Dreaming
When you find yourself creating a garden for land you don't have.
This weekly newsletter is a snippet of life in my garden and days with my camera, dogs and bees. It’s a small journey of sorts, capturing things I notice, see and love. I also like to think of this newsletter as your Friday moment to sit with a cuppa and just reflect for a moment or two. For a more deeper experience of my world upgrade to my paid newsletter which comes out every Tuesday and is filled with delicious extras.
This is the moment that I live for as a gardener. More than one pollinator feasting on a bloom. I am excited to see them all together and then I feel sad that I am sure in years past this sight would have been more common and the number of pollinators more numerous. Moments like these tell me to hold on to my dreams.= As I stand watching the scene in front of me, my mind casts back over the days and months that we have traveled up and down the roads in the area where we want to move to. I think of the houses that we visit and the houses that disappoint. We are still looking for the land that will be our next step but it is hard not to feel disheartened when you are searching and not finding what you want. You wonder if you are asking for the wrong dream. Then the bees, butterflies and bumbles say it will come. Hold on to that dream.
I collect the mail. I’m waiting for books to arrive but still no sign of them. The mail is erratic these days. In my hand however is a memory in the form of a plant mail order catalogue. I wonder if Nana’s was sent out this year. She was visiting me and found an old one lying about and asked if she could be sent one. She liked looking at the plants. I set it up for her. It was easy enough to do. I flick through my current copy and I find myself ordering plants. Those that take my fancy. Those that will offer food for my bees. The basket fills. I make payment and a few days later plants appear. In between order and arrival I read “Why Women Garden” by Alice Vincent. The book is filled with accounts of women who garden for various reasons. Many stuck with me having r``elatable reasons to garden. One, a grieving women who planted as a way to remember, made me realise that in a small way my mad plant order was a way to remember Nana. It is nearly a year since she passed away and I now have some plants to build a garden with. When ever I create this new garden it will be a space to remember her.
“These women gardened to carve space out of the situations their lives have placed them in”
Alice Vincent
It’s Tuesday, raining solidly, cold as well. I’m on the couch under a blanket with a dog beside me. Notes, books, computers are scattered about the place. I’m trying to work on my artist book project. I look at the screen blankly - what do I write? I knew this moment would come, the moment when it came to putting my gathered thoughts and words into sentences. I metaphorical open my mouth and nothing comes. I am stuck. I feel like I am trying to make the leap to the next step, except one leg is stuck on one side while the other has extended forward. And you know what this feeling is ok. I see it for what it is - a moment. A moment that I can over think, resigning myself to the idea that I have of what I want to create is terrible or I can just let it be. I choose the later. I shut the computer and put it away and reach for an art book I brought a while back. I make a tea and sink back into the sofa, cherishing the warmth from the dog and just let me my mind wander knowing I will return to my sentence construction at a later date, with a refreshed mind that has been stimulated by something.