Looking across the valley it all seems a little dull. The post holiday blues have hit with a thud and I wish I was looking out to more green than grey. The forest across the valley that greets my eye echos with silver and on the days when the sky matches the grey of the trees it just feels a bit meh. It isn’t always like this. The past week saw frosts every morning which are followed by beautiful clear days. Inspired by this weather I set up the seedling trays that I now watch eagerly to see who will emerge first. Along side the many seed trays are allium drumstick bulbs I brought off Trademe on a whim, accidentally over ordering and now I have all 60 of them sprouting - you can never have too many alliums, right? Whilst there are little seasonal promises of spring, come the weekend it feels hard to find motivated to garden even more so after the dog walk on Saturday morning when hail spat in my face as we strolled.
I knew the best way to shake of these post holiday grey blues was to do something. So Sunday morning when the cranky weather of the day before passed I went out to the garden, spending some time tidying. Winter mess is everywhere, the bareness of everything means that nothing is hidden. Paths swept last weekend are once again covered in pea straw. Pruning piles are waiting to be mulched. Weeding buckets are filled waiting to be deposited into the magical green waste bin. It is a time of waiting I guess, waiting for more light, more sun, more green. I stop myself from circling and making lists that won’t help my current mood. I just need to do something anything no matter how small to feel my body move. So I head to the space where I have been working and start there.
The first task is to fill buckets with compost and spread it over the parts that I have cleaned already. This task usually involves my shadow, the blackbird who follows along near me, watching, hunting out little treats from the compost. I love how we can be quiet together. She bounces up and down from fence rail to soil as I throw the compost out. The deep purple Salvia has finally given in to the many frost we have experiences so I cut back the dead wood along with last seasons fox gloves. The comfrey was trimmed weeks ago and is still a stumpy mass of burnt stalks, waiting to grow alongside the daffodils which are emerging. I sweep the path as I go and even just doing this little bit wrapped up against the cold, I can feel something start to shift and the grey weight inside me seems to soften.
I have scattered some pots in the flower bed where the path ends at the honey house and then turns to where the Rhoddies that I have trimmed are. In this little triangle of a bed in warmer months are dahlias and anemones and a red rose. The patch where I work is bare and reveals nothing of these plants that will soon emerge. I tidy the pots, trimming back dead leaves and remove the stalks from the anemones. As I chop back more space is instantly created. I reorganise and add a few more pots before tidying up the brick edging. The soil is cold and quickly forms mud as I clear a space to put the bricks. I find my fingers are sluggish in their movement. They require more energy than I have and I can feel the damp soil seeping through the trouser leg of my bent knee. There is a moment when you notice all of this and then you keep working and it is forgotten as you get lost in what you are doing. I think that is what I love the most about gardening. The losing of self into something else. I pottering along, minutes become an hour and then the cold starts to gnaw and becomes harder to ignore. Before long it is mid morning and the dogs come out to see what I am doing, reminding me that they need a walk. I start to tidy up, and then I stop and admire what I have done. It does look visibly better but not by much. The grey and the mud is still all there, heavy in it’s presence but I feel more like the solo daffodil that is flowering in my newly tidied flower bed. A little glow of warmth on a cold day.