Dearest Garden Friends,
These are weeks of deep emotional catharsis, reorganising of life and of domestic spaces and very very very challenging times in adjusting without folks who have parted the mortal coil...
The garden is such a sobering and earthing presence throughout all this inner and home-based turmoil; the plants ask me to dance with them and forget human cycles for a moment, as I immerse in the thrumming of the elemental...
I concentrate on the simplest tasks, like paths - what do they need to keep them being paths? The beauty of a basic, soft covering of greenery, like this clover, which serves multiple purposes, but right now it's enough that it caresses my toes and the sides of my feet, which keeps me in my body.
The panorama is such a vital thing of these days too; being able to lift one's head up and be awe-struck by the beautiful colour, composition, light, cloud formations, shades of green coming through, shadows, everything... All the elements combined, making this whole expanse in front of me, giving me perspective and asking me to look at my place in the world through The Now.
The garden which was Sergio's is growing at a phenomenal rate, as things tend to do in this part of Italy, at this time of the year: we've had a particularly delightful spring following a particularly light winter - and we just got tons of water on the vegetation, which was verging on being parched: just in time, all is perfectly thriving.
Other seasons, with this amount of sudden growth, I might've been more enthusiastically at it - cutting and pulling and suchlike. But this year, I am moving slowly, laden with the lovely soft symbiosis of gestation in my womb, and allowing the grief of losing my beloved step-mum (not long after losing Sergio too), and the complexity of becoming a mother whilst releasing the matriarch of my 'old family'.
My relationship with my step-mum was complex from the beginning, and I won't go into that private story and intimate healing here - suffice to say that the garden has been a place to shed tears and lost dreams, hopes and moments that we shared together. A place to have everything returned to the soil and to be recycled into the new.
Everything feels more heavy with meaning than before - partly of course from the magic of pregnancy - that profoundly-more-enhanced sentience and vision - but also from the loss, and the simultaneous necessity of forging ahead through it.
The Gifts returned to us through someone leaving material incarnation, are multifold...
So I try to focus on that, whilst observing the beauty of what already is, and that which I am ABLE to keep maintaining and enjoying, being nourished by and co-creating with as I learn and grow with the plants. As illustrated above and below, the tufo porous rocks, which are dotted around the garden, but also in this crescent curve here - they have become splendid jewelly marvels now, draped in this mossy golden covering. They are one of the things in the garden that bring me most delight: their pure deliciousness visually.
The contrast of the golden orange velvetiness and then the bright green grass stems.... divine!
A few lovely herbs which I put small pots of into the edges of the spaces, are now well established: here is some sage and behind it some marjoram. My favourite herbs for teas, cooking and pelvic steaming (if I were not pregnant!)
Two levels down from the herbs and cardoons, is the glorious stripe of vitality that is compost heaps, borage and wild chard... I adore popping down to this edge of the wilder part of the garden, and finding the plants ever more vibrant!
The size of the leaves this year is quite impressive: some plants look like bushes, and harvesting the leaves is such a joy.
As are the borage flowers everywhere: this stretch has the most all together, but they grow around the gardens in various stages of newness-to-fading-away.
Boarge is such a divine colour and sacred geometry, eh. And such amazing food. I've shared several times throughout the year about harvesting the plants - this winter they didn't have a break at all!
The tomato tree/ tamarillo seemed to have thrown off its cover, which made me smile, as if it is saying - I don't need any protection, it's mild enough for me to be out and sunning myself already! Hopefully this will continue... As I write, there's a fairly dramatic thunderstorm in progress!
In front of the tamarillo, with Betty the grumpy granny cat, to give a sense of scale.
Betty - and the other 5 cats! - follows me everywhere in the garden. If I stop for a moment to rest, I notice all 6 of them within around a metre radius of me... It is very funny and sweet, and they comfort me right now.
The flowers also brighten my day significantly: these wallflowers were self-seeded, as wallflowers usually are - and I enthusiastically encouraged them and made space for them. Apart from the fact that Sergio had neglected his garden for most of the past decade, he also never planted flowers, and I brought bulbs, cuttings and seeds from wherever I could save them, into any corner which had a wee bit of soil to sustain them... the perfume now is magnificent - of iris, wallflower, rosemary, and the colours of them all, alongside marigolds and borage... So uplifting.
I picked a great big bunch of iris buds a couple of days ago, and have been buoyed at watching them pop open by the hour - and the subtle smell of them permeating my bedroom - mmmmmmmm!
This first tier of the garden is the most 'organised' of them all - really simple and full of useful plants.
Another self-seeded or perhaps planted-another-season-and-only-now-flourishing plant - a pair of wild/ not wild leek-like plants in a pot beside chardy-spinach and plantain.
Another varied pot, an old sink actually, with wallflowers and thyme.
These succulents are like massive roses, and are STILL in bloom - the flowers on succulents here seem to last for actual months.
Here the marigolds in old suitcases are just closing for the night... Some are in seed, and I'll pluck them and spread them around even more... Marigolds have proliferated in the garden - so so useful and beautiful a plant! Here they're next to a low-growing oregano, I think.
And I forgot again what this shrubby tree is - something like a jujube or a Chinese date, at least with berries - but I forget.
A fig cutting which has taken nicely and is putting up buds and leaves...
And self-seeded/ re-seeded lettuce which I probably planted last year, but then 'lost' when I was very ill and couldn't take care of the seedlings... So so satisfying when things come up later than expected, as if by magic!
A prune/ apricot/ cherry twig from a nearby tree.... excited to see if I can replant it eventually.
And Betty's very typical perma-grimace - just her love language!
Beniamino in the cat's favourite old basket - lodged in a sunny panoramic place, for them to enjoy the most. And talking of favourite sitting spots: the street bench was parked by the council in the most silly of places - behind this wall:
So the view was very limited - kind of spoiling the whole point of a bench! As lovely as the stone wall and cats are, the other side of the wall gives this view:
Much better! I saw recently that someone had loosened the big bolts which attached the bench to the pavement, and I was able to push it around here... This was important also, because someone has been dumping VAST amounts of dirty cat litter over that railing, and I made a big clean-up effort this week, to counter the awful effects of toxic poopy-peepeey mountain which was accumulating!
Just the fact that someone is maintaining a place, can have a big effect on mindless acts like the dumping of the cat litter: it breaks the cycle of mindlessness, as it shows that a place is cared for and enjoyed - i.e. you shouldn't mess it up!
Now we can all sit and look out over the valley in peace, and hopefully smell nice flowers from Sergio's garden, instead of Stink Of The Dead! It took a LOT of hosing and pulling up of jobby-fied plants, to cover the litter mountain and the smell!