Sunday 6 August 2017

the interface between you and the wild

I was falling asleep to Gardener's World this Friday (the hour-long format does make it something of a marathon, although I do like the new segments, they leaven the Longmeadow nicely) when Monty abruptly shared that when they had moved in, it had just been a field. Possibly he meant it metaphorically, or relatively; there are certainly some trees there which radiate significant age and authority, and some of the walls are very old indeed. But nevertheless I felt the emotional truth in what he was saying; it was a wilderness, a bleak space, and I enclosed it, wrapped it around. I made it a garden.

Suddenly the endlessly spawning little jewelboxes of prettyness that make up Longmeadow began to make sense. They are baffles between the gardener and the wind and the wild and the rabbits that come and munch on your precious cabbages; a little labyrinth to bewilder the approach, block prying eyes and dissipate attack. The garden is battlements against what waits outside, beyond the pale.

Therefore the garden has a graduated tone; from extreme, colourful control and tidiness in the inner reaches, alongside the house, the greenhouse, the potting shed, out to the symbolic and sympathetically prettified wildernesses of the outer edges. For a house placed in a landscape (as I imagine this one is, although it could be in the suburbs somewhere for all I know) that shading out softens the edges between the garden and the wild. There is no beginning as such, just a regular march of order/interference, spreading outward around the human habitation.

That graduation of wildness is even visible in a tiny space like mine, where the fuchsias and blue poppies and kniphofia gather nervously and centrally in pots and planters, while around the edges the wilder planting shades into a wilder state (the ivy, the passion vine, the grape vine, the miniature native hedge) creating a cut-off from the neighbours. Here the dip into wilderness is very shallow; an interstitial gap between properties choked with brambles, the deep shade under a Douglas hedge, a place where you don't pull the bindweed, or can't quite get the sucker ash up from under the fence.

But still it remains, that symbolic dip into wilderness between people, preserving peace, diffusing the crowding, separating safely.

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