In Kiltumper by Niall Williams

Author:Niall Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

‘Well, it’s my favourite thing to do. Clear a space. I did it in the woods growing up. Could do it for hours. I’d leave the house, escape what was going on there, go out into the trees and find some place and I’d start clearing. But what was I thinking today?’ Chris lies on the pebbles, exhausted after hours of working. Beside her on the ground, her secateurs. Behind and to the right, a very large mound of weeds and branches, and behind them a cleared patch of earth.

The cleared space, I am thinking, is one of those elemental maybe original instincts in mankind. We never think of Eden as a garden that needed clearing or maintenance; I suppose the logic is it was Before the Fall and therefore perfect, but if it was a living place, if the plants in it grew, then they would grow too large and crowd each other and need pruning and dividing and all the rest of it. If they didn’t grow, it wasn’t a garden as we know it. Well, where my thinking on this takes me is: a garden, as I understand it, is a thing that is inextricable both from change and from human activity; it needs us to exist. A wilderness is not a garden. Even the apparently paradoxical ‘wilderness garden’ is an act of creation and the result of thought. (Out behind the garden proper, in the Wedding Field, we have decided to let the grass and wild flowers grow, and only mow a path through and around it for walking. So now in July we do have ‘a wilderness’ that grows up to Chris’s waist and she likes to walk through it in the evening before finally leaving the garden and coming in for the night. But the mown path is what makes it a ‘garden’, if it can be considered one. The path is what invites you. And part of that invitation is that when you see the opening through the tall grasses you connect to the mind that first imagined it and think: Look, here’s a way to go. In other words, it’s a human connection.)

So, clearing a space, either for new planting or to lessen crowding, is an integral part of what people do when they pick up trowel or fork. Very often, it is what Chris is doing when I look up from writing in the morning and her head appears in the lower bed or over by cabins, or when I bring her a mug of tea and call her name and the answer comes from the ditch across the road.

‘What exactly are you doing?’

‘Just clearing. Can you tell? You probably can’t tell.’

‘Oh, I can.’

‘Really?’

‘Definitely. Right there.’

‘And there, and there, and all along there. Well, the point being, this soil seems to prefer weeds to anything else and someone has to dig them up.’

‘Yes. I can see.’

‘Only because I pointed it out.’

‘No, looks much … clear-er.’

And it does. You can’t quite get to the bottom of why.

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