of garden and countryside and knows he is home.

Get your hands dirty, silence the gaggle of the world and be comfy with yourself.

TED link. Shane Koyczan "To this day"...for the bullied and beautiful. https://youtu.be/sa1iS1MqUy4list=PL70FE2F6FC2777AB9

End of the day.

Sunlight dims, the colours of the days heat drain from the sky as the warm glow from our burning star begins it's crawl from the horizon.
Clouds capture the changing spectrum, flinging rays of red and orange across my eyes.
My mind fills with the beauty of our world pushing out the insignificant dross dumped upon one through the days.
Days become daze.
Sight becomes night.
I become sleep and all else seeps away.

Seasonal glimpses

One of the joys of being in the garden at this time of year is it feels as though you've being given a special pre glimpse of things to come. This morning I was out around 5.30 (a 'perk' of having a toddler) and got to sample the first morning air, you know the one that seems to crystallize as it meets your breath, the curl of vapour as it leaves the mouth forming ever so briefly a personal cloud.  

 

There's a nip to the air that no one wants to mention dare it brings on the A word. Autumn.  It seems spring and summer really are the favoured seasons with autumn falling sad third simply due to it's fading light and proximity to winter. For many that first nip of cool autumnal air is a stirring of memories of going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, of the outside world seeming bleaker and more distant than usual. Personally I adore autumn, I really do. The change that occurs over the season is astounding, equal to the spring change and just as magical. The garden starts to slip towards slumber as summer folds into autumn and the natural rhythm rolls on, the green of the leaf dulls and flowers turn into seedheads.  

 

Fortunately I know I'll still be out there everyday experiencing all the shift brings with it, remembering what it is to be weather beaten again. There's no doubt that many a day in the winter months balance up nicely the superb days you get mid year and I know of one garden on the side of a hill that brings a new level to 'exposed to the elements' in which I've been forced to raid the car for any spare and extra layers. However the light you get on fine autumn mornings is something close to perfection (in my eyes)especially as it means you can be out in the garden early enough to see a new day be born. The first touch of Jack Frost cleans the air and can bring on a new beauty to a garden, true some plants may be killed off, I know for gardens that rely on annuals it's a tough time and it spells a change in the veg garden too of course.  

 

As for now we get to enjoy the pre glimpses of the magic show to come. The change in the garden is both quietly sedate and incredibly rapid, you can see the plants tiring and find a lot of general garden work is taken up with removing seedheads from weeds and cutting back faded leaf growth on many of the more herbaceous elements of the garden. What starts as a perfectly manageable garden soon excides all expectations and can seem to swamp you with work, so much so it's easy to loose sight of the garden as a whole, so busy do we become with our heads down. It's the horticultural equivalent to not being able to see the wood for the trees. As at any time in the garden it's important to feel part of the work you do and by stopping and looking up once in a while you can link that back into the bigger picture. Don't just focus on the one plant to be cut back but look to see how it fits into the garden and the structure that's left behind when it's gone, watch as the shadows lengthen in some areas as the sun dips lower.  

 

Be momentary lazy, really stop for a cuppa and simply watch the garden whilst you drink.

The garden. The gardener.

It's been over a year since the move. A year of discovering new gardens. A year of rediscovering gardening and what it is to be a part of that.

Since my first days apprenticeship nearly seventeen years ago I've worked for myself in a couple of cities, the National Trust in Cornwall, the odd small holding here and there and a permaculture farm in the foothills of The Black Mountains. Nowhere have I been happier than where I am now and nowhere do I feel I've been a better gardener or better understood what it is to be a gardener.

City gardens tend to be postage stamp spaces hammered into place by the surrounding concrete, even the large gardens beautifully tended and spacious meet a definite barrier at some point however carefully hidden. This comes down to the entire environment of the garden, birdsong swallowed by the sound of car stereos and sporadic but daily sirens, the sky line punctuated by the harsh lines of buildings. Perhaps this seems a trifle harsh and perhaps it is, but the truth is until one has actually experienced the visually endless expanse of field, forest and farm land and really heard the birdsong clear all around you, you don't know the alternative. Compare the relief of stepping out of a suit into looser comfier clothes, the release your body feels as you loosen the collar.

