In the last of her regular columns, Alice Vincent reflects on what she’s discovered over the course of documenting her gardening year, and why it’s now time to move on. Illustration Alice Pattullo.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time lately. I’ve spent the past year almost entirely in the company of a baby. He turned up on the spring equinox, and since then I’ve marked the changing seasons with other milestones – first solid food, standing up and sleeping through the night. Time has shrunk (nothing moves as slowly as the minutes before bedtime with a teething baby on a miserable winter afternoon) and it has telescoped (where did that tiny newborn go?).
The seasons have always kept me tethered during eventful parts of my life; when things feel strange or unwieldy, the predictability of winter following autumn following summer has been a vital metronome. Everything has its season, from sweet peas to sleep regressions. Things come to an end and open up space for something new to unfold.
“The seasons have always kept me tethered during eventful parts of my life.”
And so it is with my borrowing of this column, which – like a good garden – was only ever mine to look after for a little while. The time has come for me to hand back the keys and let something else grow in this plot instead. I’ve adored it, writing these letters to you every month. We’ve been through a lot, haven’t we? Droughts and floods, trees and tulips, gentle realisations about what makes us happy when we grow it. There’s been a garden overhaul, a posh shed to write in and fights with squirrels. There’s been a wedding. There’s been a baby.
I’ve loved hearing from you, too. Thank you for coming and saying hello at events, for writing to me about your gardens. My writing and gardening are similarly solitary pursuits; these sparks of connection are a magical thing. It feels fitting to move on with the spring ahead. It smells different in the garden now; the ripe, fresh smell of soft moss and rising sap. The days are longer and I can grab sunlight for myself before anyone else wakes up. Things are growing. I’m reclaiming the little inspections around the garden that used to mark the beginning of my days.
“It smells different in the garden now; the ripe, fresh smell of soft moss and rising sap.”
This time last year, the garden was a quagmire; now it is emerging into its first perennial spring. I wonder what that will hold, and I know that among the disappointments (how did the snails annihilate quite so many new plants?) there will be surprises I could never have imagined.
One of the ironies of writing about gardening is that it takes up the time to actually garden. The past few years have been ones of upheaval, not just inside these garden walls but for all of us. Among my book deadlines and the towering word counts and the night feeds, I’ve struggled to ground myself among the plants in quite the same way. But they’ve been patient – far more so than I have – and waited for me. In stepping back, the garden has found a rhythm I’m keen to tune back into.
“One of the ironies of writing about gardening is that it takes up the time to actually garden.”
I believe our gardens reflect the people we are when we tend to them. My first column reflected upon the first year in this, my first proper garden. That summer was a good one: from a scrap of lawn I’d managed to conjure a riot of flowerbeds, swollen with flowering fennel, fireworks of dahlias and the sharp pop of hazy blue echinops. We strung up bunting and lights and threw a riotous engagement party there. I ate plums from the tree.
It’s telling that it’s changed every year since: a dry, punishing summer that forced me to rethink the garden; a first with a baby, gathering people into an arbour we raised and painted when he was a few weeks old. This year we’ll mark our fourth summer here. I know that I’m a different person from the woman who christened the soil by swigging champagne from a bottle, but I’m not sure what lies ahead. A garden less keen to prove itself? A garden that’s better for sitting in. I have a hunch that the roses will be good this summer. A fine time, really, to smell them.