Ysella Sims is nurtured by her garden — a wild island adrift on a sea of turned fields.
I walk the long footpath out of the village on another grey evening of a stuttering spring. Wild carrot is flowering, its bruised purple stems and white umbels nodding, dramatic and seductive, on the margins. I notice that the sloping fields have been turned, ready for drilling with maize, a seismic churning of the red earth. I can see that the oaks, once part of ancient hedgerows — wavy lines of hawthorn, oak and dog rose — have been set adrift again, floating islands on a furrowed sea. I think of Isabella Tree’s description in Rewilding of the way that ploughing around trees like this slices through the network of fungi living on their roots, interrupting the threads of underground communication. Even the trees are lonely, I think.
The next time I walk the path I see the farmer. He is wearing a rubber bib and braces and scraping the slip of red soil from where it has washed down the funnels of the broken field, across the path onto the road. I think of George Monbiot’s description in Regenesis of the complexity of soil structures, the way soil has of, ‘organising itself spontaneously into coherent worlds’. I imagine a child’s bubble blown onto the breeze, creating worlds within worlds, swirling and shifting, reimagining itself in an opacity of titanium blue, amber and pink before bursting with a bang. Beside the path I see the newly emerged pineapple weed and speedwell struggling below the weight of the fractured soil.
If you look up the definition of grow, you’ll find words relating to commodification — to getting bigger, to developing, but nothing about nurturing, or connection. It’s unsurprising given our relationship with nature as one of exploitation rather than of nurture. In Alice Vincent’s Why Women Grow, I read about gardens being spaces that ‘hold grief and resilience’, spaces that offer opportunities to nurture ourselves as well as living things, that connect us to ourselves, to the earth and to each other. I let my garden mother me, nurture me; save me, time and again. I am adrift on a sea too, slipping down the furrows of broken fields, the ruins of Eden. In my garden, a space which by luck of the draw I am able to govern, I let the wild in, begin to make reparation to the earth, to feel that in some tiny hopefilled way I can help to redress the balance.
When we first arrived at our house in a Mid Devon village I found a plan of the garden carefully drawn in the previous owner’s shaky but meticulous hand on the kitchen table. There was a key and notes to help us care for the trees he’d planted; heritage apples with names like Keswick and Lord Lambourne, two swamp cypress and a Japanese witch hazel which flowers in January, splashing sunshine yellow and a sweet scent into the midwinter gloom, providing nectar for bees stumbling early from hibernation.
In the old sheds I uncovered a lifetime of gardening secrets; ways to suppress, exterminate and scare all things feathered, furred or fungal. On a cobwebbed wall I found a limp poster in 1980s pastels and typeset titled:
WEEDS IN YOUR GARDEN
A Which guide to identification and control
There were mole and rat traps resembling mediaeval torture instruments which I disposed of with a shiver. Here was an attitude to wildlife and growing from the time before, a time still resting above and below the red earth of Devon, in the attitudes of neighbours, farmers, and gardeners. A cohort whose time is passing; has passed.
But I found packets of ancient beans and seeds and tags too and thought of the owner, a reclusive composer, sitting at his piano in the raspberry coloured room in the low slant of the afternoon sun. I could see him pottering in the garden with his Jack Russells, planting and planning, staking the new trees, sitting on the commemorative bench for his wife in the shade of the lime trees.
Since then the trees have grown and we have planted more — an ironwood, a walnut, a red magnolia and a crabapple. We’ve added plum and cherry between the mulberry and medlar in the orchard. I’ve let the grass grow and mown paths through it. During May cow parsley froths pink and gold under the lime trees, there’s a bank of bluebells, a spread of primroses and Easter-coloured primulas. When people see it, a little bit in love with itself at this time of year, they call it magic. How much life there is!, they exclaim when it is buzzing and flitting and clicking with bees and hoverflies, butterflies and crickets. It is more difficult to feel my loneliness out here among life’s longing. There is too much to remind me that I am part of something else, something beyond myself.
When I am not in the garden I think of it, like I’m lovesick, wondering how the light is falling, jealous that I’m missing all of its moments of variety and beauty. Jealous that I’m missing the flowers opening, the grass waving, the insects flitting between blooms, the light moving around the garden so that this place is the one to sit, and now this one. On spring and summer mornings I roam around it, the dew soaking my feet, held by the clarity of birdsong and early light, by the quiet before the world stirs, by the cream-bellied swoop of swallows. This is my favourite hour, wandering, planting, pulling, noticing. I am held too, by a feeling of renewal, of youth. In all the other hours I feel old, my parents older, my husband ageing; we are going over but the garden is starting again.
The plants are growing and unfolding towards the sun and I stretch and unfold with them. I think of the cricket eggs in crevices waiting to hatch and the cinnabar moth pupae under the soil, waiting for the ragwort to grow. Picking a lamium I find that its purple flowers are heavy, not just with dew, but with bees too. Dainty little metallic flies dart and preen. I watch ladybirds, their shiny scarlet shells painted with fairytale black dots, pick their tiny way up stems and across the curve of leaves.
We travel to rural Oxford for a 30th birthday party with urban-dwelling youngsters. From our room we can see the Uffington horse carved into the ridgeway, on chalk downland quarried and farmed by Celts. Waking up the next morning, I notice that the air is still in a way that it isn’t at home, as if I am behind a glass wall looking out at the world. I feel the weight of loneliness and disconnection parading in the shadow of the youngsters’ hangovers, in their fights in the car park, in the words not left unsaid. And I think of all their hours spent in offices, commuting from homes to desks, working, spending and drinking hard, of missing unknown connections. I ache to be at home, back in my garden, noticing what has changed, listening to the day waking, to the blackbird’s song, realising that these young people may never think of it, because, why would they?
Back home in the Devon countryside it is late evening when I go up to the garden to check on the hens. I find a little crescent moon hanging in the sky above the silver roof of the house. Up on the hill I can see the yellow light of lampers, feel the weight of their bullets catching in the flesh of the night. I sense the snuffing out of their gun’s quarry, feeling how suddenly life can be extinguished. I look at the outline of the trees, the lime and yew, their black shapes against the sky, becoming for a moment a part of their shadow, one more skein in the tender thread between being here and not, another click of connection as the celluloid of my life loops and flickers, being here before I’m gone.
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Ysella Sims lives in rural Devon where she writes about our connection to each other and the natural world. She has been published in The Guardian, Spelt Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, Brittle Star, Iamb, and Blue Nib where she was a contributing editor. She writes about living, rural and otherwise, here.