The gardens I now find myself in are part of the landscape no matter how formal they may try to be, the awesome presence of rolling hills and giant trees humbling the grandest of borders . When the weather is rolling down a valley towards you and there's nothing you can do other than hunker down, get your clothing right and work through it, that's when you really feel it. A peg in the land, your back exposed to the sky, fingers deep in the soil and rain driving through you blurring the lines between air, skin and earth. That bright summers day after weeks of sun when a sudden shower sweeps across, soaking all below it before leaving as suddenly and the ground feels refreshed, you duck out from your shelter and laugh along with the garden as you feel the plants drink in the moisture and lift their now cleansed heads.
Toiling away in one of my most loved gardens I get to hear of it's history, how long it's been in the family, the planting and designs done by past generations, I hear of rose borders created for weddings, trees planted to commemorate a date now forgot. The soil that now cements itself forever in my hands has been worked by countless gardeners before and hopefully will do so for many more to come. I'm just a passing moment in the gardens history, barely a blink to many of the trees and not even a whisper in the surrounding landscape. The hedgerows that flow out as far as I can see were old when my grandparents were babies and many of the trees that punctuate the skyline were hundreds of years old when the land was still worked by hand.
It's this that truly marks country gardening from city gardening for me. Out here I feel a part of the garden in ways I've never had the chance to before, I feel not only that I am shaping the ground and growth and around me but that it is shaping me, there's a level of symbiosis where we feed of each other and both become stronger for it.

Truly this is the essence of it, to exist in a state where there is no difference between gardener and garden.
There is just the garden.

From city to country.

Monmouth, late November and I'm sat in the balcony of a local theatre listening to the warm, rambling tones of Monty Don. He talks long and enthusiastically as one can imagine about the joys of gardening, travel and his journey from childhood days of forced garden work to the place he now stands. Of the many things he said one thing in particularly snagged my ear and hung on long after the talk had finished. "A garden is a lot like a river. It stays in the same place but is always changing." In many ways this is true of the gardener too, week after week, year after year tending the plants and garden, learning and being shaped by the space they work. However sometimes just like a river bursting its' banks and going wherever the ground leads, the gardener too is carried out from their usual environment and left to learn the new lay of the land.

Some of you may already know that my gardening space has also recently moved from being a predominantly city based affair to finding its lungs out in the Wye Valley, a shift from concrete to bark, leaf and soil, from the ever present hum of traffic to the mewing of buzzards overhead. This may sound overly romantic and poetic but for most parts it's true. Okay I admit there are downsides to, having found one new garden to work in that sits exposed on the wrong side of the valley, being hit by all the elements but having to say goodbye to the sun at 2 o'clock as it slips below the crest of the hill I now realise how cosy and sheltered city gardens can be.

For 10 years I lived and worked in the city of Cardiff, meeting my wife and beginning a family there. It treated me well, many friends and good memories come from those years, the gardens were varied, the clients in general the perfect people to work for. I worked on cliff tops, pottered amongst elderly cottage plants, clipped topiary in private show spaces and scramble amongst controlled wilderness in renowned artists gardens. In most I was given free rein to work as I saw fit and in many ways see it as a garden of my own.
That all changed 6 months ago. Upon a whim and a hoped for dream we packed up and moved to Monmouth, a beautiful town bordering the Forest of Dean, a place I have incredibly dear memories of due to my family holidaying here since before I was born. To say I'm biased is true but I honestly couldn't be happier here. To have the Forest on my doorstep is incredible, to be able to see it from my window is mind blowing. Having grown up in a city but then trained in a profession which ensures I spend 90% of my time outside suggests I should have made this move many moons ago.

I could happily ramble on for many pages about the Monmouth area and many chapters about the wonderful  Forest of Dean, however this is a simple garden blog and I a simple gardener must focus on that.

What then of my work and the space I now find myself? In truth it's not been as big a change as one might first imagine mostly due to the fact I still travel back most days to carry on in the Cardiff gardens I've grown to know. The advantage of a relatively quick and pleasant commute means I haven't had to leave everything behind and start a fresh. this has given me the chance to find new clients and gardens at a pace that allows for quality rather than a scramble for quantity.
This is how I've ended up not only exposed and weathered on the side of a valley but in a complete blank canvas of a field that needs turning into a stock filled cottage garden bordering the 3 castles walk. It's how I've ended up too, stood in the middle of a 10 acre estate, no one around, traffic miles away and buzzards playing overhead.

To watch my family growing up amongst this place I hold so dear and being able to quietly lose myself in incredible gardens is a greater gift than I could ever hope for. There are many many happy days of gardening ahead and rest assured I will be back to ramble endlessly on about them.

Teasel's up!

It's been a rum old spring so far, cold easterly winds and frost most mornings, not that this has stopped our resident hedgehog of course. He's been up and about in the garden, knocking over pots, sniffing at the cat flap, emptying the recycling bags and generally causing havoc but still a joy to see him up again.