*This piece first appeared in The Big Issue Vol. 632, March 2021
When the first lockdown hit at the beginning of 2020 I had been a widow for just one year. The shock of my husband's early death was still all-consuming, his ongoing absence paralysing. I imagined him everywhere and thought constantly of things I must tell him. Our two dogs raced to the couch and leapt up to stare hopefully out the window every time a car approached our driveway.
I knew I could cope, knew I'd survive, but what for?
I'd had a few awards and enough things published in the past to start to call myself a writer but with his death every creative thought dropped out of my head and has so far never returned. Every night for four months I sat alone at the table in silence, doing nothing.
But one evening, sitting out on the old sleeper steps out in the backyard with Stella I looked at the space where I'd had an old shed removed. Straggling trails of jasmine remained and one unstoppable white banksia rose. I wondered what the soil would be like and if I could perhaps plant something else there along the fence. Eventually darkness fell, the birds went wherever birds go at twilight and reluctantly I came inside.
Early the next day I found myself out in the new space idly pulling out jasmine which I soon discovered is not something you can do idly at all. I found the mattock and set about waging war on the jasmine roots that had commandeered the whole area. It was an ugly job.
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| A challenging start |
Now, despite the bad press it gets a lot of the time, I have an enviable network of people on Twitter, a lot of them writers, many of them nature photographers and nearly all of them avid gardeners. I started to pay closer attention to their posts about plants and gardens. In lockdown my Twitter pals became my best resource, commenting positively on the progress I made, posting inspirational photos of their own plants and gardens and sharing ideas for sourcing plants online while we could no longer make raids on the local nurseries. A highlight came when, unable to identify a deciduous blue-flowering plant hiding in my own garden I asked for help on Twitter. Within minutes back came a reply from an unknown person in California. It's caryopteris, she said, and so it proved to be. Seems gardeners know no borders.
In the year that followed I created a whole new garden out the front as well as out the back where the shed had been. The fence now sports climbing roses and a variety of perennials that are growing like Topsy.
Soon I became aware that the more active I was outside in the garden, the more my head was filled with plans instead of grief. If anything kept me awake at night it was a visual journey of what things might look like if I spread mulch to kill what poor grass remained, dug in compost, created pathways through and under trees and chose plants that were as tough as old boots. The costs were not great - a load of secondhand bricks from eBay, cuttings from my own and friends' gardens, dividing and transplanting things from one place to a new location, soon saw my front yard begin to transform, as did I.
I came inside at the end of each day sore from digging and pulling weeds, from shovelling and spreading barrows of mulch and disposing of dead soil. But I felt better.
I know that many schools, prisons and various mental health facilities offer gardening programs and extol their success. I know I'm lucky to have the time and the ability to bend my knees and my back every day over my developing garden. As I respond to my garden, my garden responds to me. After a year I beam over it like a proud parent. I walk the new paths I created and I tend the plants with love. I seem to have reconnected to life.
If I were to find myself living in a high rise apartment the first thing I'd do is acquire a few pots and fill what little space I had with living plants that needed my care. I would hope that I could look out onto green space nearby, watching the seasons change and the gardeners at their precious work.
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