A Winter's Tale - if you ever need reminding why you garden, read this
Mud, seasonal surprises, and the beauty of the colour white
This week, my mother sent a picture of her first snowdrop
It reminded me of this from a year ago. It’s as muddy as ever, and today there’s a lingering Christmas mist:
I hate mud
Tolerable when it first arrives, the novelty soon wears off as the squelch - steadily, relentlessly, remorselessly, gleefully - grows worse every day, to the point that the dog has to beg me with his eyes to be taken for a walk. It gets to that actual point: the point when I decide I’m not going to go out to just be dragged down by what has become an enemy with an actual personality - nasty, malevolent mud.
Not today, I think - instead we’ll lay a treasure hunt in the garden for the dog, and play some brain games - I’d rather spend three hours teaching him to weave figures of eight through our legs than go out and into that evil brown stuff which will sucker onto the same legs and drag us down.
I can’t imagine myself ever gardening again - what a daft career path to have chosen, I think to myself as the kettle flicks on for another cup of tea and the kindling gets set for the fire, and recipes for best shortbread are studied. Today will be good, but it will be an inside Today, for it’s still dark at 8.15am, and a wind is getting itself up - I want to check the news to see if this wind is going turn into a Storm with a Name, but I remember that for the last two months I haven’t read the news part of the newspaper. I look at the mist which blurs everything out.
Almost in disbelief at the rubbishness of weather, I take a look through the kitchen window to see what predictable chaos is unfolding outside today as I settle in for a lovely cosy day of indoors-ing.
It’s definitely a bit of a mess out there at the moment
Buckets and pots are all gathered in one place, the fences are bare of their summer climbers, and all that can be seen are the leaves of the copper beech tree, interspersed with moulting labrador hair combed and placed for the bluetits who’ll soon come and gather it up for woolly, if a bit whiffy, nest insulation. There’s a scarlet glimpse of a ceramic poppy which made its way here from the Tower of London. Behind that there’s a small wire sculpture of a red rose, given to me by the wife of a Venetian count.
Revealed only in winter, these items carry with them memories and stories, to be told another time. The scene is not the calling card of a garden designer, a garden writer. It’s certainly not a filtered image worthy of being chopped up into a video reel for Instagram - which, following a daily advent calendar of roses which led me back down the path of wasted hours of pointless scrolling - I’m gently weaning myself back away from. Instagram doesn’t want reality, it wants slick videos and AI-generated captions. Reality is all I have to offer.
But then I spot it
Perhaps you already have spotted it too. There’s a glimpse of something which in an instant banishes an illogical hatred of personified mud. A mental switch is flicked.