These sunny mornings I can’t bear to read and write and am instead out in the garden, watering, propping, pruning and thinking of some lines from Paradise Lost (sorry to jump so far ahead, this is from Book 9)
Now, when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things that breathe
From the Earth’s great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And joined their vocal worship to the quire
Of creatures wanting voice; that done, partake
The season, prime for sweetest scents and airs;
Then com’mune how that day they best may ply
Their growing work—for much their work outgrew
The hands’ dispatch of two gardening so wide:
And Eve first to her husband thus began:—
“Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This Garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower,
Our pleasant task enjoined; but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint: what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides,
Tending to wild.
Someone asked me at the weekend what I would do if I didn’t work at The Reader, and I replied that I would garden, imagining not working as retirement. If I had to have another job? I’d like a junk-shop or to work in small town general auction house. but if I didn’t work at all? I’d be gardening. Mine is a smallish plot – I mean, compared to people with an acre or so – two gardens, one back, one from, each measuring – according to my old notes 10 metres wide by 18 long. You have to go through the house to get from one to the other, we’re a terrace and there’s no side gate. No greenhouse (I did have one once but West Kirby’s wild winter winds blew it flat) so everything is bought in or needs to be easily propagated. I do roses (lovely Albertine, mainly) from cuttings and any other things you can stick in the ground to sprout roots. I grow perennials, lots of geraniums, Bowles Mauve wallflowers, poppies… but mainly I grow couch grass. It is a natural for my sandy soil and I can’t defeat it – the opposite in fact: it often defeats me. Still a garden is agreat teacher, as Gertrude Jekyll said:
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
(I got this quote from the twitter account of a gardener I follow – Alison Levey (http://www.blackberrygarden.co.uk/).)
I go out in the sunny morning and so exactly what Milton describes:
Now, when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things that breathe
From the Earth’s great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And joined their vocal worship to the quire
Of creatures wanting voice; that done, partake
The season, prime for sweetest scents and airs;
Then com’mune how that day they best may ply
Their growing work—
I breathe, and look and feel grateful and glad, and work out what needs doing next. It’s all tending to wild, and the couch grass is rampant, and though I can’t love that, and no, not those red lily beetles either, I do love the assertion of nature, the force and energy of the planet and the plants, even though
the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint: what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides,
Tending to wild.
readerjanedavis 