HOPE IN BLOOM
Through her diary entries, Olivia Laing reveals how she has found solace – and value – in her garden during the quietude of quarantine
Whenever I plant tulips, miserably and with aching knees in the middle of November, I console myself that I’ll be glad of them come spring. It’s never been more true. Every day more appear, first as green spikes, then as tight bunched heads that burst open in the sun. I go out each morning and tot up new colours: lemon, striped yellow and red, the fuchsia-pink of Lady Van Eijk. In the wild garden there are fritillaries, with their snaky, chequerboard heads, and in the greenhouse the first pelargonium is in bloom: a tiny Lord Bute, its disproportionately huge crimson flowers cheering me each morning. I’m so scared at the moment. It feels like fear is in the atmosphere I’m breathing, filling my chest. But out here, everything is business as usual. No worries for the bee, or the black cat lurking in the hedge.
This morning I planted the sweet peas I’d ordered on New Year’s Day, the moment that I always plan the garden beds and buy seeds for annuals. It’s hard to remember what kind of time I was imagining back then. Spencer Ripple and Heaven Scent. I soaked them for 24 hours and planted them three apiece into cardboard pots. There’s a sunset now, the sky almost orange. I can see the leaves of the olivetree flickering in the wind. I’ve been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf ’s war diaries, how frightened she was and how keeping an eye on nature was such a consolation in that last freezing winter. I’m so glad it’s spring. Today I watched the fish skittering about in the sun. More frogspawn than I’ve ever seen. I’m grubbing up the Japanese anemones tomorrow. That’s the thing about a garden: it roots you in the present, but it also makes you invest in the future.
An anxious, overwrought day, most of it spent on the phone, trying to persuade my sister in London to go to our mother’s house in Suffolk before the surely inevitable lockdown fixes us in place. She laughs, can’t believe it’s possible, but sure enough, that evening, lockdown is announced. I’ve already been at home for weeks with pleurisy, but now we’re grounded. The house takes on a new feeling. We’re living in a sealed world.
A perfect day, under normal circumstances. Warm and still, the garden full of butterflies. The first lunch outdoors, the first ceremonial dragging out of a garden chair. In the afternoon I planted courgette seeds (Black Beauty). Every morning, I start my day by opening the greenhouse door. It’s lovely to see the shelves filling up – dahlias, pelargoniums, trays of seeds. I spend a lot of time in there, rubbing fragrant leaves and letting myself think of nothing.
This afternoon I cleared a mass of honeysuckle that was shading the one vegetable bed. There’s rhubarb and sorrel in it now, but I’m planning on adding courgettes and rainbow chard. Even weeding feels soothing. In the face of the virus I’m helpless, but I can pull out dandelion and bindweed, I can turn the soil, water seeds, sieve compost. These small, repetitive tasks ground me each day, drawing me away from the terrors of the news and restoring me as a body on the Earth. There are new green leaves on the birch-tree. This morning I counted 40 fish in the pond, along with a swarming mass of interim tadpole-frogspawn jelly that the fish no doubt regard as lunch. I feel awash with gratitude at each ant or ladybird, each new forget-me-not seedling. The wallflowers I planted last year are a hedge now, covered in velvety crimson and marmalade flowers. You can smell them from the other end of the garden. Some things haven’t changed.
After three freezing days, the sun is back. I’m up and out into the garden like an eel. Delicious cool air, swimming from bed to bed. I re-potted all my dahlias after becoming suspicious that they were rotting in damp compost. It’s funny how dreadful wasting the smallest thing feels right now. They cost £3.40 each, but I still lift them and cut all the rot away before packing them back into fresh dry compost, crossing my fingers tightly. Yellow Honka, Blackberry Ripple, Catching Fire. I have no idea where we’ll be when they come into flower, but it feels vital to tend to them now. And today is a red-letter day: my compost and vegetable seeds, ordered weeks ago, have been dispatched. This afternoon I’ll be planting runner beans, tomatoes and rainbow chard. I miss London, I miss New York, I miss my family, but there is some small blessing in being in the same place each day, catching every change in the green world.
‘Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency’ by Olivia Laing (£20, Picador) is out now.