All is well in the garden

Day 222

It is spring and I have been in the garden hanging things on walls - plaques and plates and other brightly coloured things gleaned at car boot sales. There are now three pretty little hand-painted bird boxes dangling from my Maple tree, the twisty wire coil with the optical-illusion glass ball has had a wash, and the tiny frog fountain has been cleaned out.

I've picked every daffodil in the garden and put it in the house, (I spend more time in the house at the moment, so I can enjoy them more there), along with cherry blossom, heather, grape hyacinths and pulminaria. The cherry blossom and forsythia are shedding everywhere, so there are now carpets of spring in the house as well.

The one thing I have always loved about being in the country is how in touch with the changing faces of the season one is. When we lived at the farm, each week there was a different mixture of flowers in the hedgerow, and blossom in the trees was followed by shoots, then leaves, then nesting birds, then berries. The world around was fecund, riotous, and abundant.

When I lived in London, however, I had only a passing awareness of the passage of time. Summer was hot, autumn was windy, winter was cold and spring was wet. That was all. Seasons came and went largely unnoticed. Once, my sister and I were so desperate to experience the autumn properly, that we went to the local park with four black bin liners and filled them up with fallen leaves.

Back home, we covered everything we could, drifts of them piled everywhere as if fallen from invisible branches in the ceiling. We put them in our hair and stuck them on our clothes. Friends turned up and it became a party, with all of us dancing about throwing armfuls of leaves into the air. Clearing them up three weeks later took hours and caused a large scale nervous breakdown in the hoover, but it was worth it.

Although I still live in a city, it is a small one, and my house is in a hidden sort of valley with deer and badgers that invade the garden at night, and fields and trees the view from every window. When I first saw the little walled garden with the huge Japanese Maple tree, I knew it was where I wanted to live, whatever the flat was like. Each Autumn the leaves turn a deep, burning, flame red, and as they gather on the rich, green, grass the colour contrast is heartbreaking.

Before I leave this house, (we never stay anywhere for very long, but we'll be here a few years yet), I want to plant crocuses to cover the lawn. A carpet of purple and yellow, the very colours of spring, as a gift to the next tenants. An awakening to life before the abundance of the roses and the headiness of the honeysuckle as you pass into summer.

If I put out birdseed regularly, then the squirrels come, followed by jays, wood pigeons, sparrows, blue tits, magpies, robins, and sometimes a woodpecker. Back at the farm in the real countryside, we were once terrorised by a wild boar, and there was a white stag with his milky family we saw on our walks, but this is good enough. As long as I can be where the daily difference in the season speaks to me, then I can be happy. To be cut off from that stifles something inside and I lose some sense of my own balance.

These are the joys that I cannot function well without - a gentle orange sunset, a fluffy squirrel snarling at my cat, a cluster of pink campions by the roadside, a robin on the wall, dandelion clock tendrils blowing in the wind, a polished conker, the song of a blackbird, the scent of lavender and honeysuckle and mint, pussy willow buds and old man's beard, a scarlet pimpernel growing from a cleft in a wall, a frog discovered under a large, damp leaf, and a place to potter and pot up geraniums.

It is spring and I have been in the garden. My mind has eased, my heart has danced and my spirit has sung.