in the garden
This week I’m resharing a newsletter I wrote this month two years ago, just after I had returned home from a visit to my family in Massachusetts. October is one of my favourite months because I do love spooky season, but it’s also the time of year I feel most homesick for New England and the most restless about needing to go back. This week, everything I want to say is in this essay. I am sharing it with a renewed sense of gratitude to still be able to visit and care for the graves of my loved ones, mindful that they have not been bombed and bulldozed into oblivion as Israel has done to cemeteries in Palestine, or washed away by catastrophic flooding that has occurred on every continent this week.
A few weeks ago I made a list: six cemeteries, seven stones, twelve names. I cut long sprigs of rosemary from the pot in my garden and packed them between my shirts. When I took them out, we were in Massachusetts, in my mother’s house. She cut mint and lavender from her garden while my stepfather found us some twine, and we made seven little bouquets. (It felt rude to visit and not leave a little something.) I drew a route that made a hook around the bottom of Springfield, east to west, oldest to newest.
We were in such a hurry to get going that we forgot to bring any garden tools. It wasn’t an issue until we tried to find my mother’s grandparents, whose flat headstone was, according to my grandfather, somewhere across from the office, near a statue of the Blessed Mother, kind of on a hill. We scanned the lines of sunken rectangles, scuffing away fallen leaves from overgrown names. When my sibling called out that they had found the right one, I rushed over and dropped straight to my knees to tear away thick mats of grass. My mom rummaged up a collection of tools from her handbag: a mini screwdriver, a penny, a dog tag, a Swiss army knife. My sibling and my partner and I bent over to pull away the obscuring sod, wash the face of the stone with water from the tap, dig out sand and worms from the letters of my great-grandparents’ names. My mother told us stories about them: how stubborn a patriarch Grandpa could be, how skilfully Gram sewed all his suits, how sweetly and deeply they loved each other. I thought about the giant rhubarb in Gram’s garden, where some of her ashes were scattered among her roses and irises; I thought about the engagement ring we shared, which Grandpa gave to her in a box of chocolates. When the stone was clean, I placed the bouquet upon it and my partner held me close.
In Glasgow, I walk in a cemetery every day and no one I know or love is in it. These old Victorian graveyards are more like parks than the cemeteries I knew in Massachusetts. The forest has grown up unchecked from the graveyard’s quiet heart: knobbly-kneed pines knock down headstones, mosses creep across their backs, smooth deciduous trunks spend decades opening their mouths to swallow fallen blocks of granite. Few stones date from the last thirty or forty years, so it is a lively aberration when one stands out as lovingly tended. There is no illusion here about the durability of memory. I am quietly and persistently unsettled by how easy it is to be forgotten; I hate to think that the graves of my people, far away in another country, would look as if they too have been forgotten when I am here, alive and thinking about them.
In Massachusetts, the cemeteries are green and rolling like golf courses, with trees sternly but aesthetically kept in line. As we made our way through my list, I found it easiest to memorialise, with sympathy and empathy and forgiveness, the ones who had gardened. I have a picture of my great-great-grandparents, Grandpa's parents, standing proudly in their back garden in West Springfield, where they grew their own grapes for homemade wine, and pears and apples that they traded with neighbours for tomatoes and peppers. I have seen, on Google Street View, the porch where my other great-great-grandparents, Gram's parents, dried their beans, and the land where they kept chickens and grew vegetables. They all came from Italy to Massachusetts over a hundred years ago: the wine-making Berteras were educated and well-off, the bean-growing Polastris illiterate and poor. But they all made gardens to feed themselves and to feel at home. Knowing some of what they grew makes me feel like I know something of their pleasures, their immigrant homesickness, their fearfulness and contentment.
I have felt this too; have also used the garden to feel more at home in places where I wasn’t born. I tended their graves and crouched over their bodies in the home they came to, which they made for my great-grandparents and grandparents and my mother and now me, but I left it. I left it ten years ago and, until a few weeks ago, had not been back for five. I teased the soil from their names and thought about their pear trees and French beans in Massachusetts, and the lemons and zucchini they would have eaten in Italy, and the only thing about my life in Scotland that felt real to me were the seedlings I left on the table outside to grow bigger while I was away.
The day after my cemetery tour, the writer Page wrote movingly in her newsletter
When I met an old friend in Maine, my body was still store from all the bending over. Every time I stood up or climbed the stairs or waddled out of the car, my buns protested and I thought about my people again with love and satisfaction the way I might think about the compost I had turned. I felt, in my body, the same kind of gratification as if I had made a new bed. My friend told me their brother does the same thing when he’s back in town: goes to the graves that no one else in the family ever visits and keeps them clean. I wondered out loud if it’s a kind of penance we bring upon ourselves to pay, to atone for leaving home. I can’t remember why I would have been so self-deprecating. Maybe the guilt I have about leaving home has become a shifting plate in my body; maybe just then it was pushing up a new hill of regret, a crater of homesickness. Maybe I felt that leaving the home these people made, full of the living people I love so dearly, was a kind of betrayal to them.
