13.11.24 – on the anniversary of the garden’s death and making good structure

in the garden

Three years ago today, my tenement garden was destroyed. The landlord of our ground floor flat gave us 7 days’ notice to completely clear what I had spent three years growing so that there was space for scaffolding for four months’ (ultimately six months) of building works. According to the landlord (whose company was conducting the works), it was totally possible but not economical to build the scaffolding around the garden. Despite promising us a full week on the Monday, he was not satisfied with our progress by Thursday, and sent lackeys out on the Friday to start tearing things out. I woke up to my trellises bent out of shape in the back garden, and rushed to the front to beg them to stop. Over the weekend, while my poor partner was on night shift, I was helped by so many friends and neighbours in carting the compost from the raised beds out to the back communal garden. It still makes me emotional to remember how many people offered their own gardens for storing my herbs, and brought pastry from Big Bear, and promised seeds and manure for when I had a garden again.

I wrote about that week when it was done, shattered by the grief of so suddenly losing an ecosystem that I knew and loved like a friend. It was only 2.5 by 5 metres, roughly the size of a parking space, but I had filled it with dozens of pots and four raised beds that held kales, strawberries, courgettes, foxgloves, herbs, an apple tree, a jostaberry, Korean mint, self-seeded nasturtium and calendula, enough lettuce to keep us self-sufficient for the summers, and big bouquets of cosmos and verbena bonariensis. Plus the compost bin! For three years, it filled the howling gap in my chest that had longed for closeness with land. It introduced me to neighbours who became good friends, and had its own relationship with people who never knew me but smiled at the garden whenever they passed. Because of other people, loving it was not without complication: its public-facing nature on a busy city street made me feel perennially vulnerable, as if a vital organ was outside of me at all times, prone to the whims of spitters, litterers, and drunk tweens. But ultimately it gave me far, far more than was ever taken from it. It remains one of the great loves and most meaningful relationships of my life.

The grief I carried in the wake of its shocking loss did not end when we were lucky enough to buy a house of our own just a month after the scaffolding came down. When, this past February, I discovered that the landlord had built decking in the small recess where the garden had been, I wrote about my experience of grieving the ecosystem I lost, and the ecosystem that has been forbidden from happening there again, within the context of the mass land grief being experienced now in genocide and climate collapse. Since then, my grief for that garden has altered and softened. The finality of the decking erased any anxiousness I had about seeing my self-seeded verbena bonariensis and calendula and sorrel abused and diminished through the years, while simultaneously insulating my hopefulness that they will burst forth again when the decking inevitably comes out. The outpouring of mournful solidarity when I posted about it on Instagram dissolved any shame I had for still grieving a year and a half after having left. And probably most importantly, I’ve found tenderness and intimacy with the new garden, in large part because it quite literally holds so much of the old garden. The first Halloween in this house, I spread the compost we saved from the old raised beds onto new beds, and in the spring all the poppy, borage, calendula, verbena, and Korean mint seeds that had dropped in that tenement oasis a mile away bloomed safely in this new home, and have bloomed every year since.

So within this anniversary week, it feels very serendipitous that next Thursday I will be at the prize-giving ceremony for the Nature Chronicles Prize at the Kendal Mountain Festival, where my essay about the life and death of that garden will be celebrated with five other award winners and launched in an anthology published by Saraband. The essay, called “The Kailyards”, weaves the making of my garden with the history of the Scottish kailyard, most particularly the kailyards that were grown when my old neighbourhood of Langside was still a rural hamlet. Like my own rented urban garden, the kailyards were also subject to the caprice of landlords, and their demise was similarly tied to exploitative capitalism wielded by opportunistic bigots. This essay is an excerpt from my book-in-progress Lang (shortlisted for the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize), a place-writing memoir which braids the environmental history of Langside with my experience of being undiagnosed autistic.

It’s a joy and an honour to have made the Nature Chronicles shortlist. I find it very moving that the story of this garden has resonated so much with others. I wish I didn’t! I wish land justice was built into the architecture of our society and that landlords had no ability to make a profit from tenants. But I hope this particular narrative might contribute to the fight for land rights and tenants’ rights, and that it might just even be a good read. Three years since losing my beautiful little garden, there is such bittersweet victory that the memory of it will live on in this book.

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – November

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.

            Contrive or forcast where, and what you are to sow and plant. Prepare and mix soils and composts thoroughly; miss not high-way earth, cleanings of streets; make compositions of manures, soils, and lyme.

            Lay bair roots of trees that need, and manure such as require it. Plant all fruit-trees, forrest-trees, and shrubs that lose the leaf, also prune such. Plant cabbage, sow hasties for early peas in warme grounds, but trust not to them.

