Gardening

with grace and kindness

I watch as a black bird, swoops in while I work and starts to knead the soil with their beck where I have weeded, hunting for treasure, hunting for food.  They are locals to my garden.  They know me well enough to feel comfortable being so close to where I stand.  I like this aspect of trust.  It makes me feel like I am doing something right in this garden space. It is a space of kindness, a garden that shows grace to those that inhabit it.

Agastache flower

I  collect words which I hide in various note books and write on scraps of paper.  Little secrets that I keep for myself.  They are words that inspired. Words that say what I want to say in a more eloquent way than I can. Words that I aspire to write. I came across a quote ‘in a garden of grace’. This is how I have been feeling in the garden of late, I thought. In between intervals of rain and cold I garden. I had two really good session on week day afternoons, where I finish work and walk straight out into the garden.  I work an area which is pretty well established. It is made of tall growing perennials that flower in masses. It is an abundance of bee friendly plants.  There are a couple of roses that have a tendency to spread in a wild and beautiful way.  They were moved to their new spot as in my nativity I planted them to close to a path.  Their thorns made walking past awkward.  I spy raspberry canes that I hope will flower this year. My mind flick backs to when Atlas was a pup and we taught him to sit using raspberries for a reward.  He remembers this too and will hunt them out off the bushes when they fruit.  I wonder if he will teach Helios this little trick. 

Borage Flower

It is a simple space to work. I trim back the dry stalks of past seasons. Look at dara ‘chocolate lace’ seedlings that are starting to take form.  The odd weed is removed, here and there.  There is  new growth which is always heartening. In the  gaps I plant blue Agastache which already reside in this bed and I love. I thought later I will add  meadow flower annuals, inspired by a recent Susie Ripley post which mentions cornflowers, coreopsis, strawflowers, cosmos, scabiosa. Hopefully they will self-seed and add to the story in the years to come just like the blue flowering borage which I am always happy and often surprised to find in different corners of the garden.

Flowering Heuchera

When I finish up and head inside, I feel good. I realise that working in the garden has given back to myself something I had lost over the past years as I navigate the storm waters that is Peri-menopause. Like many during this time, I have been figuring out that this indeed where I am in my life.  All these physical changes naturally leads one down many rabbit holes of why and as I emerge from what I hope is the last I feel so grateful that  through out this whole journey I have had the garden space to find myself again. The garden has shown me a kindness and grace I have, over the past few years, been unwilling to give myself. As I work in the garden I use my body. It moves with strength and energy. All this movement make me stronger and lets the nervous energy I seem to accumulated disperse. The garden gives me space for my mind to wander, to flow, to focus on nothing and everything at the same time. As I weed, I get lost in thoughts which leads to a calmness that carries me through the rest of the day. I breath deeper for the physical and mental workout.

Fig wort & Aquilegia

When I stumbled across my words “in a garden of grace” I first thought of images of beautiful flower beds and how graceful a garden can look. Swaying flower heads. A gorgeous  bloom. The sound of a bird singing.  All things that will soon start to appear in my garden.  But grace is more than this. It is how I feel in the garden.  My garden is where I am kinder to myself. I realise that that garden has given me that, the grace to show myself kindness. The garden had shown me how the meaning of grace.