the garden | vol. 2
on dry earth and dead leaves; on love and resurrection
After a week away during the heatwave, I returned home to Amsterdam to a dry and dead-looking garden. Anxious about the drought-wracked devastation that awaited, as soon as I came through our front door, I swapped suitcase for watering can and set about drenching the pots as best as I could, before finally stepping back to surveil the damage.
The soil of my little terracotta-bound Eden, beneath the first quenched inch, was sand-like. That’s the issue with a garden constructed out of potted plants: you’re planting in loam, not in earth. There is no deeper well of darker, hydrated reserves beneath the surface: any encapsulated land is limited to its own shallow depths.
Some of my garden had been transplanted here with me, but much was grown and seeded here, on this terrace. And as my relationship has grown, so have the plants.
But after this week of neglect, the roses he bought me for my last birthday were now headless, leaves yellow. The lavender and jasmine I had brought back from extinction were, once again, sun-bleached and crisping. The rosemary I bought him one autumn, as we sank into a long winter of weeknight roasts and evergreen mornings, was shrivelled, albeit stubbornly surviving.
Some herbs had succumbed to the heat entirely. In my absence, the parsley had grown tall, then turned pale and collapsed into its new shade of yellow, its rangey height evidence of a phantom recovery before death. The chives, just about to bloom, were now hay. My mint had turned itself into tea.
I was – ‘distraught’ is too strong a word, but – a bit down? Sure. Some people keep pets; I have my garden. Every morning, I wake and check to see if the plants have survived the night. Whether their leaves and new shoots are still breathing. Making sure there’s been no crows plundering their sleep like nightmares, breaking safe roots from their slumber.
Because, as the gardener-writer Sui Searle says, ‘when you love something, you care for it – and so it is with gardening and tending the earth and habitat we share with other beings. In our garden ecosystems we can see how our flourishing is closely intertwined and connected with the rest of life.’
After a few hours, in which leaves were pruned and stems cut back, and a few fallen seedlings were donated to mulch, I managed to largely resurrect my garden. There were a few casualties, a couple of severe haircuts, but in the main, the plants survived their fast.
‘Without winter,’ Alice Vincent writes, ‘there is no spring: dormancy allows things to reflect and recharge; it offers a vital pause.’ If periods of frost make the garden rest for a while, then periods of drought make it work harder. That which survives, after a period of no water, is likely to survive for far longer.
In the garden, the dead, dried, faded become mulch: the kitchen’s inedible remains add to the fertility of the soil: what is discarded becomes useful again, vital even. What didn’t survive the heat was not meant to, what did will be all the stronger for it. As with redundancy, we cut back; we pray for good weather and bring gratitude for rain – and like this, we continue.