The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Author:Olivia Laing [Olivia Laing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-26T17:00:00+00:00

My own garden was quickening by the hour. I mowed the grass for the first time on 29 March, cutting a curved path through the greenhouse lawn. A bat in the blue air, I wrote in my diary that evening, and later a field mouse on the doorstep. The next morning there were jackdaws in the pigeon loft, their beaks stuffed with twigs, shouting out their quarrelsome chack chack chack. Spring had swung into gear. We ate the first breakfast outdoors, and afterwards I filled the pots in the pond garden with pelargoniums: ‘Surcouf’, its flowers the startling pink of pickled beetroot, and ‘Crocodile’, named for its scaly variegated leaves.

There was a triangular abandoned bed on the north side of the house, across the path from the larger, sunnier one Ian had claimed as his herb garden. A cheerful winter jasmine grew out of gravel, under which there was one of those horrible weed membranes made of black plastic, which inevitably degrades into ribbons and will outlive us all. Morris would have hated it. On an impulse that afternoon I pulled it out, planting the gravel instead with transplanted violets and primroses and a foetid hellebore I found languishing beside the bins.

It was the hottest March day in thirty-five years. I ate a hot cross bun and drank a cup of tea, and then went at the bed under the sitting-room window, which had also been covered in gravel and planted with low-maintenance lavender, now straggly and sad. By the end of the day, I had a new bed turned over and ready for planting. The ‘Vanessa Bell’ rose?, I wrote. Pinks, pulsatilla, Shirley poppies? That was the thing about gardening. The possibilities were infinite. A few hours later, I was back to scribble: Bats again.

I was beginning to feel drunk on the sheer variety of surviving forms. White violets, pink bergenia, the sappy, cadmium-green spikes of day lilies, and then the true harbinger of spring: tissue-pink magnolia petals emerging from their purses, leaving velvety husks on the grass. At first it was only two or three, and the next morning it was as if a great ship had unfurled its sails and was riding at anchor on the lawn. The phrase so much to do appeared on nearly every page of my diary, along with fiddling about, which often consumed whole days. I was pruning the beech hedge when they rang the passing bell for Prince Philip, and painting the greenhouse after my first Covid vaccine. Some mornings I was up and out by four or four-thirty: tugging up cleavers; building tripods and planting out sweet peas; clipping the box squares, still in my pyjamas, dipping the shears into dilute bleach to ward off blight.

By my birthday in the middle of April it was as if I’d climbed inside a Morris pattern. The shabby little greenhouse garden had transformed itself into the meadow I’d planned and planted back in winter. It was at its most beautiful early in the

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