A garden / A story

How mine began and a visit to Nirox Sculpture Park

We have fallen into autumn. The flower beds are collapsing with summer’s flotsam of blown open dahlias, papery petals, confetti from a season-long party. In-between the chaos and ageing are the young green of sprouting ranunculus, the last piquante peppers, the first Japanese anemone. Autumn and Spring are so transitional, endings and beginnings overlapping.

I spent a few blissful hours alone at Nirox Sculpture park this weekend. The last time I was there with my sister and our troop of 5 mini’s we promised to return once a season, we haven’t managed that yet. There are invitations everywhere you look. Invitations to explore, to play. The air moved with dragonflies which had some say over the breeze, and soft seed pod scatterings which didn’t. Glimpses of sculptures behind trees and over rises entice you deeper; people and objects, natural elements. Declarations of love, war and peace.

It is the soft sinking grassy earth that does it for me. The mown curved pathways leading me, the leafy trails. The insects, the water, the stone walls and bridge. The oaks that have blanketed areas with filtered light and cricket hums. Leafy tips on towering bowing branches reaching toward each other, closing the clearings, finger tips touching, their roots lover’s toes under the covers. Nirox is a story of a people in a changing country.

I love this quote I saw on Early Morning Birds’ Instagram page, a beautiful feed:

Gardens are a form of autobiography - Sydney Eddison

And the main character has had a bad rep. Think of a gardener, do you see an artist? I didn’t. Before I became a gardener myself, a gardener was a grumpy, asocial and weird 59-cats-person. People who have turned their back on humans who hurt, and committed themselves to plants who don’t. (sorry gardeners, I am ashamed. A gardener could never be grumpy. And I really don’t mind that I’m a weird asocial cat person now).

A gardener is a rebel, leading a quiet rebellion. Against consumerism, the fast and the plastic-covered, the efficient and new-and-improved. A gardener rebels against the status quo, mass production and the loss of nature spaces. A gardener is an artist, creating a space and a story.

In his garden, every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.”

—Louise Beebe Wilder

Autumn has a 2020 nostalgia for me. Like many others around the globe, it was the birth of our vegetable garden. We planted cabbages and cauliflower, carelessly scattered flower seeds and grew new reasons to get up every morning. Time slowed, life was distilled down to its essentials.

The garden grew up. We lifted more lawn, doubled its size. We laid pathways for intrigue, an arch for the robin to sit on against the paling sky, a clearing in the middle for picnics, a lavender border to separate it from the driveway and attract the bees. The 4 times table remained a mystery but we planted all the vegetables we ever wanted to see grow.

We added flowers that are wild and soft, to catch the light and respond to the wind. We identified new butterflies and noted the month, screamed with delight as we beheaded our first cabbage. We tasted radishes (figured out that dipped in butter and salt in the only way) and said new words powdery mildew, the lettuce is bolting, root shock. We built a teepee for sugar snap peas and planted things from my childhood, bearded irises, nasturtiums. We added a pond for a frog, a bench for an invitation to stay a while and consider the words custodian and haven. We held small seeds, remnants of creation, considered the faith required. I learnt to take photo’s of it all.

Then came days I drew deep sweet-pea-filled breaths just escaped from the closing-in walls of the messy-work-school-shouting house. After the psychologist’s feedback, lying under the flower canopy, watching the calm crawled life below, where there seemed to be more oxygen, and perspective. The days I lay clinging to the comforting surface of the earth on my back while it spins, when parenting didn’t feel like something I could put in the success column. What is a garden if it isn’t a retreat?

Now the grass often grows long between mowings, creeps into the beds, it’s not perfectly kept, around jobs and school. Weeds makes their homes before being removed, reluctantly. My excuse, this space is more than just ours. It is a sanctuary for all, bees and creeping creatures, vast life under the soil, a nod to the knowledge we don’t want to claim right. Here there is a trust that nature will bring this mini-ecosystem into balance by design. And every season we add compost, save seeds and start anew.

Start your own story. If your story is to be in the form of a garden I’ve prepared a starting guide for small gardens which I’m so excited to share with you later this week.