8.5.24 – noise pollution and a case for contentment

in the garden

It’s the noisy season again. Every day of the week offers an unpredictable, unholy chorus of strimmers, mowers, chainsaws, blowers, and hedge trimmers, whining and roaring their way through the open windows and my head. The flats next door get their garden factored on random days and only ever at 7am, performed by three or four men simultaneously mowing, strimming, and leaf blowing at such a decibel that, even in a heatwave, we have to close all the windows. The flats across the road get theirs done mid-morning, just as I’m walking past with my dog, entirely unprepared and unprotected for the full assault of noise that necessitates these so-called gardeners wear ear-defenders. At some point in the afternoon, there will be an irritating drone on the air as the cemetery gets mowed. On the weekends, there is a concurrent whirring of hedge trimmers, gravelly buzz of many electric lawnmowers, and the grinding rattle of random chainsaws, mixed with the rush of traffic from a nearby main road.

It has taken me almost the full two years we have lived here to unhook the experience of these noises from a gut feeling of panic. Until we lived in this house of our own, we lived in rented flats where the caretaking of surrounding land was very much not in our control. We never knew when landscapers would show up or how long they would take, and we had no say in how the job was done on land we looked at and used every day: an unnatural withholding of agency imposed on millions of flat-dwellers and renters across the UK.

Physically, this took a toll. There is plenty of evidence that living in areas with high noise pollution may lead to stress and sleep disturbance, which in turn leads to the risk of health problems like heart disease and diabetes. For neurodivergent people with sensory sensitivities, the effects of this noise pollution are more immediate. I know now that my routine response to the simultaneous mowers and strimmers around our ground-floor cottage flat in Inverness were autistic meltdowns, in which I was too overwhelmed and overstimulated to control my sobbing and stimming. In other flats where the noise was not so close, the effect was less severe, but cumulative with other sensory issues frequently led to meltdowns later on.

Mentally and politically, the panic was more complex. My emotional investment in the ecologies of densely-grown patches around our homes or the precarious set-up of my own gardens led to round-the-clock hypervigilance, keeping one ear out for the death-drone of landscapers in case they meant to destroy the land I held dear. More than once, I have thrown myself outdoors to confront these confused private hires and council workers (and once a presumptuous neighbour), asking them not to mow the whole meadow or denature the whole leafy back lane. In my landlessness, I felt a kind of liberation to be a pain-in-the-arse about ALL land, which did not feel freeing so much as it felt heavy with constant dread, always listening for the strimmers, always trying to find the most convincing words.

Now living in a neighbourhood made up mostly of terraced and semi-detached houses, it has taken practice to tell myself, when I hear the strimmers, “That is not your problem.” What began as an all-day gnawing a couple years ago has become a temporary uneasiness, reminding myself that it’s just my own neighbours making their own choices about the land they live on. I reassure myself, again, that I am planting as many trees as I can fit, making as much habitat as I can wedge into a dense vegetal polyculture.

But last week, there was a mighty racket of chainsaws and wood chippers by the flats across the lane. Through the venerable avenue of old trees, I could see a man in orange working away in the branches of a younger tree. For a moment, I felt the impulse to go out and investigate the situation with all my righteous protestation close at hand. Were they felling it? Was it sick? Would they maybe reconsider? Do they know it’s illegal to do work like this in bird nesting season? But I didn’t go out; I found my self-appointed duty to be a pain-in-the-arse tattered and void, invalidated by my own land ownership. Ever since, I have been interrogating myself about why this should be: if I only draw the line at private property (so far, yes, kind of), whether this self-voiding is an ingrained capitalist response I should learn to undo, how to become the kind of person who can be pleasantly confrontational at the drop of a hat, if there’s ever a friendly way of pointing out that there’s an insect apocalypse and I recently saw a bat trying to feed during the daytime, etc. I have no answers for myself yet; just a general uneasiness as the chainsaws, mowers, blowers, and strimmers start up again somewhere nearby.

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – May

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.

