Dream garden
A friend I’ve never met might be coming to visit next week.
It would be her first time visiting our house and she told me about a dream she’d had months ago in which I showed her and her family around my garden.
We know each other through Instagram.
In the same way that the images we post on social media don’t always give the full picture, I am worried that the garden she dreamt of was more beautiful than the one I have – that my garden will disappoint.
While I see other gardeners taking part in No-Mow May, letting their lawns bloom wild for spring pollinators, we ended up cutting our grass in anticipation of our son’s birthday party.
I have never planted flowers, my excuse being that our regular deer – a group of red stags and a family of roe deer only
– would eat them.
The polytunnel is still bare, only recently vacated by hens whose house went into the tunnel for avian flu lockdown and didn’t come out for a year; instead of the tomatoes, pea shoots, beetroot, courgettes, strawberries, or butternut squash that we’ve grown in previous years there is only bracken uncurling through otherwise empty soil.
It looks like I don’t care. I keep thinking though of the opening lines of a Karine Polwart song, Take Its Own Time: ‘You ceased to mow the lawn 10 years ago, you just wanted to see how your garden would grow.’
The main sentiment is that the gardener no longer tries to shape their garden, just lets it seed itself and watches to see what will grow.
I may not have done much to cultivate beauty or diversity around our house, yet it is there.
My friend could see the tiny dog violets that have escaped the lawnmower, the daisies growing in rubble that will one day be a patio and it won’t be long until self-heal flourishes on the earth mounded up by the back drain.
Growing through the fence by the empty polytunnel, a crab apple tree holds clusters of gorgeous dusky flowers.
I can point to the stone ruins that I soon won’t be able to reach without stepping on bluebells, the place where wild orchids will emerge from the bent grass, or the ditch that will fill with water forget-me-nots.
Beyond the side-gate, there are celandines growing in the field, and wood anemones cluster under self-seeded oak and birch.
She will have to watch her step where forests of new blaeberry shoots are thriving, and I can pick handfuls of appley wood sorrel for her wee one.
Maybe not a garden, most definitely a dream. but