But this inexplicable urge to care for the graves of my people does not feel like guilt, or like penitence. It feels like care, and like gardening. I think we come back to remember our dead because going away is a kind of practice death, an exercise in seeing how everything in life moves on without you, how it could grow over the evidence you were ever there if you’re gone long enough. I can see the door closing on the memories of these people who were immigrants like me and I cannot help but rush to keep it open. I cannot help but grow pears and beans to hold it ajar a little longer.
The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – October
The first newsletter of every month this year will include an excerpt from gardener John Reid’s 1683 book The Gard’ner’s Kalendar, an addendum to his book The Scots Gard’ner.
Gather winter fruits. Trench and fallow grounds (mixing with proper soil) to ly over the winter. Prepare manures, mixing and laying in heaps bottom’d and covered with earth. Plant hawthorn hedges and all trees that lose their leaves. Also lay their branches. Prune roses. Gather seeds of hassell, hawthorn, plan, ash, beach, oak, aple, pear, &c. Cut strawberries, arthichocks, asparagus, covering their beds with manure and ashes. Earth up winter sallades, herbes and flowers, a little. Plant cabbage, tulips, anemonies and other bulbs. Sow the seed of bairs-ears, cowslips, tulips, &c. Beat and roll gravel and grass. Finish your last weeding and mowing. Lay bair leopered tree roots and remove what harms them; also delve and manure such as require it. Drain excessive moisture wherever it be. Pick and conserve fruits. Make perry and cyder.
You may now safely remove bees.
Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season
Coleworts, leeks, cabbage, coleflowers, onions, shallot, beans. Blanched endive and sellery. Pickled asparagus, purslain, &c.
Scorzonera, beet-rave, carrots, turneeps, parsneeps, potatoes, skirrets, artichocks, cucumbers, aples, pears, plumes, almond, &c.
Cyder, perry, and wine of cherries, currans, goosberries, raspberries, ail of liquourish, metheglin, &c.
When Reid instructs one to “trench and fallow grounds”, he’s referring firstly to that old tradition of double-digging, and secondly to the practice of leaving the freshly-dug ground unplanted for a season to “rest” the soil and deplete the weed bank by regular hoeing. In The Scots Gard’ner he writes,
“The latter end of harvest the ground is softest for trenching, and it lying all winter open to the weather is thereby meliorated. For as trenching doth well prepare hard, barren, and untoil’d ground, so doth it such as is exhausted by long and unskilful usage; and if at every trenching you apply proper manures mixt with the second spading, or under the last shovelling, and in five years re-trench, it will become to your wish, for all gardens, and plantations.”
Writing a little over a century later in 1813, Patrick Neill lamented in On Scottish Gardens and Orchards that the state of cottage-gardens’ soil was often quite poor, as they were not trenched as often as they might be due to the inconvenient timing of tenancy agreements: “The ridging up or dress over such ground as is not put under winter crop, in order to its being meliorated by the frost, may next be noticed: This is at present entirely neglected, and it will be so, as long as cottagers remain till Candlemas [February 2] uncertain whether they are to continue their possession for another season.”
We know now that trenching and digging are largely unnecessary (except in extreme cases of compacted soil), and in fact do a great deal of harm to soil structure and the lifeforms that create it. The laying of manure or compost in no-dig or low-intervention gardening is much better for the health of soil life and overwintering plants, and I will be laying lots this autumn. But, in a move that would horrify John Reid and Patrick Neill, I am also challenging myself to go one step further and leave as many “weeds” as I can handle. I’ve been following the work of Joshua Sparkes for a long time, and am fascinated by the work he’s doing at Birch Farm in creating a radical polyculture at a market garden scale. Combining principles of Japanese natural farming and syntropic agriculture, Birch Farm embraces weedy plants for their role as natural cover crops that protect soil over winter, growing cheek-by-jowl with principle crops and edible perennials, all of which seem very content with a low-compost and high-plant-matter fertility system. (His recent segment on Gardener’s World was especially illuminating, and I’m looking forward to
’s forthcoming podcast with Joshua and video of Birch Farm.)This kind of growing is new and unfamiliar for most of us, but I find it particularly compelling due to historic evidence that “weeds”, in both pre-historic and medieval European contexts, were not removed/weeded from principle crops, and may have been utilised as additional sources of forage or animal fodder. I highly suspect that early literature on gardening which condemns the immoral neglect or uncleanliness of gardens is in fact gesturing to lingering polyculture systems once utilised by peasant farmers. So in the spirit of recovering old relationships with land, I will swallow all my frustration with the proliferation of volunteer wild plants over winter and observe closely their role in my own emerging polyculture.
I fell into a deep rabbit hole last night looking at what Joshua spatkes and others he had tagged on his IG are up to. I'm so excited to learn more and challenge myself and restraint. Thank you for this!
Greetings from western Massachusetts in the hills northwest of Springfield. And thank you for your writing.