7.2.24 – grief and hotbeds

in the garden

A couple weeks ago, I swung past the old flat. It’s been a little over two years ago now that my beloved garden there was destroyed for six months of building works, the first and most traumatic incident with the landlord that winter which compelled us to leave. I have been back a few times since we moved, with varying emotions. In the cold months I found the emptiness of the garden gnawingly sad; in the summer, I shouted with victory that the self-seeded verbena bonariensis had romped through the margins. This time, I did a double-take: both my old garden and the neighbour’s (also owned by that landlord) had been filled with decking, sequestered by a wooden fence.

It was impossible for it not to feel personal. The conflict with the landlord in the lead-up to the works had been so hostile that I did wonder if he would allow any tenants after us to make gardens. He was so incensed by our attachment to the space and our resistance to its destruction that his response then was cartoonishly malevolent: sending lackeys to destroy the garden before our seven-day deadline was up, threatening us that we wouldn’t get the garden back (despite it being included in the rental agreement) if we didn’t behave, allowing raw sewage to leak into the back garden for two whole weeks before hiring someone to fix the downpipe. It hadn’t surprised me when new membrane and gravel were laid after we left, to prevent the old garden from resurrecting itself. It hadn’t surprised me either when the resilient verbena bonariensis was torn out in the autumn. So while it’s entirely in character that he would lay decking to make sure the problem of living things is never a problem in future, I was nevertheless shocked. All at once, a wave of fresh grief that the remains of that particular garden in that particular place can never exist again.

When I shared this discovery on Instagram, I received dozens of messages relaying astonishment and fury, empathizing so generously with my renewed sense of loss. I haven’t had so much engagement on anything since the garden was destroyed, and it provided such catharsis to live the grief so publicly again. I don’t, as a rule, talk openly about the grief I still feel for that garden. Something in me thinks it would look ungrateful or obsessive when I now own a garden five times the size of the old one. But the grief I have over the loss of that particular relationship, between me and that beautiful little ecology, is ongoing, and I do wonder sometimes if I’m reinforcing a colonialist-capitalist ideology by not speaking openly about the long-term effects of losing beloved land.

Western imperialism has conditioned us to see land as inert parcels whose value is determined by human use and ownership. Coupled with this, the dominant migration narratives of white European settlers across the world asserts that “home” can be abandoned and then remade anywhere, belonging easily transferred from one place to the next. (With the usual discriminatory exceptions.) Thus, a garden is not perceived as a unique relationship between many beings, but as a human-centric exercise in control, creation, and expression that can be transferred from one place to another, like potting on seedlings. The loss of a space for that human-centric practice is sad, yes, but why should it continue to be sad when the human eventually has not just a new space, but more space?

Such an insidious little belief makes so many other insidious things possible. It allows us to be apathetic about the destruction of indigenous lands through genocide, and to see displacement through war, through environmental collapse, and through invasive capitalist venture as something easily fixed through relocation. My grief at the loss of my old garden is truly and rightfully miniscule compared to the grief suffered by those whose centuries-old olive groves have been torn out and bombed, whose wetlands have been poisoned by fossil fuels and shrimp farming, whose plains have been carved into unrecognizability by mining for precious metals and industrial monocultures, whose rainforests have been razed for cattle rearing and palm oil. But it is still grief, still related to those other griefs, still a result of the kind of capitalism that sees land as a product to be monetized regardless of the human and non-human cost.

I don’t want you to think that my grief has been resolved just because we participated in the capitalist competition of house-buying and emerged victorious, because I also don’t want you to think that a person can be totally whole and happy and free of longing when forcibly removed from their indigenous land to somewhere “safer”. I don’t want you to think that land is somehow separate from us, because I need you to understand that our embeddedness within the land means we will inevitably experience valid and keenest grief when beloved connections are destroyed, no matter the scale of the severing. And I don’t want you to think this severing is ever inevitable, because I need you to acknowledge that there are individual human beings to blame for the hoarding of land, the collapse of our climate, the genocide of millions: people who made choices about who and what to slaughter for their own capitalist profiteering.

I loved my little garden like a friend, like a limb; I still do laps along its path in my head, still think every day about where my plants used to be and how we changed together through years of familiarity. It makes me furious and sorrowful that future tenants won’t have the same opportunity, won’t make community with neighbours through their presence in caring for plants, won’t even be able to put pots on the deck without being accused by the landlord of staining and rot. I trust my new garden (so full of the soil and seedbank of the old garden) to care for me as we get to know one another, remake one another. But perhaps I won’t be quite so private about the waxing and waning of my grief; not when staying silent about my grief contributes to worldwide silence about the grief of others, not when my grief and liberation is tied inherently to the grief and liberation of the land and its carers as a whole.

