in the garden
Last year, from the refuge of a safe and stable place, I wrote about the intersection of crip time and garden time. I described how being in the garden does not cure me of chronic illness or neurodivergence, but it does create space and time for me to exist outside of the disabling constrictions of capitalist hetero white supremacist patriarchal ableist time. I wrote, “It reassures me, when I am not able to be in the world as I want to be, that my life remains useful, embedded, productive, vital.”
Over the last few months, my life has been more derailed by chronic illness than usual. First by a storm of migraines that barged in every few days for weeks at a time, then by long, distorted stretches of insomnia, followed by fatigue so heavy that I cried at how tired I was and how far I felt from the life I wanted to be living. I resolved the insomnia with daily magnesium and a better sensory diet to manage the dysfunction of autistic burnout, which in turn minimised the migraines. But the fatigue remained, fogging up my life with its density of exhaustion.
I have familiarity and patience with how pain abruptly side-lines me and how weather, disturbed routines, and social interactions exacerbate my sensory limitations. I know well the terror and exhaustion of feeling far from my working mind. But such prolonged fatigue seemed unprecedented, and detached from any identifiable cause. It was spring and I wanted to be in the garden, but I couldn’t even make the leap from crip time to garden time. I scorned the naïveté that let me write such romantic generalisations last year. I had still been able to do the March and April rush of seed sowing then. I had still been able to dig out shitlawn and think about landscaping. In this sorry state, I could barely take a short walk around the block with the dog, or make dinner, or string three words together.
The great seed-sowing of March and April is so much about looking forward, anticipating and imagining summer and autumn. From such a hole of fatigue, when there is such uncertainty about when or whether it will worsen, improve, or lift entirely, imagining that immediate future feels impossible. How does one hold the inherent and always-impending futurity of the garden from within the stasis of such exhaustion? I stood in the garden one day as the dog did his investigative loops and asked myself this. I thought about everything I had not yet sown, all the pleasure that would be delayed because of this mystery illness. Then I thought of everything still in the ground and not yet germinated; all the waiting that the land was doing too, all the uncertainty of when it would be warm enough and light enough to emerge. It was gratifying to realise just how much is in the ground that will come through eventually, requiring no effort on my part. There’s a whole gang already on the go – humungous rhubarb, flowering kales, masses of sorrel, woody herbs with new green growth, sprouting garlics I forgot to harvest last year, garlics I planted in November, foxgloves, apples, berries, etc – but so much more yet to emerge: self-seeded rocket, kales, borage, phacelia, nigella, nasturtium, calendula, Korean mint, chamomile, poppies, and more that I’m sure I’ve forgotten and will be delighted to see again.
It was a gentle reminder to myself that garden time does not exist as a monolith; just because I could not be in the fast-paced forward-looking version celebrated by everyone else right now did not mean garden time in its entirety was inaccessible to me. The garden would not leave me behind like the rest of life was threatening to do. (And despite the marginalisation of disability, this joy in the garden is a direct result of the privilege of stable housing.)
Gratefully, and with a lot of work/medical pondering/experimentation, the fatigue is getting better. I have sown many seeds, and pricked them out, and made new garden beds in the front garden. I’ve made dinner again. I’ve strung a few words together. It took me a long time to write this, but I don’t think it will take so long the next time.
The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – April
The first newsletter of every month this year will include an excerpt from gardener John Reid’s 1683 book The Gardn’ner’s Kalendar, an addendum to his book The Scots Gard’ner.
Aprile
Plant holly hedges and hawthorn too, if not too foreward. Ply and sheer hedges. Nail and prune wall-trees, &c. Sow and plant firrs, and other greens. Slip and set sage, rosemary, thyme, rue, savory, and all fibrous rooted herbes and flowers. Uncover and dress strawberries. Plant artichocks, slip them and delve their plottes. Set cabbages, beans, peas, kidnees. Sow asparagus, parsley, beets, and beet-card. Set garleeks, shallot, potatoes, skirrets, sorral. Sow onions, leeks, lettice, cresses, radish, orach, scorzonera, carvy, fennel, &c. And on the hot-bed, cucumbers, coleflowers, purslain, sweet marjoram, basill, summer savory, tobaco, &c.
