Digging over my past
Driven by an urge to leave the city and coping with bereavement, Charlie Hart moved to the country with his family and set about creating a seven-acre garden from scratch. The project transformed more than just the land...
Iremember when I was at university my tutor said: “the best politicians have a hinterland, something other than politics, something they can go back to, something that gives them perspective”. Going back to the soil has always provided me with a hinterland. I like it on my hands, under my nails and as often as not streaked across my forehead from where I have wiped away the beads of sweat that inevitably accompany working it. I love the rich crumbly stuff we walk on every day: soil is place, soil is memories, soil is a perpetual new beginning.
I grew up on an organic farm but along with many others in my generation washed up in a big city during my twenties. For me, living in a city always felt like walking into the white noise of an untuned television. I was a rabbit in its headlights. As we all know, cities can be surprisingly anonymous and lonely places, with many people living for 20 years not knowing the family in the flat above them. By the time we left the city my wife and I had three children, but city life had begun to feel increasingly like living in an impenetrable cage. It took my father dying, and the loss of our farm, before my sinews stiffened and I knew I had to finally make my escape.
Each trip out of town to look at a possible house to buy became almost painful. Not just because travelling anywhere with young children requires stopping frequently to mop up sick and change nappies, but because all the return journeys saw us deflated; cut deeply by the fact that the house we had seen was unsuitable and the long wait had to continue. But the moment we turned into the drive leading to the house we now live in we knew that this time it might be different.
Our house is not overly large, and the walls could be a tad thicker in places, but it wasn’t the house that sent me off to the mortgage broker, it was the seven acres of Arcadian paradise that came with it. I knew immediately it was the perfect site for a new and audacious garden. We returned to London that time with a different feeling in our bellies, a feeling of optimistic terror; would we agree a price, would we find the funds, might our long wait finally be coming to an end?
Our farmhouse is several hundred metres down a dirt track and half a mile from the nearest neighbour. This isolation is great (exactly what we wanted, in fact) but when we moved here my wife didn’t have a driving licence. We both thought it would be easy for her to get one, but neither of us realised at the time that her dyspraxia would turn getting a driving licence into a mammoth 18 month slog. During this period, as nominated chauffeur, I was responsible for every person or item that came into or out of our farmhouse; from the six school runs a day to each bottle of milk.
During this period, it also became increasingly clear that my mother was entering what was to be her final furlong, this followed on quite quickly after the death of my father. My grief began to mount and it pushed me relentlessly back out into the garden and onto the soil. The garden became the shoulder I cried on and I remember digging hot tears into the soil of what was to become our rose garden, which now provides us with billowing flowers and foliage. The rose garden has become a sort of tribute to my parents; a message of hope.
During this period, everyone else thought my obsession with the garden was, if not mad, at least a bit odd, but despite their absence I knew as I dug that my parents would both have completely understood my desire to grow not just plants, but also meaning, on the side of a hill. In this sense I have shared this garden with them all the way through building it; the sense of a place that I can share with them is oblivious to the mere fact of their absence.
During my childhood and into my early adulthood I suffered from a sort of searing anxiety. I don’t mean worry in the conventional sense, but rather the quest to lead an ordinary life whilst your brain chemistry is telling you that you are in mortal combat with a lion. This sort of anxiety is horrible, it robs the joy from your life and it does so from within the secret parts of your mind, its effects are mostly invisible to others. I often say to people that as my garden came together on an incoming tide my grief and anxiety seemed to recede on an ebbing one. But like the tide, they recede rather than completely disappearing.
How this healing transaction took place remains, even to me, partly mysterious. A couple of things do stand out though. Gardening is all about looking and as I developed the skill to look at the garden I seemed also to be able to look at my anxiety and my grief. The other thing is that looking (as opposed, perhaps, to merely seeing) is about patience. Something about working with the seasons, with lost and gained harvests and of course with the soil taught me to look patiently. Over time internal knots were untied and loose ends tied up.
Initially I threw myself at the garden in a sort of crazed frenzy, and the physical task of digging barrow after barrow of soil provided welcome endorphins. But, gradually the frenzy abated. On the third anniversary of my mother’s death I heard the chirrup of a robin and I picked up my spade and went out to dig, but that morning for the first time I dug for pleasure rather than from pain. My grief and my anxiety are no longer enemies. My grief has become a strange and protective friend and now when I see anxiety coming along I throw open the door to it. Often, so much of the misery we feel comes from fighting
The garden became the shouldericrie don. I remember digging hot tears into the soil of what was to become our rose garden
the thing we fear rather than the thing itself.
Now my wife has her driving licence and our four children have an idyllic garden to grow up in. Our lives are as far from the city as they could be. I seem, accidentally, to be breeding a new crop of gardeners too. I don’t believe coercion works and I never force them to do anything; but they all weigh in one way or another voluntarily. My son likes cutting grass, his sister Beatrice is a keen digger and doer outside, Florence enjoys designing things and our toddler Celestia (like all toddlers) loves water. She and I sally forth with watering cans all summer long. All of them enjoy raiding the vegetable garden or scavenging for strawberries; mostly getting the best of the crop before I arrive on the scene. I don’t regret the fact that I heeded the call of the soil, if anything I regret the fact that I didn’t heed it sooner.