In Bloom (or maybe Come As You Are)
28 May 2024I am not much of a gardener. Sometimes I will get out there and do some hacking and chopping and digging and pruning, but only for theraputic reasons. It feels nice to me when I can impress my will upon the hectic growth.
Nevertheless if I just left it to do what it wanted then the landlord and neighbours would be bothered by this. I feel like the garden and I have this unstable equilibrium where we gently push against each other until a reaction is provoked.
My ideal garden
I am no Capability Brown, as you are gathering. For me the ideal garden has sufficient space for me to do my things but also is low effort, in keeping with the location, encouraging to the local animals. Here we have kites, a kestral, barn and tawny owls, squirrels, muntjac and roe deer. Plenty of hares and rabbits come by, as well as the odd weasel or stoat (I don’t know the differences) and really a lot of butterflies and birds.
A beetle in the garden.
It’s also nice to have something useful in the garden. I do wish we had a bay tree, but we’re well equipped for chives and some other basic edible leaves. There’s an apple tree too, so we have nice cox apples annually.
A flower. I don’t really know about flowers.
A grassy lawn framed by neat beds is really the antithesis of fun in my mind. While it is useful to have some green space for outdoor activities, I like a much more diverse setting.
The garden we have
Since this is a temporary home for us, with maybe another six months or year before we vacate, I’ve not made a huge effort to transform the space. There are plenty of plants that I would rip straight out if I knew I would be here in the summer of 2025, but as it stands I can live with them for now.
Another flower. These are all straight-off-the-camera crops.
Apparently these roses are ornamental types grafted onto a hardier rose variety. This, I am told, means you get a fancy flower but without all the care needed. This makes sense since I have provided zero care.
Some of these plants seem like odd decisions. There’s a row of daffodils that came up along a path that leads to an old shed. They lasted a few days and sure made looking for the strimmer seem luxurious.
I don’t know what this is, but it looks like the kind of flower they print on a dress in M&S.
All this is of course just an excuse to show you some photos I took. Do you like flowers? I don’t know whether it is worth trying to incorporate their shapes and colours into my art, which can be somewhat geometric.
I am a fan of the artwork of Takeshi Kitano as showcased in the Hana-Bi film where specific flowers were reimagined. They are also interesting from the perspective of being the sex organs of the plant. My art primarily examines the role of technology in society, so I don’t know where this fits. Perhaps some day gardening will lead to inspiration.
One last flower. I don’t encourage people to visit, so these are mostly just for me.
Now to go and prune these blooms.