Set strawberries, violets, July-flowers, &c. Also sow the seeds of July-flowers, &c. Sow all your annuall flowers and rare plants, some requiring the hot-bed. Lay, beat, and roll gravel and grass. Fall to your mowing and weeding.
Destroy moles, mice, worms, and snails.
Open the doors off your bee-hives, now they hatch.
Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season
Onions, leeks, colworts, beets, parsley, and other herbes: spinage, sorral, scorzonera; green asparagus, lettice, and other sallads. Pickled artichocks, beet-rave, barberries, cucumbers.
Housed aples and pears, conserved cherries, plumes, peaches, apricocks, gooseberries, currans. Also wines of aples, pears, cherries, liquourish, hony, &c.
As busy and rich as it is, Reid’s spring is unfamiliar to me without the sowing of nightshades. While we can hardly imagine a summer without the sweet acidic flesh of tomatoes, for Reid and other British gardeners of the 17th century, there were no tomatoes, chillies, or aubergines, and potatoes were merely a novelty for wealthy enthusiasts. Though all had been brought to the UK from their places of origin via the violence of European colonisation by the time Reid wrote his book (tomatoes, potatoes, and chillies from Central and South America; aubergines from southern and eastern Asia), all except potatoes were grown as ornamentals in the British Isles until the 19th century. But it wasn’t until the post-war period of the 20th century that these non-tuberous nightshades, tomatoes especially, were widely grown by white British gardeners and found increasingly indispensable to their dinner plate. Since then, tomatoes have become not only a huge part of British culinary identity (baked beans, spag bol, curries, pizza, etc), but they have become the de facto gateway plant for beginner gardeners.
I can understand why, to a point. They’re easy to germinate and swift to grow, supplying quick satisfaction for such a simple act of placing seed in compost. But they soon require intensive resources (rich soil, a big-enough pot, staking, full sun) and the ultimate pay-off is months down the road, by which time the plant might have been struck down by blight or its fruits marred by a fungus. It’s a difficult plant to grow outdoors, especially in Scotland, and I can only credit our increasingly hot autumns for the tomato success I’ve enjoyed the last couple years.
Surely a better plant for beginners in this climate would be one of the many listed by Reid for sowing now. Beans, peas, and radishes are classic beginner plants, yes, but what about marjoram? I have grown its cousin oregano from seed and no one ever says how easy it is to do, or how swiftly a large and happy plant develops: entirely perennial, good in a pot, and surprisingly hardy in Scottish winters. Parsley, too, is easy, the pay-off is long, and its uses are so varied that it never gets old, though it needs a deep pot. Finally, cabbage is a broad term, but there are so many brassicas that are far easier and arguably more satisfying to grow for a first-timer than the ubiquitous tomato: kales can be grown in pots, are very beautiful, and provide multiple harvests over a long season; bitter greens like cime di rapa are fast-growing and delicious on pizza; and mustard greens are very satisfying to grow for salad, especially in a bowl-shaped pot with other cut-and-come-again salad varieties like rocket and oak-leaf lettuce.
So much of this resonated and I'm thinking of you. This, in particular, is beautifully said: "How does one hold the inherent and always-impending futurity of the garden from within the stasis of such exhaustion?"
I’m sorry you’re experiencing this. It’s hard to comment because I don’t want to bring myself into this too much, but I experienced a few years of not being able to get into the garden and it was both devastating to not be able to be in the garden and watch plants die because I couldn’t give them care and also reassuring to see that the garden was mostly still there and thriving without me. It felt especially tough since the garden is a place of healing, but I couldn’t get to it. These mysterious conditions are devastating and excruciatingly frustrating. For me it’s been almost 9 years of trying to unravel a complex puzzle with a cause and effect that is often impossible to follow.
Wishing you continued improvement.