Down the garden path… Again
"Suffer Vegetables"
For most of the year you can’t keep me indoors and for most of the day I can’t sit still, but a certain solidifying inertia takes over once I’ve stopped.
In a daily rhythm that means that after I’ve cleaned the cemented porridge pot, walked the arm exercising puppies, taught new gardeners (who haven’t taken the sticky labels of their tools yet), checked on the ‘we are not yet old (but please call on us often’) parents, collected some stormcast seaweed for the brassica beds, moved my young dancers from their leg confining day desks to the open studios of their evenings, carved a pumpkin for diner and done the ‘puter work or one of ever changing things on the “to do but never all get done” list, I plonk and won’t be shifted. I beg things be passed to me, and smile winningly for cups of tea. Next day after a suitable nights rest it all begins again.
This seems to translate to my annual rhythm in the garden. I spend 10 and a half to 11months busy in it. Loving my time there, jealous of my volunteers and students who now seem to spend more time there than I do, but then deep winter comes and I stop.
In January, I start thinking maybe I don’t want to get up. Maybe I’ll just stay put. I look at damp sheds, moldy garden gloves, and all the bits I missed tidying up, where weeds or worse have appeared. I think, “will I really start all this over again. Maybe this year after a lifetime of growing things, I just won’t bother.”
Age brings wisdom, perhaps simply because through repetition we can’t keep fooling ourselves, as, for the last few years, another little voice says back, “don’t be silly, you know what will happen when the first day of spring like weather appears and you catch sight of your garden diary and just wait til you open that exciting little package from Seed Savers with the new varieties you wanted to try.”
This year it was actually the official “Lá 'le Bríde” first day of spring that it happened. I felt that sun, walking the arm stretchers along a lovely river in Wexford, I felt it happening. I’ll get started in the garden now. Back home in Wicklow, I heard others on my through the town chats. Everyone was signing, easing up the tensions they were so used to feeling they’d forgotten they had them. It has been a nasty winter that came after Irish weather stations recorded their coldest and wettest summer in years. So I dreamt of gardening and stretched to get up.
A few days later, it snowed. I sat back down, shut the door stretched just far enough to reach a garden book and begged my beloved to please please make me a cup of tea.
If I’d know it wasn’t going to begin thawing in the Wicklow hills until April I might have found a way to hibernate!
Suzie Cahn
