Stefanie Preissner

The garden has morphed into a soggy and overgrown Petri dish of yuckiness. Now spring is here, it’s time to face all of the things I’ve been hiding from

I’m being intimidated by my back garden. It’s March, spring has sprung, and every time I pass one of the five windows that looks onto my back garden I am hit with a feeling that lies somewhere between guilt and dread. I have to be honest, I haven’t set foot in my back garden since I put the barbecue in the shed last October.

When the Boy Housemate lived here, he used to go outside many times a day, all year long. He’d take phone calls out there, stretch his legs, get some fresh air (or vape-air, depending on how his willpower was doing). Since he moved out, the garden has become a source of deep fear and procrastination.

My nana used to say that the first mowing of the lawn had to happen on St Patrick’s Day. In the last few weeks, that advice has been weighing on me. I don’t want to go back out there. I’ve put it off for so long, it’s like cleaning the oven. I’m absolutely dreading it. Of course the Mayo Man would happily cut the grass for me, but it’s more than that. I find change really difficult. Transitions of any kind are distressing and this extends to spring and autumn.

I love the garden in summer. I have

flowers out there; we barbecue; I lie out in the sun reading books. The thing that brings me the most joy in the world — hanging out a wash on the clothes line — is only possible because of the glory of the back garden. But in spring, I hate it. I wish my strong feelings were enough to change the disarray out there.

Unfortunately, though, my emotions do not control the stars. The sun moved from wherever it’s been hiding back into my yard, heralding the season of new growth and beginning. In response to my perfect and total neglect, the garden has morphed into a soggy and overgrown Petri dish of yuckiness.

There are a million little balls of moss

that birds have dumped or dropped as they’ve flown overhead. Lengths of plastic that blew off someone else’s roof have been cultivating ecosystems at the bottom of my fence. A can of what may have been Diet Coke has blanched in the weather, having been forgotten after the last barbecue of 2020. The Trojan amount of work that awaits me when I finally step outside makes me want to seal the door and cover the windows.

It’s quite literally a reflection of my life; any tasks I put on the long finger and work hard to ignore in their neglect become wild, chaotic challenges that seem too much to face. Normally, I’m good at planning in advance. I know how to think a few moves ahead. I can lay foundations that I later build on. It’s a way to prevent being caught off balance.

These days, however, everything seems too unpredictable for me to maintain any kind of control. Any plans I make get thwarted. I don’t seem to be able to take an assured, dependable step in any direction. So I’ve just shut it all out in the garden of my life and ignored it. But now it’s spring… enough ignoring has happened. How can I progress in these uncertain times? I think it’s about striving for curiosity rather than certainty. I am determined to tackle the garden with all the green fingers I can muster.

I start with Google. Images of landscaped beauty that have been crafted by Alan Titchmarsh or Diarmuid Gavin fill my screen with charm and my stomach with envy. I drop my expectations and change my search terms: ‘beginnner’s tips for overgrown neglected gardens’. A domestic cleaner’s website pops up and I feel calmed by the first sentence, “Let’s start with some tips on how to handle this daunting task”. It’s nice to feel a little bit of optimism and unearned hope.

I start to think that my feelings about

the garden are actually misdirected emotions; things I am trying to avoid feeling about the things I have had to neglect since the pandemic. As I scrolled through the site, picking up tips for how to resurrect my garden, hope leaked into my whole outlook. Is it foolish or naïve to be confident and buoyant about the promise of the future?

Maybe so. But the facts are that summer will come, it will be warm, things will grow and flourish again. It’s natural. We all need some plausible future to invest in. Keeping the door shut and staying cynical won’t make me feel better. So I’m about ready to open the back door with a curiosity about what is possible out there. I’m ready to tidy up, to clean and nest and cultivate something that can flourish and thrive. There’s joy on the way.