The garden when I grew it

The garden now

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – February

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.

Plant any trees or shrubs that lose the leaf, also lay such for increase; see June. Likewayes sow all your seeds, kyes, kirnells, nuts, stones; also the seeds of several greens, as holly, yew, philyrea, laurells, &c. Prune firrs, &c.

Continue to destroy vermine.

Graffing [grafting] is now in season, see the last moneth. Prune all trees and shrubs except tender greens. Nail and dress them at the wall. Cover the roots of trees layed bair the fore-end of winter, if any be. Plant hawthorn hedges, willows, &c.

Plant liquourish, potatoes, peas, beans, cabbage, sow parsley, beets, spinage, marygold, and other hardie pot-herbes.

Let carnations and such sheltered flowers get air in mild weather. But keep close the green house.

Now you may remove bees and feed weak stocks.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

            Cole, leiks, sweet herbes, onions, shallot, housed cabbage, skirrets, turneeps, parsneeps, potatoes, beet-rave, scorzonera, carrots, besides parsley and fennel roots.

            Pickled beet-rave, artichock, cucumber; housed aples, pears, and other conserved fruits with cyder and other wines and drinks, as above [in January].

I found it strange that Reid suggests such a lengthy list of annuals to sow in February. After all, when he was writing in the late 17^th century, Europe was in the middle of its Little Ice Age, a period between the early 14^th and mid-19^th centuries when mountain glaciers expanded in some places and the mean annual temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere declined by 0.6 degrees Celcius. Winters in Northern Europe were often long and very cold, while summers could be short and wet. The Februarys that Reid knew would have been very wintery compared to the mild month we’re having now; sowing potatoes, parsley, and beans isn’t advisable for February in Scotland currently, let alone 341 years ago.

Though he doesn’t say so in his Kalendar, it’s likely Reid presumes the reader will have set up a hotbed, as he instructs in The Scots Gard’ner. A hotbed uses heat from the decomposition of organic matter in order to aid in the germination and protection of plants during late winter/early spring. It’s a method of cultivation that was pioneered by the Egyptians and spread by the Romans, and is still a low-effort and low-cost way of raising early plants today. Modern hotbeds, as demonstrated through this excellent book by Jack First and this video by Huw Richards, are usually set up in a bay made of fencing or pallets that is then layered with organic material like manure, seaweed, spent brewery grains, grass clippings, etc, covered with a layer of compost for growing, and the young plants protected by a cold frame that maximises exposure to light. The bed can be used through the year for other plants, like squashes and cucumbers, and the contents spread as a mulch in winter once they’ve fully broken down.

In contrast, Reid’s instructions for a traditional hotbed involves digging a pit four feet deep, filling it with a “fortnight’s gathering” of manure and litter from the stables, trodding it well down, covering that with four inches of compost, and then arching over sticks and mats to contain the heat. The bed is left for four or five days to heat up, then seeds are sown, and the process of airing and covering the bed is repeated as the plants grow. However, he acknowledges the “great trouble” in making this sort of bed, and offers an alternative: filling the pit with new manure but no earth, and placing “wooden cases therein, about nine or ten inches deep, and about three foot broad, having wood-handles at the end; bore them full of auger or wimble-holes at the bottome, and fill them with the foresaid earth, and therein sow your seeds.” He advises that baskets and pots are also well-suited, as long as fresh manure is added around them to maintain the heat.

I seriously considered making a hotbed in our front garden this year. We have neglected its development as the back garden took priority, and I thought a hotbed might be a fun way to grow some early salads, then summer pumpkins, and ultimately spread lots of compost over a small area in late autumn for next year’s plans. But despite my continued belief that anything bigger than the 2.5 by 5 metre garden I had before is basically Sissinghurst, it has been impressed upon me that this is still a small urban front garden, and that our rather traditional neighbours might not see a giant heap of manure and brewery grains as “fun”.

So instead of early salads, I will soon sow some chilis on a heat mat under a grow light. Mid-month, I’ll start slow with some spring onions, radishes, and chicories.

reading 

My life has been derailed by back-to-back migraines lately, so all my reading has been very short-form. I have especially loved this 4-part series by torri blue, MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering Through the Language of Silence and the Poems of Mary Oliver (part one, part two, part three, part four). Many quotes from part two have stuck with me this week as I navigate my own autistic experience of chronic pain: “My mind is a forest. At least that is one of the theories. Synaptic overgrowth. An insufficient pruning mechanism, a lazy gardener in my mindgarden. Perhaps autism means my brain branches are tangled, looped around each other, the jungle of my synapses dense and humming. Wild.”