“My calm is strong; it is the strongest thing I have. I’ve nurtured it as a precious thing for many years.” Marc Hamer
More from Marc Hamer and his beautiful book later. Meanwhile a story of Easter Saturday here at the allotment.
After I finished planting a few things in what we call the Wollemi Side: a couple of geum, some new clematis and the first few sweet peas of the year; the recently worked on area received a small visitor. A visitor I’m calling a fieldmouse, though it could have been a baby rat for all I know. Anyway, it was a beautiful little creature. In fact it still is, here next to me. As I’m starting to write the little mouse rustles around in the dug over earth seeing what it can find. Could it only speak, and given its obvious confidence, I’m suspecting it might have liked to contribute its own comments to here.
This is a proper bright blue springtime of a day. Unlike the big stormy one that poured down here yesterday. Instead, today’s weather started off and has stayed completely calm. Encouraging me to be out early at the shops round the corner, where I noticed the Penny Lane Asda was displaying lots more than its usual bedding plants along the front of the shop. Which is how come I bought a whole bag-full of what I’ve just been planting.
Now that’s done the little fieldmouse is still chewing away at whatever it’s finding in the soil. Clearly not bothered by the great big human sat next to it. Who’s doing that thinking thing that humans do.
Thinking, even as I wrote that, how maybe this “Story of the Fieldmouse” could be a live kind of a blog post. All thought about and done while the little creature is still burrowing away at the side of me.
Time passes contentedly. One of us chewing, the other one typing.
Before I’m done I said I’d talk about Marc Hamer’s book, where the quotation I’ve put at the top of the post comes from.
The book’s called “Seed To Dust: A Gardener’s Story” and I first found it at the StoryHouse Library in Chester when I was there the other day with Sarah.1 I can’t take books home from there, but it was seeing that quote sent me off to Central Library here in Liverpool the day afterwards to borrow their copy. Surprising myself really by borrowing what’s, on the face of it, a gardening book. Except it isn’t the usual sort of “do this and don’t do that” set of instructions gardening book. I can never got on with those. Instead it’s a proper story about the gardener’s life, as he reflects on it through a year of going about his gardening job. So much my sort of thing then that, credit where it’s due, the half hour of looking at the book in Chester was more than enough encouragement to get me started on this new version of my own writing. Even though my life is so different to his, with his history of homelessness and the other tough times he writes about. And with this allotment being such a contrast to the twelve acre garden he works on. His idea and where he situates his writing and thinking nevertheless intrigued me, and have already got me writing freely again.
And what I’ll go on to write here won’t always be about the allotment itself, I’m sure. But the place will ground and interrupt me. As well as give me all kinds of useful things to do while I’m thinking. Like his big garden, and his shed, and his lifetime of opinions and experience does for Marc Hamer.
I think the book’s a gem then, as well as an inspiration, as you’ve probably gathered by now. I’m about half way through it and will no doubt be wandering around in it some more in future posts. But here’s another quote for today:
“When I have been separated from the land, from the cycles of nature and the weather, working in factories or offices, I have become distanced from my own mortality, from feelings of being human in the world. I’ve become at times like a machine, programmed to produce and to consume, and my behaviour and attitudes became polluted and strange to me.”
Me too. Enough said.
Another thing then, while I’m still here, and since I mentioned “the Wollemi side” of the allotment earlier, I thought I should explain what a “Wollemi is. It’s a plant whose prehistoric existence had been suspected from fossil records but was thought to have become extinct during dinosaur days. Until a few of them were found in some remote gorges of the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales around thirty years ago.2 Sarah first saw a Wollemi displayed in the Amsterdam Botanic Gardens, was fascinated, and ended up getting one for here a few years later, after they began being commercially cloned as one method of their species preservation. And it thrived, did Sarah’s Wollemi, for over a decade. Until about a year back, when it appeared to be dying on us. But as you can see in the photographs it hasn’t. Due to Sarah’s recommendation that if we cut it back hard, almost to the ground, then the plant might begin reviving itself. Which it appears to be doing. The fresh green lower branches that have sprouted since we cut it back last summer suggesting that, it’s ancestors having survived for millions of years in Australia, this one’s going to survive a good few more years with us in Liverpool yet.3
Oh and wait, as I was thinking of packing up to go home just now there’s been a fieldmouse incident.
While I was talking about the Wollemi something, and I hope it wasn’t me, so frightened the fieldmouse that it’s just dived for cover by leaping right across the path from the Wollemi side, where it’s been all this time I’ve been writing, into a large lavender bush . Maybe the little fieldmouse lives in there? I’ll let you know if I see it again. But for now it’s definitely safe.
And that really is all from a mostly contented afternoon here at the allotment. With a bit of life and death excitement at the end.
“Seed To Dust: A Gardener’s Story,” Marc Hamer. Penguin/Random House 2021.
Wollemi Wikipedia link: from which you’ll get proper historic and horticultural details where they won’t use any amateur phrases like my “dinosaur days.” You’ll also see it’s not strictly a pine tree at all.
Near Liverpool you can visit a splendid collection of Wollemi at Ness Gardens on the Wirral.