Gardening helped me grieve for my parents
The simple act of planting let soldier on after the death of his mother – and had hidden healing powers
Losing one’s parents is an unpleasant business. It is usually packed with a rollercoaster of contradictory emotions, from profound sadness all the way through to crashing relief, followed by a splash of guilt. Crying can be helpful, too. But if you are anything like me, this all has to be done in private and requires space and time. The latter two commodities being in famously short supply for those of us with young families.
The loss of my mother more or less coincided with my wife, Sybilla, and I moving our large and very young family – Isaac, Beatrice and Florence, then seven, four and three – out of London to the countryside at the end of 2013.
We liked our farmhouse the minute we saw it. It sits cheerily and somehow lazily on the lip of a hill, with land that runs down into the depths of the Peb Valley below. But it wasn’t the house that slayed us with wonder and made us want to build our home here, it was the setting.
As we walked down into the valley that first time, we discovered, behind a great elm hedge, roughly five acres of virgin meadowland. Because of some peculiar topography this meadow juts out into (and provides almost 360-degree views of) the valley it sits in.
The meadow seems to float within an impossibly large East Anglian sky, like an island moated by cloud. Particularly when it is misty, the sky laps up against the side of it. As a result, we started to call this place Skymeadow. It is here that I have dug our new garden, into the side of that most unusual thing – an East Anglian hill. And it is now that I recognise it has been the distraction of doing so that has given me the oxygen and machinery I needed to grieve.
My mother, Christina, hadn’t been right for a while before we moved, and via a series of unpleasant interviews with doctors, it was established that she had lung cancer. This was evidenced from an X-ray, because she pointedly refused to let them do anything else to her. In a rather old-fashioned way, she seemed to accept her circumstances, and the last thing she wanted was for “modern medicine” to poke, prod and irradiate her into feeling worse. She soldiered on, ignoring any advice that was given to her by conventional medical practitioners, and passed away in January 2015, aged 76 – separated by two days and three years from the death of my father, David, aged 65, in January 2011, following a heroic fiveyear battle with motor neurone disease.
You can “dig for victory”, but I have discovered you can also dig for mental health. Creating a new garden by hand, working in step with nature and the seasons, has enabled me to unpack my feelings in a more deliberate way than I might otherwise have done. A garden forces emotional patience. Plants can’t be hurried but they have a definite constancy. Just as the sun will rise each morning, so leaves will break in the spring and flowers (if you are lucky) will spangle in the summer. Through the turbulence of life our gardens, by merely being there each morning when we wake up, can somehow wrap themselves around us and help us face the tribulations of the outside world. Certainly ours does.
This hasn’t been principally an endorphin-fuelled recovery from grief either. Yes, the physical effort required to build a garden (shifting ton after ton of earth by hand, for example) has delivered endorphins – but it has been watching our new garden gradually come together that has been like seeing my grief leave on an ebbing tide, and hope return on an incoming one. I admit that my commitment to the garden has sometimes verged on obsessional.
My parents had a passionate, though stormy, relationship. After their marriage broke down, my mum suffered from a broken heart, although I didn’t realise it at the time. She didn’t pursue a romantic interest again for the rest of her life. She did, however, spend time with me in our little London garden, and I remember planting an apple tree of which we both became immeasurably proud. The earliest photo I have of myself, in which I am wearing only a T-shirt and something resembling a nappy, has me bent double beside a rose with my face buried deep within it. The link between horticulture and healing was established very early on.
I have now dug seven distinct garden rooms into the side of our East Anglian hill. But the first one I made is an area that we now call The Isles. This is the beating heart and the most formal part of our garden. It was when I dug The Isles that I grieved for my parents and it is a sort of tribute to them. I remember occasionally standing up to catch my breath as I dug and suddenly welling up. I trampled my tears into the same soil that now provides us with billowing foliage and tall flower spikes in the summer. The Isles is a story of hope – and has enabled me to turn loss into gain.
In The Isles I created two giant flowerbeds dedicated to my favourite, quintessentially English and very simple spring succession; richly coloured tulips dancing away above clouds of violet forget-me-nots interspersed with roses, holding in their healthy foliage all the promise of the summer to come. If you add the first true warmth of a spring sun, the chorus of birds looking for love and the smell of freshly cut grass, perhaps even heaven starts to break in?
Despite their differences, both my parents would have immediately and intuitively understood the benefit of the struggle to extract meaning in this way. The steely and sinewy effort not just to grow plants, sometimes in adverse conditions, but also to grow meaning and purpose at the same time altogether on the side of a hill.
A garden is a place where the sky meets the earth and where human business can truly be done. When I was working on the Modern Slavery Garden for the Chelsea Flower Show in 2016, I discovered the brilliant Medaille Trust used an allotment to help with the recovery of slavery survivors. Gardens are fit and ready to serve as places in which we can unpick the messy business of real life and quest for hope. I know this is a message my parents would want me to share.
Now, three years, another baby (Celestia arrived in 2015) and one herniated disc into creating the garden of our dreams, I know I have done something of which my parents would be proud, and that belief gives me a huge amount of pleasure. This garden nursed me through my grief and I pull each weed from it in a spirit of thankfulness – in some mysterious way, it is a gift from me to them.
Every year the anniversary of their deaths comes around in bleakest midwinter. This year, for the first time, I managed to look outside my study window and smile. A friendly robin chirruped. Life goes on. Spring, after all, is an excellent time to pick up a spade and dig a new flowerbed.