Tag: garden

As you can see, a very ordinary, small, town garden. And an axe. Which I got for Christmas, and which I had to use to hack through thick, buried wisteria vine running under the western bed.

I got paid last week. I discovered a few months back that buying dormant fruit trees at this time of year is surprisingly cheap. So I have some apple trees incoming, ones that I can raise in containers. I’ve slowly been building a small stock of fruit trees, even as I raise other plants from seed. The soil is fucked. There’s no drainage, either. And, as my daughter’s partner pointed out, there is probably more salt in the air from the Thames Estuary than I, as a lifelong resident, actually notice. I’ve been amending the soil at the back western corner, behind the axe there, to start a pollinator/wildlife-highway section, and I’ll have to do something similar at the front end. I am determined that by summer this garden will be producing food.

I once read an interview with Jon J Muth where he talked about having his and his friends’ kids cover a wall with random messy marks, which he then considered the under-painting for a new mural, taking inspiration from the marks he had to work with. I consider my long-neglected garden in a similar way.

(Apparently I wrote this on Jan 30 and never posted it)

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It’s hard to write a lasting story on ice. Recurring cold snaps and hard frosts have frozen the garden in place, and it’s impossible to work with. I ordered a bunch of dormant plants, as this is the season to pick them up cheap, and now I’m just hoping they survive until spring.

This site is much the same. I’m still shaking it out of deep freeze and figuring out how to work it. As a digital garden, it’s frozen.

“Digital garden” is a term I came across a few years ago. Here’s the post in question:

…not following the conventions of the “personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete – notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

Another post from that writer, Maggie Appleton, illustrates where she sees digital gardens fitting:

All of which constitutes a fun thing to think about. I have always personally liked the “hardly baked” approach as coined by Simon Reynolds, but I also like the chronological channel. The thing is actually connecting up the planting, which I am historically bad at. In a nod to the garden, I’ve started adding tags to posts – a minor thing, and something I probably should have done years ago, but it may help me surface stuff without having to dig around in the dirt to see if there’s a plant I forgot about that got covered in weeds.

I’m a bad gardener. But I’m a worse knowledge worker. Some of my peers shove everything they come across into vastly powerful knowledge management engines and mighty zettelkastens. I’m more of a casual zibaldone operator. The metaphor I’ve always used is tossing information into the compost bin at the back of my head, and letting it all cook down until idea A rots next to idea B and rolls out a useful clump of muck I can turn into a story. It’s an organic, unmanaged process.

But spring is coming. If I start some seeds in the propagator now, and put them into the new cheap mini greenhouse (a tenner!) that just arrived when they have true leaves on them, I should have a working food-forest garden going when the frost season passes. So I’m planning in advance of the time the garden is no longer frozen.

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I am resisting opening a new category for garden notes. But I kind of want to. At the top of June 2022, I showed the state of the garden to my partner, who said it looked like a “dark mysterious glade,” so in my head the garden is The Glade now.

It’s not a big garden. When my daughter left for university – nearly ten years, now! – we stopped maintaining it beyond keeping the lawn down and controlling the edges a bit. And then, one morning in early June, I stopped on my way back from feeding the chickens and actually looked around for the first time in years. And realised it was a death forest. A handful of plants performing Darwinian murder on everything around them, and empty beds with morbid soil. That past Xmas, I’d been bought a countertop hydroponic propagator because I’d been bemoaning a lack of fresh herbs for the kitchen. Nine years earlier, I’d bought a plastic mini greenhouse after a health scare but had never assembled the bloody thing.

So I went out with secateurs and trowels and old kitchen shears and a rusty saw, and went to work on clearing the garden, raising plants in the propagator and potting them in the mini greenhouse.

Pictured is the lilac tree that finally dropped its foliage, which will make it easier to cut back. The garden is largely black and green right now.

Gardening is an art. It’s inherently a creative act, that supports my other creative acts. It’s also, for me, a horticultural therapy practise. A living notebook. For me, it entirely fits within the ambit of this site. And now, it’s the start of my first full year of including the garden in my creative work. (Because, previously, the garden was included in the life of parenting, which is a related but very different thing.) So notes on the garden will appear here too, being folded into the stream of my creative life. There will be complaints about snails.

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