Winter gardens: order in awaiting

Either side of a riotous and wonderful Burns night celebration last weekend, I visited two established gardens in the middle of their winter dormancy. One was the large walled garden at Attingham, outside Shrewsbury, whilst the other was the terraced and sloping gardens below Upton House, not far from the site of the first major battle of the English civil war, Edge Hill. Both gardens were large, still and marked by a quiet preparedness that comes from putting things in order before a great event. Attingham we know well, from countless visits there during the 13 years we lived in Shrewsbury, and we have seen the garden evolve and change. But I don’t recall seeing it so cold, so prepared and waiting. There is a real challenge to a well-readied garden that tells you much about the minds that have readied it. At Attingham, they were lifting and dividing rhubarb, the rhizomes split so that the emerging crowns were evenly distributed, and a bed, and forcing pots, prepared for replanting. But this was pretty much the only activity I saw.

What there was, was the overpowering sense of earth prepared for sowing, trees pruned and shrubs trimmed, grass greening and the small winter cyclamens giving flashes of colour. Some of the cold frames still had salad stuffs present and some early sowing had gone on in the greenhouses. Everything was waiting for spring. In some places, not many, bulbs were emerging, and only the bold snowdrops and early celandines were out. Trees were in willing bud, but the leaves were still hidden away. It was just a wonderful experience, both gardens palpably aching to flourish, if only enough heat and light could be coaxed from a reluctant sun.

Away from the gardens, puts of bulbs and corms had been readied around the greenhouses, tools sharpened and barrows cleaned, stakes for the legumes all ready, lying in wait. In other places, the decay of the previous year was still in evidence: those flower heads left for birds and insects had faded to brown but were not deadheaded, grasses were left to die to enrich the soil.

There was a very strong awareness of the shift from decay to growth. Things left to decay were deliberately left, allowing the decay to feed the new growth. I think sometimes we find this hard in our western, progress-focused thinking. The idea of decay or waste (and God knows, we produce enough waste) is seen as a byproduct of our obsession with making new things and digging stuff out of the earth to burn. Waste is seen as a problem. Not here in these gardens. All is put to use, composted, reused, cleaned, given over for animals, who in turn provide manure that will go on the gardens. An agrarian principle is that there is no waste, no loss. It becomes the goodness of the following cycle. Here is Wendell Berry (from his NHM-award essay, It all Turns on Affection):

The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay….should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. This is what is meant, and is all that can be meant, by ‘sustainability.’ The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection….It is the principle of return that complicates matters, for it requires responsibility, care, of a different and higher order than that required by production and consumption alone, and it calls for methods and economies of a different kind…indissolubly linked in complex patterns of energy exchange.

In Berry’s world, this is what is meant by health. Health as a word is related to the word for wholeness and for healing, akin to the Hebrew shalom. It is not just ‘being well’ or ‘feeling well’ but the active participating of humans in cycles that lead to the health of the soil, of plants, or one another, and of our relationships. And in these cycles, there are low moments, when nothing much is happening, but where the earth is responding to the careful affection and consideration given it by responsible gardeners over the quiet periods. Perhaps that is exactly why it was so exciting to be amongst ordered, winter gardens.