“The GARDEN AGAINST TIME”
A collage of all things special to me from my summer place in Maine. The inspiration behind Cliff Walk Designs.
As an avid collector and reader of antique and current garden books and related literature, it’s nearly impossible to pick a few favorites because there are so many published works I love. That being said, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time was a personal account of a writers experience restoring an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, UK. Laing shifts back and forth between gardens and times of the past - referencing Capability Brown, William Morris, and then shifts to the current day [2020], describing how the effects of COVID and the dramatic shifts in the political space impacted society and humanity on a global lcvel.
For Laing, the answer in part was to find an escape - a place that felt safe but also a space that needed tending. This space was that garden at her new home in Suffolk. In the book, she writes:
“We all travel into adulthood bearing particular burdens, some of which are necessarily personal, individual, idiosyncratic, and some of which are more properly categorized as political, to do with the kind of history doled out to the people who shared our circumstances. I think there are many ways that adults handle and manage the sometimes radioactive material of their own past, and that I’m not alone in finding solace in the act of making gardens. The particular childhood I had left me with a craving, a permanent, nagging need for a place that was safe, wild, messy, bountiful and above all private. I wanted a home, absolutely, but it was a garden that I needed.”
This resonated with me in my own personal way. In the spring of 2019, I watched my daughter make her entrance into the world. My sole responsibility from there was to care for my son and my baby girl. Simultaneously, my father’s health was failing him. Between post-partum depression and the anxiety of not knowing my father’s true status or his time left on this planet, I felt out of body. When he passed away in late 2019, I realized I had witnessed the cycle of life that year. I held my baby and looked into her fresh new eyes and then all of a sudden I was holding my fathers hand, calloused but comforting - because he was my dad, and trying to process that his energy was shifting to a new place. There would be no more hugs or cat purrs or calls, letters, emails, jokes, stories…my mind and world began to spin.
As awful and tragic as COVID was on everyone, there are many people who somehow still found themselves, or were able to find a solution to something that had been plaguing them. Lockdown required school closure so I surrendered to my home with my family and spent nearly every day with my children in the gardens. This turned out to be incredibly healing in many ways for my grief, and also became a purposeful ritual…..
I began to dream back to the days I would help my father in the garden as a small girl. He wa a busy lawyer during the week and so these weekends in the garden at our old home in Chestnut Hill, MA, were the moments that I truly connected with my dad. He taught me the true essentials of gardening, cured my fear of spider webs (which inundated the trellis garden shed by our patio), presented a side of him that was so gentle, patient and magnetic. He found joy in every insect - “good one” or “bad one.” He taught me the importance of soil heath and how these critters and earth worms enhance and feed our soil.
This was just how I naturally approached working with and educating my son in the garden. From an early age — when even xxxs size garden gloves were too big for him — he was forever by my side. He was always wanting to help, wanting to learn, wanting to plant and mulch. My children are like gardens themselves - I grew them and I continue to foster and to tend to them.
