Neglect

the absolute state of my garden

From October to March, my garden and I get along well. We live like the best of neighbours, dutifully ignoring each other.

Then, spring hits, and I remember that the outdoor space of my home exists, and that it looks terrible.

The grass is overgrown, full of dock plants and dandelions. The tarmac is fuzzy with moss. The plants in the herbaceous border are growing sideways. The deck has a hole in it.

The garden came with the house. It was highly manicured, someone’s pride and joy. There’s a rockery and cast iron ornaments. Very green. Garden centre green. The only plants I recognise are the brambles and dock leaves that have grown since I moved in.

Granted, I’m busy, and rarely have time to spend any significant amount of time out there. But when the season changes I’m reminded why I wanted to live in the countryside in the first place. To be outside, to have space, to watch the swallows flit around, primroses, heather, the smell of pollen and wet earth.

If we have guests, I claim the long grass is for nature. But there’s nothing wild about the monculture of green dotted with weeds, light blocked out by leylandii. I just haven’t found a way to make it feel wild.

All my life I have craved wildness.

The garden I grew up in was wild. Apple and ash trees. Long grasses. Undergrowth. Birds and bats and shrews and newts and frogs and hedgehogs. It was a small haven of wild in the hectares of agricultural fields surrounding us. That’s the garden I crave. Thorn trees and pine marten, a stream.

I’m longing for some sort of storybook garden, without doing any of the work.

The first year we were here, I saw hares in the garden most mornings. Flocks of gold finches fed on the long grasses.

Then, the hares stopped.

It’s difficult to feel love for the place, when it’s so representative of things that I hate. Pretty plants that feed nothing. Trees that house no one. No undergrowth for mammals. Not once have we come across a hedgehog or fox. It’s suburban, despite its country location. It’s a reminder of the biodiversity crisis. There’s no wildness here, not anymore.

The other morning we spotted a hare in the yard. Closer to a kangaroo than a rabbit. Huge legs springing across my eyeline.

These are the creatures I see through my window. Rarely, but welcome.

I don’t know why the hares are back. Something, I presume, to do with whatever is going on in the surrounding countryside. I don’t think that me not mowing the grass for 12 months has brought them back. More likely it’s the frequent fox hunts killing their predator in the area, though I’m speculating.

I’m enjoying the chance to spot them in the early mornings. I hope they keep using this route. The swallows too have returned.

Nature can recover, but an abandoned garden that was once a field, then landscaped to within an inch of its life, won’t pop into a country meadow by itself. If I want native trees and places for mammals to live, I have to do the work.

We fucked it, we fix it.