Apart from my art studio, my other sanctuary is the garden. This was once just a typical urban new build plot, which is now my little bit of Eden, an oasis, it’s my place where I go to lose myself in little jobs working alongside nature. I have always had, and enjoyed some kind of garden of my own, to tend and look after.
As a small child growing up in the 1970’s, my father dug two tiny vegetable plots in the kitchen garden situated at the rear of our newly built southeast London home for me and my twin sister. Each plot was no bigger than 4’ x 4’, and here he took the time to teach us both how to sow seeds (easy to grow stuff like radish, some beetroot, and beans to grow up sticks), and nurture and wait patiently until harvest. My father like his father, was of a generation who grew food to supplement the house keeping expenses, and to have the security of something fresh in the diet, and if any food shortages were a possibility. Even then in the 70’s, cuts, strikes, redundancies, and shortages were a regular occurrence. I can remember when bags of sugar would be stored, the next it was busy making your own bread, as there was none in the shops. At least we had one of those large chest freezers in the garage, (bought second hand from a neighbour), filling up with the surplus from the vegetable garden; if only we could perfect the “blanching technique” referenced from the “Home Freezing Cookbook”, it all seemed quite scientific and mentioned enzymes? When “the lights all went out”, at 4pm weekdays, there was strict instruction not to open the freezer lid, in case it all defrosted overnight! Precarious times those 1970’s. Umm, sounds relevant today in some respect.
When my family and I, then aged 12, moved to the Westcountry to buy and run a hotel by the sea, we were all assigned important roles and responsibilities. I volunteered, or was I told? That my job was to look after the grounds, car park and terraced gardens. If I can remember correctly, I think I received the wage of £6.50 a week. I would not say this job kept me out of mischief, but having this vast expanse of land to maintain certainly kept my interest in gardening alive and growing.
At 26 I left my family home and had my own place to live and create places to grow plants. From a small one up and one down tiny cottage with no real garden, just cobbles and paving, to a small Victorian terrace house with only a long thin paved back yard. I continued to grow plants, even at first from pots on my windowsill, some even edible. My hand is up to being that “watering slave” to pots and containers. In my search for a patch of land to grow something I have pulled up patio paving to reveal ………. Yes, more paving! Before finally finding rich fertile soil to grow a small garden in. Thanks to those early days when Nick would come around with a crowbar and hiring a pneumatic drill….We meant business!
Today I have the Exmoor Inspired Studio Garden, a patch of ground measuring no more than approximately 15’ x 30’, which was originally not intended for me, as it was my Mum’s Garden. She had moved to this new build house and garden in Somerset so to be situated halfway travel between my sister and me. She would often reference how she had now gone full circle from the first new build in Southeast London to here. The property had started from just an architect’s drawing to the excitement of seeing the foundations and then the build take shape. I helped guide Mum through interior choices and finally settling in. But I left the garden planning to how she wanted it, I knew better than to suggest any ideas. Her choice being a lawn only, a little place for some runner beans (her favourite vegetable and something she could pick fresh in late summer), and pots! She only wanted to keep the garden simple, as without Dad, (he had passed away 14 years earlier) and not a gardener herself. She would honestly admit she didn’t have “green fingers”. I would always know when a house plant was on its last legs, when a leafless, scorched specimen would be put outside with others, all lined up next to the bench under the kitchen window. I used to ask what was happening with them? “Oh, they’re in recovery, they need some fresh air”, she’d answer…. “More like death row”, I would say.
Mum had 5 lovely years here, before she suddenly and peacefully passed away. I was left bewildered, parentless, and facing like all of us when we lose both parents, the realisation that you are now officially an orphan and at the top of the pecking order of the natural cycle of life and death. Uncertain of where I had arrived, although knowing all along that I would arrive here at this point one day. But it was not just bereavement I had to reflect upon, but the date was the 20th of March 2020, the immanent beginning of the county lock down three days later.
It is now four years on, and with reflection, that lockdown was the best thing personally for me. As the country, perhaps even the world shut down to some extent, to a completely different way of life. A calmness seemed to fall upon me. Here in the UK, we were experiencing a glorious spring and then later into the summer, it gave me the time, the space and the quiet to come to terms with my new life, because it was a new life for me.
It was during one of those sunny days, I’m not sure how far into lockdown we were, a month perhaps, I can remember sitting on the bench under the kitchen window with my recently inherited dead house plants, and looking across at this long, slightly sloping patchy lawn. It was at that moment I saw it; I could see how I would have designed this blank canvas. I sat back and in my minds eye I envisaged a studio to the top right, where the garage was then situated, then coming down towards me raised beds, with varying levels, and other areas I could create. “Why, Gary would you sell this? It would be perfect for you”. The rest is history, plenty of hard digging clay by hand, shifting soil to level and make beds, building curved retaining walls, laying paths and planting with anything and everything that took my fancy. Over the rest of that disjointed year, it was the best bereavement counselling I could have had, and I truly owe that to my garden.
I have never studied gardening, “horticulture”, as such, but I have a lifetime’s interest in growing plants and my creative design trained eye helps for layout and where to plant. Much, no….. most of my gardening is instinctive, and several times plants end up in the wrong place, but I then just move them later, when it’s the right time to dig up and shift things around. (Usually in the late autumn early winter) If I need to know anything about a gardening task, I ask those who have “the knowing”, be that in their profession or those who have years of knowledge and experience. I must say, Mr Google can be very helpful when caught on the spot; just recently the Don of gardening, Mr Monty said the word PRUNING! Yes, I shouted! I will get on with that. But not so fast, when I checked on the superhighway of information for the trees and shrubs I have in the garden, several required pruning at different times of the year, its not just winter pruning…oh no. Disaster adverted.
For me it is just as important as the act of gardening, and that is to take the time to see the results of my “pottering”, just to sit in that top corner patio with the grape vine, or by the studio doors with the vegetables growing in the raised beds, and yes sit back on the bench by the kitchen window, and just be. I guess you could say it is a self-administered therapy, it gives me a grounding, a mental calming in this hectic and sometimes crazy world I live in, but all around me is that which is growing, it is part of nature and I put it there.
A fortune teller once told me in my twenties, “…..and when it is all done, you will eventually end up and live where you can see the countryside and the sea, and people will come to visit you in your garden.”
I am there, and they do.