Six Square Metres by Margaret Simons

Author:Margaret Simons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, GAR000000, GAR028000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2015-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Ancient mythologies are full of winter as a time of retreat and sadness. Pluto, ruler of the infernal regions, reaches out his power. Sap is withdrawn from leaves, and they fall. Animals hibernate. Winter is a time of grey and black. The season is a metaphor for death, but also for hope, because we all know that spring will come. All these descriptions and metaphors, of course, are tied up with the Northern Hemisphere, and a life very different in time and geography from my inner-urban professionalism. The street trees drop their leaves, the catalogues in the letterbox are full of advertisements for heating and insulation, and the shops hold seasonal sales. But nobody stores away nuts and pickles. Nobody salts meat for long keeping, or worries about making it through to spring.

As a gardener, I find there is much to look forward to in winter. Is there any more powerful passage of the Bible than the assertion, ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted’?

One of the things I do in winter is pluck up, not the things that have been planted, but the things that keep on bloody planting themselves. Weeds, in other words. In winter, things stop growing, and so for a few short months I have the illusion that I am a real gardener, able to keep up with and control growth. I weed things, and they stay weeded. For once, despite shorter days and longer nights, I appear to be in control.

It is also the time for infrastructure projects — for building and planning, erecting trellises and making garden beds, and doing all those other things that help to make a garden more than a collection of plants. Once upon a time in England, a garden was understood to be part of what it was to be civilised. It was the space between the house and the countryside — an intermediary between the wilderness and the world of the antimacassar, at once a tribute to nature, and evidence of human control over it. Whole generations of European landscape-gardeners built their careers around different ideas of humankind’s place in the natural world, and the transition from wilderness to civilisation.

In my case, the garden is the buffer and point of transition between home and the urban wilderness, and my infrastructure projects reflect this: the clumsy trellis between me and the McDonald’s carpark, the thick jasmine on the boundary with my neighbour at the front that helps us to remain clearly separate households, even though we live close enough to hear each other open our cereal boxes in the morning.

Although my space is limited, I find myself longing for that most basic means of defying the seasons — a greenhouse. I like being able to pick my own tomatoes in winter, or at least early spring, when those hard green things in the supermarket are priced at several king’s ransoms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.