TAKING ROOT
Alice Vincent on finding succour in the creation of a lush city sanctuary
Igrew up in the countryside. Mine was a childhood of stickyweed and chaffinch song, of Sunday walks across the fields that ended in crumpets. But it took moving to the city for me to find nature – specifically, the kind I could nurture and control in a tiny plot on a concrete balcony.
Speak to a lot of adult gardeners and they’ll have stories about plots they tended as children – a gaudy bit of flower bed that was their own territory. We were blessed with a long strip of garden, but I didn’t horticulturally colonise any of it; an indoorsy sort, I preferred to sink into books, crayons and computer games.
By my mid-twenties, though, nature started to gnaw at me. There were no grand epiphanies that involved signing up for RHS courses. Rather, gardening arrived like any other kind of habit – surprising at the time, but in hindsight less so; something that I needed and found increasingly difficult to resist.
There were certain things that tipped me into it: a break-up, loneliness, frustration that the life I’d constructed according to plans wasn’t working. Looking back, I think those seeds had been dormant and were waiting to germinate, stretch out and eventually bloom. Passed down through generations of my family, they needed space and time to present themselves within the pressures of urban life.
So, one spring, I started to furnish my new balcony with herbs, because I wanted to eat them and because they were what my mother grew. I was terrible at it, drowning them in jumbo tomato tins that had no drainage, but I knew I wanted more. I sowed seeds (which failed to germinate) and picked up annuals from trays on supermarket shelves. It was a schmozzle of ignorance, but it was mine, and when things grew, they gave me a small, pure sense of happiness unlike any I’d known before.
As time went on, I learnt how to usher things into life; how to read the seasons in the air and the trees; the sheer vitality of looking and breathing in an environment that demands so much rush. I still prefer the nature one can find in the city. Like the people who live there, it is all the more interesting for its resilience. ‘Rootbound: Rewilding a Life’ by Alice Vincent (£14.99, Canongate Books) is out now.