            Pull up suckers and haw [hoe] about the trees. Rub off unnecessary buds. Sheer or clip hedges. Prune tender greens (not the resinous), bring furth the housed ones refreshing and trimming them. Plant all sorts of medicinal herbes. Sow all sweet ones which are tender.

            Gather snails, worms, and catch moles.

            Sow lettice, cresses, purslain, turneep, radish, peas, &c. Continue weeding and watering.

            Near the end watch the bees ready to swarm.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

            Coleworts and other herbes, (being eaten with contentment are better than a fatted ox without it), sage (with butter), leeks, parsley, thyme, marjoram, sorrall, spinage, &c. Scorzonera, asparagus, lettice, purslain, and other sallades and pot-herbes.

            Pickled artichocks, barberries, beet-rave, cucumbers, housed aples and pears for many uses. Early cherries, strawberries, near the end.

            Cyder, metheglin, liquorish ail, &c.

In no other month of the calendar does Reid suggest how to eat herbs (“with butter”!) or dispense advice on the attitude with which one should approach the available harvests. He quotes a variation of the Biblical verse Proverbs 15:17, which in the King James Bible (the translation most likely known to Reid) reads, “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” The modern New Revised Standard Version similarly goes, “Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it.”

In quoting this verse, Reid is likely referring to the possibility that the reader, in May, will be in the midst of the hungry gap, that period in spring when winter vegetables have begun to set seed (and are tedious to eat) and summer fare is still too young to harvest. But Reid’s version seems to hold two meanings. After listing coleworts (kale) and “other herbs”, he says in parentheses, “Being eaten with contentment are better than a fatted ox without it”. “It” could mean contentment again, in that it’s better to eat your greens with contentment than to eat a fatted ox without contentment. But it also seems to be saying that the fatted ox itself is unsatisfying without the greens. Better the winter greens by themselves than a lavish roast without any vegetal flavour at all.

He makes his case quite convincingly in the appendix to The Scots Gard’ner, “Shewing how to use the Fruits of the Garden”. There is no meat that Reid does not think could be improved with the addition of potherbs:

“In the sauce or gravy of roast mutton and capon and in all stewed dishes bruise shallot or rub the dishes therewith. You may stove leeks with a cock. Onions may be baked with a little butter if you want meat; also make use of them with roast meat especially geese, and to most fresh fishes in which parsley and thyme fagot [bouquet garni] in mainly used. Boyl coleflowers in water mixt with a little milk; then pour it off and mix them in the stew-pan with sweet butter seasoned with salt, and so serve them up about boyled mutton. Boyl cabbage with beef, reserving the top of the pot to powr on (when dished up) about the beef.”

My favourites, which I have most closely incorporated into my own cooking, are Reid’s directions for plant-dominant broths.

“Spinag is excellent stoves being boyled with lamb or veall with a little sorrall therein, as also choped dishes thereof with butter. The same way use beets; also make green broth of them with leeks, fagot of thyme and parsly. In some stoves and broths you may put arage [orach?], marigold leaves, violet leaves, straw-berrie leaves, buglos, burrage, and endive. In pottage put juice of sorrall, fagot of thyme and parsly, and in most of broths.”

Such broths would have been much closer to what working class people of his time would have eaten as well, as I mentioned in January, compared to the luxurious roast meats which would have only been available to wealthy gourmands.

Based on the notable lack of onions at the organic grocery just now and the intense flowering of my kales, I would say we’re drifting through the hungry gap. But like Reid argues, there is still much to enjoy. There is an abundance of sorrel in my garden, entirely self-perpetuating from a sowing I did about seven years ago in Inverness. I have made a lot of garden broth with it through the years with Reid in mind; this week, along with the sorrel, I gathered parsley stalks nearly in flower, herb fennel, young stalks of garlic I forgot to harvest last year, a bay leaf, garlic chives, and new green growth of winter savoury, sage, and thyme; simmered gently very for a little over an hour, to prevent the sorrel going bitter; and so far used for a rice pilaf and braised red cabbage.

Forever and ever, free Palestine.