            Gather the seeds of holly, yew, ash, &c., ordering them as in Chap. III. Furnish your nurseries with stocks.

            Shelter tender evergreen seedlings. House your cabbage, carrots, turneeps: and at any time ere hard frosts house your skirrets, potatoes, parsneeps, &c. Cover asparagus, artichocks, as in the last moneth. Sow bairs-ears, plant tulips, &c. Shut the conservatory. Preserve your choisest flowers. Sweep and cleanse the walks of leaves, &. Stop your bees close so that you leave breathing vents.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

Cabbage, coleflower, onions, leeks, shallot, &c. Blanched sellery, succory, pickled asparagus, purslain, &c. French parsneeps, skirrets, potatoes, carrots, turneeps, beet-rave, scorzonera, parsley and fennell roots, aples, pears, &c.

            Cyder, perry, wine of cherries, rasps, currans, goosberries, liquourish, hony, &c.

November is the first month in John Reid’s The Gard’ner’s Kalendar, marking the point in the year where the garden most truly begins. We’re in a period of steady preparation: planting the things that will take all winter to knit themselves into the ground, gathering seeds, clearing paths and caring for tools, storing what we harvested this year so it can sustain us later. I am reminded to order the hazels that will go in the front garden for both privacy and habitat, and apples to replace the ones that were decimated by canker this summer, and a plum/damson/greengage (I can’t decide!) because I want jam/ice cream/tarts. I need to plant my crocuses, tulips, and daffodils in the front garden, which is still overrun with nasturtium. I need to plant my kales where they’ll be protected from the southerly winds. It feels very good to have all my garlic in the ground, though the damn squirrels keep digging them up.

There has been a lot of metaphor about seeds and preparation in the last week. Some of it has felt like reinforcement; most of it I can’t bear. My social media feeds are a dizzying mix of leftists who knew this was coming and are bereft we aren’t better at organising, leftists who knew this was coming and think the resulting catastrophic rise of fascism is what Americans deserve, and liberals who are posting hopeful, hypothetical scenarios in which powerful people might make uncharacteristic decisions that will save us at the last minute from some of the worst of what’s been promised. A hopefulness that ultimately says, I hope I don’t have to do anything. I know a lot of people who exist in this dominant vein of political engagement, who vote sometimes when the stakes seem higher than usual, but who are ultimately isolated within the hyper-individualism of a capitalist-consumerist system that seems inescapable, unchangeable. I am trying not to be angry with them. I am trying to focus on where the structure of everything has failed us.

My chaotic feelings were most clearly and articulately reflected back at me by

Kirk Gordon

when he wrote about photographing his garden the night before the election and what he anticipated he would say about seeds.

“Seeds are a classic symbol of hope. They’re easy to turn to in a moment like this. The thing is, the photos I took from my garden aren’t really focused on the seeds. Instead, they feature calyxes, bracts, capsules, and husks. In other words, they depict the ways seeds are carried, organized, protected, and dispersed. These structures supplement the seed’s playbook for the future with insights on timing, placement, and persistence.”

There’s been a lot of focus on structures this time around, and the lack of effective organising on the left. We are failing, collectively, to resist the fascism that has fully taken hold in North America and Europe. The power of the people has been siloed off in the erasure of third spaces, the crack-down on unions, the impoverishment of both time and money that makes billionaires rich. It’s simply not enough for us to hope without also engaging in structures of direct action, community care, and explicit political engagement with people in power. “Seeds represent a hopeful bet on the future, full of the instructions and resources to thrive. They are a tough, durable, pragmatic form of optimism. But they are doomed if we don’t invest in the proper structures to carry them.”

Gardening, this thing we’re all here to enthuse about, should be a pillar of community life and food sovereignty, but has been stolen through the centuries and perverted by capitalism as an upper-middle class leisure activity. For all the necessary good that white middle-class gardens do to increase biodiversity, support wildlife, and feed ourselves, they are still all too often expressions of our individualism that do not join up with the gardens of our neighbours. As autumn turns to winter and fascism takes hold, we cannot prepare our gardens or our hearts in isolation. As you plan the structure of your spring, I hope you also find ways to make structure between yourself and others to resist the violence being committed against the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and the Congo, against trans people, against people with wombs, against immigrants, against refugees. I hope you do this with the same urgency, generosity, and joy as you give to the planting of your bulbs and piling up your leaf mould. I hope you begin in the garden and grow your way outward into networks of resilience.

A withered cosmo on the last day of the old garden