Gentle Reader,
It is sometimes necessary to go away in order to come back. Last week, I came back, and since my departure, there have been various developments.
For reasons not understood by most (including myself), I have taken an interest in gardens. The interest, which mysteriously took hold just before I headed off on my holidays, gained momentum as I passed the days and evenings in my little Parisienne studio. Strangely, although I was in the City of Light, with the artistic and cultural wonders of the world at my feet, I found myself thinking of the little garden which abuts my bedroom in Dublin, which I had just left, the remembrance of which gave rise to a warm enveloping sense of gladness.
Ironically, before I had left I had thought of nothing but Paris, and I savoured the prospect of flâneuring in the very same streets where the famous writers of the generation perdue once walked. But within the narrow confines of my hebergement, it was wildflowers and ponds and bumbly bees which came to the fore, despite my not knowing the first thing about them, and I began to scheme fervently, with the assistance of Chat-GPT and various online pond fanatics, as to where and how I might give rise to them. Eventually, I narrowed my focus to my parents’ garden and the adjoining field (the only suitable patch of land over which I could claim at least partial hegemony), the thought of which caused my little dopamine receptors to fizz agreeably.
Admittedly, I am known to take a whim – a notion will tickle my fancy and I will not be satisfied until I have dived deeply into it and explored its every corner. Afterwards, the interest will sometimes, but not always, fade away like a dream and I knew that it was easy to daydream of wild and sprawling paradisums, from the safety of my bourgeois apartment, without having to establish whether the spirit was willing but the flesh might be weak. The feeling and imagery was nonetheless strong, and tinged with the delectability which is afforded to undertakings which, strong in mind, remain yet distant in time and in space.
The day eventually came when I arrived home and, like Attenborough himself, I noted with a knowing eye the various changes which had taken place in the little stamp of garden outside my bedroom in Dublin. I approved of the lengthening grass interspersed with dandelions and, with slight signs of wildlife emerging, I looked forward to how things would look again with the passage of a few more weeks, realising that it is a great pleasure to simply notice (that such and such a bird is a bearded tit, or what have you).
It seemed that with the growth of the grass, concerns about ‘garden maintenance’ were liable to arise. My housemate, concerned always about respectability, and assuming that an unmowed lawn signalled that we were disreputable persons not worthy of the rental house, eyed both myself and the lengthening grass suspiciously. I allayed her concerns that the neglect could be justified, and that any correspondence would be answered forthwith in a manner amenable to both literary and wildlife enthusiasts alike.
(Similarly, earlier in the year, such an opportunity almost presented itself. One fine February day, a little slip of paper came through our door, issued by the “area inspector” – a very busy and important man – who requisitioned that we trim our hedge. Delighted by the diversion of being able to write a biting and biodiverse response, I smiled wrathfully. Alas, I had celebrated too soon – at the bottom of the note there was nary an email address nor a phone number to respond to. Saddened that I could not address with umbrage my faux grievances, I folded away the already-half written email in a corner of my mind, just as no doubt the bureaucrat filed a carbon copy of the correspondence somewhere in the back of a dusty filing cabinet.)
In any case, reader, I began to plan my trip to the parents house and to envision the wildflowers and the little pond, thinking all the while of Yeats, of Kavanagh, who knew that:
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death…
Wise words.
I don’t know, reader, whence this new sensitivity came. Perhaps it is the accumulation of the anno Domini (I have twice tried to delete a full stop from the screen only to discern it was a speck of dust, a symptom of seeing the mote in another’s eye while failing to see the beam in one’s own), or maybe it can be traced to the slow accumulation and coalescence of certain experiences, laid out below for interest:
— The arrival one fine March afternoon of a bee at my bedroom window by knocking his sconce against it.
— The location of my ground-floor bedroom (which looks onto the garden).
— The letter of harassment which necessitated that I clip the greenery which was blocking the street and therefore the confrontation, for the first time in my life, of a vital hedgerow with a dull shears.
— The suggestion by my aunt to my father many moons ago to turn the adjoining field into a wildflower meadow which stuck in my cranium.
— The arrival of the pandemic which refocused my mind on the importance of having access to outdoor spaces.
— My inability to buy a house, thereby inciting a jealousy and encouraging behaviours carried out by homeowners, in an act of simulation.
— The fault of Kavanagh for mentioning roaring water, and of Yeats, for mentioning bee-loud glades.
Maybe my interest can be traced back through the above, just as literary geneticists can trace the origins of a writer’s influences over the course of his or her career by examining their texts.
It might be also that I have simply slowed down. I work less and I am generally highly unlikely to run around doing other people’s bidding for reasons which are ultimately unimportant. This might have opened up a bit of space for me, to throw off the blinkers and see new ways of living.
In any case, I am on my way to my parents’ house and I am ready to afflict them with the feverish ideology of the to newly-converted zealot. If this ideology involves physical activity, sunlight, and a sense of contribution and of cultivation, then it seems as safe a bet as any, and readers are encouraged to stay tuned for future updates which might be tinged with the green thumb.
Gardens are lovely, I wish I had one! In the meantime, I make do with a few potted plants in our feebly sunlit tiled courtyard. But we are fortunate to have the town's central green space, also known as the prairie (albeit a small prairie) right across the street and I can enjoy it without having to contribute to its upkeep.