Pavement Legacies
I keep finding the garden in the street, between cracks in the pavement. For a while there was a fully-grown calendula between the footpath and a garden wall, sat next to a withered red-veined sorrel, just as they would have leaned against each other in my beds. I didn’t notice the sorrel until after I had taken a picture of the calendula, and now I see my sorrel everywhere, buddied up next to fat crowns of ancient dandelions. In the spring, I found Sutherland kale growing in the pavement down the road, offspring of a kale that set seed last year. The pavement-kales quickly flowered, and their offspring popped up across the street from them, and now a third generation of stunted pavement-dwellers are setting seed too. There’s one flowering next to the thick wall of the flood defence, and I am reminded that brassicas used to grow along the banks of this river two hundred years ago. Maybe more: the White Cart flows under Paisley Abbey, and archaeological excavation of its 15th century drains turned up seeds for both brassica rapa (turnip rape) and brassica oleracea (kale).
I don’t know why I ever thought the garden was dead, because it is clearly still right here. Ever since its untimely destruction in November, I haven’t found a satisfying way to describe the half-alive feeling of it in the communal back garden, or the seedlings that made ghost-lines around the empty beds in front. The whole thing has felt trapped in limbo, full of uncertainty and could-have-beens: could have sprung back to life for a while in the front if the building work had ended sooner, could have been whisked away to another small space down the street, could have spent many more months in stasis, waiting.
Now that we’re leaving for good, it’s obvious to me just how alive the garden has been all this time. I walk past the apple trees by the church and the community garden, which I know have been in intimate communication with my Manx Codlin, helping each other to fruit through the intercession of insects. And suddenly I realise that this is the actual end of the garden; that it will take leaving this place entirely, away from these trees and hedges and birds, to conclude the garden as a living, shifting organism, specific to this place at the bottom of a hill.
I love this land very deeply. I know things about it that other people don’t know, from before it was the city: when it was a bog for thousands of years and people deposited things in it for sacrifice and safekeeping; when it was the edge of a battlefield; when it was a bleachfield, a grazing ground for cows, a wheatfield; when part of it held a farm for a little while. I know the mill lade that used to cut from a shoulder of the river through the peaty field toward the meal mill, and that there was a fist fight near the lade’s bridge that ruined some of the farmer’s crops. I know that a corner of it was a tennis court for a while, before it was an urban neighbourhood grooved with canyons of tenements. To grow kale and flowers within this place, knowing these things, has been one of the most unexpected and life-changing love affairs of my life. I am still in some disbelief that I won’t ever know it quite so well again, that all my knowledge of the pavement flora and fruit trees will have long gaps and omissions.
But leaving was always the way I intended the garden to end, and nothing about that feels tragic. The legacies of most gardens are naturally short-lived; to have watched mine play out in successive generations up and down the street is some kind of intimate miracle. I’m grateful for the slow repetition of running into it like a friend, taking our time in saying goodbye. I’m grateful some things, like the neighbourhood apple trees, will still be familiar when I come back. But I’m also grateful to be leaving. I’m grateful to be hauling all these plants and compost to a bigger place, where we can all expand into each other in the privacy and quiet of a sheltered back garden. I grew the garden, it grew me, and this old dead-bog city contained us. I’m grateful to have known this ground; I’m grateful the ground remembered me in spring.