On Progress

Notes from the progress of a tiny urban garden

I wrote a couple of weeks ago a Threads post about progress and I knew I wanted to delve deeper into the topic  because I believe that in our chase for “picture perfect” we have forgotten the very true, gruelling beauty of the journey itself. 

As I write these words, I am sitting in the garden which last year was overrun with weeds and which this spring was cut open as we put in a new wooden fence and redid a part of the lawn. I remember wondering in April as I looked at its wet, dark clay exposed to the elements like gaping, bleeding scars, how long it would take for my beloved garden to recover. Would it ever do? In that moment, I seriously had my doubts. 

The garden in April...

You see, there invariably comes a stage in the process when progress is being made where we feel like everything is lost and where a subtle doubt begins to creep into our mind, tying our stomach up into a knot, making our heart quiver with fear and making us wonder why in the world we couldn’t be satisfied with what we had before. Surely, this isn’t the “better” we were looking for? 

There is an old Sufi tale about a handful of Sodom and Gomorrah inhabitants who were rescued from its destruction by messengers of God. Blind as they were to the land they were being taken to, they kicked and screamed in such a way that they had to be tied up in chains and carried by force through the journey in the desert. 

Take also the tale of the Exodus - the doubt that crept into the people’s hearts, the fear, the regret for the land being left behind, however much plagued with darkness and servitude it might have been that flared up in the face of the unknown. 

Our curse and our blessing as humans is we are constantly torn between our two natures - our mammalian, earthly body and our brighter, eternal souls . I try to remind myself of these tales when I inevitably become lost in the throes of progress for when all feels like it is lost, that is usually the point where the deep change we have been working for is able to take root. It happens quietly. A sprig of clover pushes through the cloying earth, a blade of grass shimmies its way to the light and then a day of sunshine pierces through the deep dark gray of April showers and life springs up to meet its soft embrace. Suddenly, that bare patch of earth becomes  a thin carpet of green, the plants that were trampled, buried by soil dug up from the garden’s deepest depths come up again, a little shy, perhaps a little less buoyantly than they might have come otherwise but they come up nonetheless, whole and green and fresh like all of spring’s new growth. 

It takes courage in that deepest of nights to trust in the process and to continue to work and walk the path of the Living. 

My dear friend Sarabeth recently wrote about her Night Garden, that very sacred space we all tend  in the light and dark of our lives. She writes about the foxgloves that took 6 years of sheer determination to finally bloom, she writes about that lovely lupine bank, sprung from poor, scrounged earth, she writes about those pieces of ourselves that we bury with the bulbs - our joys, our fears, our grief, our love - all of those bits and pieces, soft and fragile, raw and bare. Go read it and then come back and read it again. And again. And again. 

The garden is already looking so much fuller than it did a short couple of weeks ago. I sit in it, revelling in  its growth, catching my breath as I will the bushes and the perennials to fill out just as I hold in my heart a seed of wisdom reminding me that all will come in its time. 

Vegetables, fruit, flowers... I am surprised at the different rates of growth of each and every plant - the Nepeta took off with a roar, while the rudbeckias beyond took their time settling in and are just now shooting up. All in its own timing...

The lupine is about to bloom a single flower (the other was chopped off by the neighbourhood groundhog - Update: Both have now been chopped off by the groundhog), a feat I did not think we would be graced with after the many transplantations it suffered in the spring. The Ammi I planted out as big, healthy promises of blooms are now barely hanging on, munched as it is by our (big and fat with tender shoots) garden visitor but the roses I was sure I’d killed over the winter are coming on nicely and the sickly little lavender my grandmother gave me to care for is filling out and I see tiny green tomatoes emerging where their blooms have dropped and the elderflower is growing as the thug it will become and I am so very, very grateful for it all.  

The Ammi cemetery, right after the last of the lupine flower was chopped off and left to wither on the ground… This was supposed to be a glorious piece of the garden, with the Ammi towering over the lupine, dancing with the Dahlias and welcoming bees and flies and butterflies at the very height of summer.

David Austin’s The Poet’s Wife - Bought this as a potted rose, should have pruned the buds it already had to allow her to focus on root development, but I didn’t, because those blooms….

Cimicifuga racemosa (Black Cohosh) - a beauty that produces the most deliciously fragrant blooms in mid-summer and which literally comes alive with bees of all sorts drinking up on its nectar. If it does well this year I will add a couple more in that more-or-less shady corner.

Life wants to live, let us never forget that as we walk down its long, meandering path. Life wants to live and our only job, as Sarabeth’s friend Polly would say, is to just keep tending the soil.

With much love and care, 

xxx

Camille

P.S. Yes, I am still very much pregnant - that too is a journey and surely a most beautiful one at that. So I stop and breathe in the roses as I exercise patience and that great art of letting go.