The small round wooden and metal table sits by the living room window. Outside. I have just retrieved it from the depth of the shed, navigating its sharp black legs past bicycles tyres and lawn mower. My hand glides on the slats, the wood encased in layers of varnish I carefully applied in the setting autumn sun after work. Spongy beads of varnish bump my fingers in the spot where the varnish conglomerated. Black particles of pollution and dust stick to my skin. I brush them off into the air and briefly consider wiping the table clean but that would involve stepping indoors to grab cleaning materials. I sit on the mismatched chipped blue chair, the wood still carrying the moisture of the air within its strands.
My partner rests a cup of tea by my open notebook. ‘Thanks,’ I murmur. I turn my eReader on, unscrew the cap of my fountain pen, and begin to study. A blackbird atop the roof of the house at the end of the garden sings his trilling liquid song, loud and clear for all to hear. I pause in my reading to listen. I am glad to see him perched in what I consider his personal perch. I have no idea if he is the same bird I witnessed in the act of declaring his dominion over the neighbourhood the year before. I like to think so. A blue tit lands on the still skeletal whitebeam and adds their voice to the growing chorus of songs.
I wonder where the swallows are. The nests under the eaves of the pub on my commute route awaits. It is early but I cannot get swallows out of my mind. I look at my cycle cap with their stylised shapes, white against blue, and dream of their flight. I remember their play over my grandmother’s garden, their flow in a small mountain village at the border between Extremadura and Andalucía in Spain. The vanishing sun sets my dreams aglow. I lose myself in the tension of waiting for a moment. I know I need to be patient, my eyes will not find them in the sky just yet.
I lower my gaze to the ground where the garden lay, my eReader and notebook forgotten. It is difficult to hold onto words when the world is so new and fresh. Our mossy grass is bordered with blooming daffodils. They mostly bear bright yellow flowers, an echo of the cacophony of yellow flowers dancing on the forsythia, but a few rogue white ones are gradually emerging from their green shelter. The tulips too are growing, the straight stems bolder and bigger by the day. The green protective cocoon raising the flowers are bulging under the rising pressure of flowers demanded to be let out. I smile, thankful to see the daffodils and tulips rising. Over the past two years, my partner and I have overhauled the borders often, displacing and damaging the bulbs in our work. Still, they grow, resilient to our attacks and endlessly forgetting of our carelessness.
A flurry of delicate and tiny purple and yellow flowers are sprouting at the very edge of the grass. I do not recall seeing them in previous years. I suspect our visiting birds have carried the seeds to the garden. I make a mental note to look them up online later. For now, my eyes travel past the new flowers to the bank of wildflowers of a friend’s wedding carpeting the small patch of earth between the redcurrant tree and the heavy wooden chairs. They are only fluffy leaves at the moment, faint tendrils of white hair over green leaves. The blue flowers are in no hurry to reveal themselves. The wildflowers have travelled beyond this patch of earth since we scattered them out of their paper packet, spreading across our garden and past the boundary of our wooden fences.
The trees and bushes are blossoming too. Tight, timid bundle of leaves are growing at the edges of branches, soon to unfurl and bathe in the warmth of the sun. The apple tree remains stark naked. I worry about them. They have suffered from a fungal infection and do not seem to be recovering. We have tried to help them along as best we could, but recovery has not yet come. If the fungi rears their head this year, we will have to face the decision of uprooting the apple tree and taking them down. I do not wan to contemplate this decision just yet. My hands still remember the tickle of young roots when we placed the tree into the ground. My eyes turn to the younger apple tree still growing in a pot. A sapling travelled by post from Scotland, they have been steadily, healthily growing. I wonder if apples will grow the this year on their lanky teenage frame.
The strawberries I collected from the plant table at the end of one of the village I cycle through on my commute seem to have make it through winter. They have lost some leaves to the frost but most are still green, the long stems they threw in an energetic invasion plan the previous year still strong. I wonder if this year they will fruit more than grow. I follow the last of their tendril to the willow tree sheltered between the forsythia and the wonky hazelnut. I have yet to spot signs of early buds. I hope they will come. The willow tree has not enjoyed the past winter, their frame growing brittle and dry at the edges. I know I could turn to books and the Internet to learn how best to take care of them, but the garden is not the domain of brain knowledge. I learn differently here. I listen to the tutelage of the plants, my sense tuned into their more-than-human voices.
The still unidentified tree straggling their way to the sky between the red currant and the bushy other unidentified tree is expanding young shoots into the air. I chopped their trunk last year to offer more space to the surrounding trees, but this tree is more resilient than I thought. The stump is sprouting young growth in every direction, an act of defiance letting me know there is still plenty of life left in the tree. They are in an awkward position, one that does not allow them to thrive. Or so I thought. I am loathe to cut them again. I suspect I will not. I tried to have my way but the tree did not listen to my will. It is my turn to listen, learn, and care.
It is difficult, this learning, under the guidance of the plants and animals populating the garden. I have not been taught how to listen and care in the past. I tend to the space as best I can, half-remembered gestures and memories of childhood winding their way through to my muscles and fingertips. I have to let go of every principle of learning I have been raised with. There are no exams here, no pass or fail, only growth and decay. Life and death. My partner and I have not killed that many plants, only roses forever escape our love. Other plants have struggled, calling out to us to move them to other parts of the garden. So we did and they are now better. The heather has rewarded us with bright specks of colours throughout the winter months, and the lavender adorns us with their soothing scent as we walk past and brush our skin against their leaves. The small evergreen bushes around them have frozen and I suspect died. I am waiting still. It is early spring and there might be life lurking deep in their roots.
The invasive plants are coming back too. The plants I call weed. They grow endlessly, taking all the available space and gradually choking the plants we added over the years. I will soon have to return to a routine of plucking and uprooting. I am sure treatments exist to get rid of the weeds more easily, but I like to pull them out with my bare hands. I get to feel the soil through my fingers, observe the minute change on the plants all around, and when the timing is right and luck is on my side I get to eat a berry or two in exchange for my toil. But for now they are sluggish and unhurried. The garden is holding its breath and so am I. We live in a stasis of being. We are part winter, part spring. The wintering is over, the stillness of rest is slipping through the cracks of our being. Buds and shoots are filling them, expanding them. My body calls to the outdoors, to the movements of care and alertness, but it is not yet time. I try to be patient, to watch, to wait, to savour this space of transition and precarious balance I have never paid attention to before. I remember the overwhelm I felt in previous years when all the plants decide to bloom at once, my senses unable to process what felt like a sudden change, but what I am now learning is gradual and subdued. If nothing else, this waiting will have taught me to watch. Details I used to miss in the dark edges of the day have been unveiled and through this hungry observation, I too become a creature of spring, a young shoot of green and yellow, a puffy blossom in the wind.