Diva Harris (and dog) find hope wedged in the trees.
Ground cover / branch cover: mud, litter and last year’s burrs become snowdrops, cyclamen, crocuses, daffodils and narcissus. Spindly trees outside posh houses are soon festooned with the garlands of spring.
The start of the year is dark and cold, with little motivation to walk or write, even though they are usually life’s greatest pleasures. For dog and woman alike, it is the season of two coats and radiator worship. No matter what time we force ourselves out of the house, the sun seems to have gone down already, and teenagers rollerskate home from school on light-up wheels. I stomp around in wellies, a battered overcoat and unravelling wool hat, like a disgruntled farmer from the 1950s.
Other sighthound owners joke that their dog’s instruction manual reads DO NOT GET WET, but the same cannot be said for ours. Perhaps it’s an outdoors-in-all-weathers farm collie work ethic sliding down the genetic spiral — along with predispositions to rounding up errant family members, wearing one ear up and one ear down, and at times infuriating persistence — but ours actively seeks the biggest, sludgiest puddles imaginable, joyfully frolicking in the muck when the only other walkers out are those wedded to spaniels. I suppose it matches my winter park aesthetic; we two city-dwellers cosplaying as farm folk when the closest we usually get is the farmer’s market. We have started to tell her she is our favourite dog in all the bog. She has a lot of choice; the bog is all around, the river pushing up from under the park’s compacted earth, swelling in her yearly reminder that she’s still there.
The condition of the ground is ever-worsening. We attend a badly publicised community meeting in which the organisers of the disruptive, locally controversial, large-scale summer events attempt to do a PowerPoint presentation about why the events are good, actually. They are shouted down by an impassioned cross-section of society who have heard this all before. There are parents of children who can’t sleep; grandparents of neurodivergent grandchildren who can’t visit during the noise pollution; people whose cars were towed to make way for councillors’ cars. There are people who live in houses, flats and tower blocks. There are people who are made to feel mentally unwell by the sound bleed and people who don’t have access to other green space. There are children whose playspace has been sullied with rubbish, excrement and broken glass.
Last year, the council illegally cut down trees during bird nesting season in order to facilitate the events. Every spring and summer, HGVs crack the concrete, too many feet compact the earth, and nothing is fixed or given time to recover before the next year’s barrage of mistreatment. An elderly woman shouts this is bullshit!, which it is. Unelected representatives give the impression of being open to questions, but only provide evasive, political answers. They cannot reveal the profits made by the events because it is “commercially sensitive information”. These undisclosed profits are absorbed into the wider parks budget for the borough, rather than benefitting the land they are exploited from. The council do not hold the events company to account for the ground works they are responsible for but never complete. They are holding this consultation under the pretence that the licenses haven’t yet been granted, even though this year’s events are already long sold out. They are stealing public land for private enterprise from people of all ages, races, genders, means and levels of mobility, who rely on access to green space for play, for leisure, for solace, for headspace. They are stealing land from the trees and the bats and the herons and the woodpeckers and the frogs and the foxes and the owls and the fungi. The meeting is a folly; a farce; a box-ticking exercise to demonstrate that residents were consulted. It is bureaucratic and capitalistic and infuriating and oppressive, but it is also invigorating to see so many people stand up for their rights, and the rights of their communally owned space.
Our flat is damp, the dog cracks a tooth, and 1930s politics seem to be back in vogue. Big, ancient trees come crashing to the ground, their insides pulped by rot. But just when it feels like there is no hope, its shoots begin to poke above the soggy ground. The grey days are suddenly bright yellow; it is light enough to be out at 6pm, and at dusk, Venus is bright above a sliver of moon — a beauty spot on the cheek of the sky. There are signs of life and renewal everywhere — bulbs come into bud, frogs and newts crawl from the ponds, and the swan couple begin to nest, beaks tucked neatly under wings. There is blossom and mimosa and magnolia against bright blue sky, and a single tulip we didn’t plant blushes in the garden. The sun evaporates the worst of the waterlog, and I can wear one coat instead of two. The dog doesn’t have to wear a coat at all.
It’s a cliché to find optimism in the springtime, and sometimes that optimism is misguided or premature. By the beginning of March, the sun-seeking trumpets of the daffodils droop heavily with cold, heavy rain, and an unfortunate amphibian meets a horrifying, accidental, slimy crunch under my walking boot. But new hope is in the post. Vandalised trees are lovingly fenced so they may recuperate. The community, undeterred by yarn-spinning, wraps its arms around its park. Though a kite is wedged in a tree, its stripes shout the colours of the rainbow; perhaps one day soon, someone will be brave enough to climb up, untangle its strings, and laugh as they watch it loop on the warm winds of a new season.
