Creating a garden

And avoiding abstraction

Photo by Tracey Parish on Unsplash

Just now I put up some white twine to support the hollyhocks, which had gone horizontal in last week’s storm.

Before that I pulled a thistle from between the leaves of a blue geranium in the new garden bed, and before that I mended a linen top where a seam had come loose.

That small chain of actions felt glorious, with the kind of disproportionate happiness that makes one wonder if one is asking too much from life, or too little, to be pleased by such tiny things.

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I hadn’t sewn in decades. The gestures of it — tying a knot to secure the thread after one pulls it through for the first time; finishing a row and then reversing oneself, boustrophedon-style, which is to say like an ox plowing rows back and forth across a field — were from more than fifty years ago, when I was a little kid making things with my mom in a house that was mostly garden.

There was a pleasure in the competence of the movements, and equally in the competence of whoever had designed the sewing kit, which I’d bought on a whim once and never looked at since.

The kit’s mesh bag held a dozen or so spools of thread in different colors, two of which were close enough for the cloth at hand.

When I needed a pin, I saw a colorwheel of big-headed pins.

There were needles in different sizes, and a threader, and when I wanted to put down the needle for a moment I saw a red pincushion to push it into. There were large scissors when it was time to clip the thread, and other things for the future: a stitch-ripper, a thimble, a measuring tape folded upon itself just like in the old days.

I’d expected a sewing kit to feel unserious, a toy purchased instead of the real things that a real person would buy. But this had been made by someone who sewed and knew what tools would be needed even for a simple task, and who chose solid, well-made versions of all of them.

Appreciating it was a moment of happiness in itself.

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Somewhere between my hippie childhood and my academic adulthood I lost faith in myself as a material being in the world.

Other people’s material competence never ceased to give pleasure, but pretty much only the memory of distinct, clear moments of enjoying one’s own competence in the physical sphere, like tying up a flower or fixing a torn seam, remained.

Today it occurred to me how much of moving to the countryside was unconsciously a hope of finding a way back to that. It’s been a slow road to recognising something so simple.

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In and around the new flowerbed, the amount of life is astounding.

During the hot dry days before the storm the combination of flowers must have provided rare food or shade or moisture, because every flying creature in the area seemed to seek it out. Bees, butterflies, flower flies, and beetles were the ones I recognized. (That is to say, I recognized all but the flower flies: I thought they were a kind of strange bee that traveled in flocks. A neighbor came over to look and explain.)

It turns out that the flowers were chosen with water shortages in mind. I had no idea.

Up to now my entire role in creating the flowerbed, and the emerging garden overall, has been as a catalyst.

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When I first moved here, and until last spring, the expanse of grass that came with the house felt more like a burden and a responsibility than anything else.

I didn’t know what I owed it, I didn’t know what to do with it, I didn’t want to bother with it. I found it difficult to want anything for it, much less anything from it.

Then I happened upon two photographs in a Substack article by the British garden designer Jo Thompson.

The first showed a garden similar to mine, all blank grass stretching back, a sense of formlessness. The second showed the same garden after she had transformed it: it had become filled with height and roses and greenery and color and life.

Suddenly, I had a desire. I wanted something that could actually exist in my mostly empty space.

I bought Thompson’s book, The New Romantic Garden, and looked through it, soaking in the pictures.

I showed them to someone who knew what he was doing.

Now there is a garden appearing here. Sometimes we call the small area with the new flower bed, where also two young fruit trees are now in place and a rose arch will go up soon, the “romantic garden” area, and sometimes the “cottage garden” area, and sometimes what this kind of space is usually called in Swedish, which is the “grandmother’s garden” area.

It all means the same thing: simple flowers and sometimes vegetables, and life and color and a balance of form and wildness: nothing too untended, but nothing too constrained. Just what I wanted, although I hadn’t known it until then.

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Normally, when I become interested in something, I read about it. I study up, I immerse myself. I learn everything there is to learn.

With the garden, I have done none of that. Instead, there has been a slow, episodic, direct kind of learning.

F., who is making the garden out of nothing, teaches me something as we stand and discuss it: a change, a moment of unexpectedness that I don’t know how to interpret until after the discussion, when I do.

My wonderful neighbor L., who once snuck into the garden while I was asleep to plant a handful of happy orange flowers where she saw that I needed them, tells me which self-seeded things should be pulled out and which should remain, sometimes mentioning who she herself got that knowledge from. Another friend, A., does the same.

This is a new kind of learning for me.

I don’t want to research what flowers are good for local insects here. I want to discuss with F. our shared goal of plants that feed the ecosystem, and to slowly gain from his knowledge and expertise.

I want to learn the old-fashioned way, the way I once learned sewing. It took until today to figure that out. Up until now, the lack of desire to read has been perplexing; I mistook it for lack of interest.

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Normally “garden” is a verb more than it is a noun.

To have a garden is to garden, to take action. Until today, I have had no urge to do so.

I have been content to be a catalyst for someone else to be creative.

The role I have taken on as an expert gardener’s client has not been that different, strangely enough, from the role one plays as a supervisor of a research thesis, which is to support the other person in their work: to raise questions, serve as a sounding board for ideas, provide support and encouragement and resources, and rejoice in every successful outcome. ¹

I have been creating only in the sense that a thesis supervisor is creating, other than that it is my desire for a particular feel of garden that is underlying the project. I have seen “garden” as a thing that I was helping to bring into being, and that hopefully would last a long time, bringing pleasure to whoever came after me as well.

But not as a verb, not for myself.

The last time F. was here, I asked if I was his only client who only wanted to talk about the garden, never to actually garden it.

He paused for a long moment, reviewing all of them, and finally said, unequivocally, “yes.”

Even his clients who are elderly and can no longer garden as much as they would like are out there, doing.

“But,” he added, “you have been starting from a non-garden. It takes time. It might be slow. But likely, as it comes into being, one day, you’ll come into the sense of it. Then things might change.”

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So little of what I’ve wanted in my life until now has been directly material. A great deal of it has involved working with abstractions that help people, but at a remove.

Until today the garden was part of those familiar frames, with everything shying away from digging into the actual material work of it all.

But something about the sewing kit, about the white twine successfully if inexpertly supporting the falling hollyhocks, about the thistle growing right through the center of the blue geranium, shifted the garden a tiny bit sidewise. It became real. Perhaps the most obvious thing in the world, for many. A big thing, at this end.

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I had intended this essay to be a very different garden one! That one, discussing a novel by Philip K. Dick of all people, will have to wait for another time.

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For an earlier attempt to grapple with the garden, see:

1. Of course a thesis superviser is also a teacher, but that’s not relevant here. What’s similar is the sense that one’s job is to support someone else in their act of creating something new, rather than being the creator oneself.