These are anxious and frustrating times. I know this, because my inbox is chocker with messages from retailers, utility companies, media, horticulture and sports organisations, and every other mailing list I’m subscribed to telling me so. Perhaps you don’t need yet another blog post dwelling on the subject, but I do think there are a couple of points that are worth making here.
As an anxious person, my strategies to combat anxiety in recent years have been to keep gardening, keep running and in general, keep busy. My Facebook feed is full of suggestions of home-based fitness, baking, making, sewing and gardening ideas. To add insult to injury (or rather, injury to insult) in week one of the ‘lockdown’ situation, I fell over my own gardening boots and sprained my ankle, so my options for keeping fit and busy immediately diminished.
Why do I always feel I need to have something to show for my time? Why is there so much pressure to be constantly productive? It’s taken a global lockdown and an injured ankle for me to start training myself out of this mindset. I’ve hobbled down the garden with a deck chair, and just sat looking, smelling and listening to it, possibly for the first time in my life. There wasn’t even a G&T involved.
For a fairly chaotic and incoherent garden, this corner is looking quite handsome at the moment. The flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) always looks impressive at this time of year, and the Camellia has more flowers on it than it has had for ages, probably due to the amount of rain we had last summer. The Magnolia stellata is looking a lot better for not having been ravaged by the foxes this year, and the Viburnum tinus is just starting to come in to flower.
Magnolia stellata
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying hard to enjoy the attractive parts of my garden whilst not being distracted by the areas that need work. It’s still rewarding to go out there and notice more green, more growth and more blooms each day, as spring gathers pace. I’m grateful to nature for bringing about all those things without my intervention, and it deserves my appreciation and respect in return, even if this is from a deck chair on the lawn.