Mid NOTE #2 How to leave a garden
We hear so much of how to start a garden but what of leaving one? What of the gardens and the views that we must leave behind?
Mid note: Middle notes, also known as heart notes, emerge after the top notes of a scented blend fade. Full-bodied and slow to evaporate, they are the lingering soul of a perfume. That which will be remembered.
‘I thought it would be the magnolia tree that got me. But it was strangely the taller lime tree that stood behind, presiding over our back garden from the neighbour’s patch beyond. The one with the crow’s nest up top, the branch that’s been hanging off for years, and a couple of wood pigeons silhouetted against an ever-changing sky. The one that sways in the wind but would never fall. The one I could see from my bedroom window when I wrote, and looked at in the early hours with babes in arms or through a pandemic dawn. I guess I’m primed to look up not down.’
I wrote these lines back in June 2022, a few months after I had accepted that in order to find hope and happiness in my personal life, I would have to sacrifice home and family stability – and almost as a metaphor for everything that would entail – the garden I had also been nurturing for the past 15 years.
I knew how to make a garden – intuitively, through knowledge gained over the years writing and gardening, and by way of more recent qualifications. There’s also a wealth of advice via books and online about starting a garden, an almost cult celebration of the new, involving design and planting but also the joy and wellbeing gained along the way.
In terms of leaving a garden I had grown to love and loved to grow I felt cast adrift in a heatwave-stricken border of wilting perennials, all of us struggling against a new kind of unseasonal disorder with no blueprint for future success. Looking back it would be true to say that so powerful were the emotions associated with leaving my garden, a space I considered both sanctuary and workplace as a writer of gardens and plants, I perhaps stayed much longer than I should. Looking back through images of the space over nearly two decades of cohabitation, marriage, and motherhood, it’s clear to see why.
Here I accepted an engagement, held a wedding party, raised my children, hosted friends and family, wrote five books and edited countless more, made a herbarium of every plant over a year, and took sanctuary during lockdowns. I gardened for pleasure but also for purpose, a strong contingency of herbs, edibles, and cut and dried flowers weaving their way into beds and borders.
Here I accepted an engagement, held a wedding party, raised my children, hosted friends and family, wrote five books and edited countless more, made a herbarium of every plant over a year, posed for a shoot for Gardens Illustrated in the freezing cold just a few months after the birth of my second child, and took sanctuary during lockdowns. I gardened for pleasure but also for purpose, a strong contingency of herbs, edibles, and cut and dried flowers weaving their way into beds and borders. I found joy in every plant rooted in and every seed saved, the bulbs and corms snuggled into the soil beneath trees following weeks of tulip choices, and the first front garden wildlife pond to grace the neighbourhood – a draw for passers by, enticed in by dragonflies that played among the gentle arcs of the fishing rod grasses. I also cried among the catmint or whatever I might be crouching down next to as the prospect of a happy home life declined.
I say this not for sympathy but rather to illustrate just how complex and interwoven our relationship with a garden might be, especially when led by the illusion of ownership, the safety net of a ‘family home’. It may sound ludicrous to someone who has not been through a divorce, but I had to process the idea of leaving my garden months before I had the courage to leave the actual marriage – perhaps in pursuit of it – for the garden for me was the absolute manifestation of love. A place where we would grow together. Led by nature. I know I am not alone in this sentiment.
The two narratives quickly then became one as the very real stages of divorce grief set in. The denial already dealt with as I wondered how I could practically and emotionally leave, so deeply entrenched that a slew of longterm design and planting decisions were made. The anger I felt at having to leave behind that which I had cherished, played out through a childish refusal to garden for a few months – let nature take its course. The bargaining that ensued where the garden became a battleground for the rights that must be mediated, but also – without tending – more keenly subject to the laws of nature. The depression that came with a no-going-back move to sell the house, followed by the survival-mode acceptance necessary to put our home, and now temporarily neglected garden, on the market.
‘During this time I kept a journal of notes relating to leaving my garden. Some I even posted to myself in the mail, a way of somehow validating the process without publicly sharing how I felt online or as yet in a book. These notes were constantly surprising, revealing details of views or plants I didn’t know held so much value to me.’
During this time I kept a journal of notes relating to leaving my garden. Some I even posted to myself in the mail, a way of somehow validating the process without publicly sharing how I felt online or as yet in a book. These notes were constantly surprising, revealing details of views or plants I didn’t know held so much value to me. The scent and white star-shaped flowers of the jasmine that grew by the back door, the one that I had been clipping in the rain when my ex-husband proposed, but in later years, more so the glee I felt in watching curling stems laden with clouds of blooms ramble up the verandah and over into Laura’s garden next door. I knew that if I left it untamed it would one day need cutting right back to almost start again but it was worth it for the sky show and the encouraging sense of expression and rebellion.
The ‘weeds’ in the cracks between the mismatched paving stones were another one. ‘Take the buttercups out’, I was advised, ‘and the dandelions’, but I never quite had the heart to give them the full farewell. Instead I put them on a kind of gardening leave along with the violets and the herb Robert and the plantain ribwort that I most certainly inadvertently brought in from Wanstead Flats on my boots, but also possibly on purpose.
Standing in the middle of all this pertinent invasion was a much invited magnolia tree unrivalled, in my experience, for its elegant open branches and huge candy pink cup-like blooms. I have countless pictures of my children and their cousins and friends climbing this tree, each year an extra daring step higher into the canopy until only legs or feet are visible between the leathery leaves. There are pictures of me and my ex-husband posing beneath the leaves, taken by a photographer friend Eva who was moving back to Sweden but wanted to capture a part of our garden that somehow she would also be leaving. Such was the backdrop quality of this achingly beautiful specimen, that people would actively ask for an invite over peak blossom time, historically around the Spring Equinox. There would also be rogue blooms in August or September, almost as regular as the first flush but always treated as a magical rarity such was the shared fun of the ‘unexpected’ uplift. The tooth fairy was also known to make a visit, hiding treasure for teeth within the silken petals.
Still, it was not the magnolia tree that actually got me in the end but the view of that lime tree in someone else’s backyard. The view beyond. I mentioned it to a friend and then to another and we began to share stories of the views that we had left behind. Some had gardens, some did not but we all had spaces that we had looked upon that stayed in our memories. Ownership, interestingly, didn’t ultimately factor in.
I then began to cast my net wider to collect the stories of those who had also left their gardens because of divorce but also for other reasons: enforced dis-ownership through financial hardship; the displacement and dislocation of people fleeing unsafe situations or lands; the letting go or passing on of a garden tended by a dearly departed loved one; or simply a relocation to pastures new, from childhood home to first rental, from large garden to small.
‘Between my notes and theirs, I began to construct a much more rounded vision of what it took to leave a garden. The heartbreak and hope that often goes hand in hand in times of upheaval. Collected stories of love and loss providing comfort and validation. The shared experience and the guiding hand. A need to delve deeper into issues around dwelling, placemaking, ownership, loss, and our connection with nature and the land.’
Between my notes and theirs, I began to construct a much more rounded vision of what it took to leave a garden. The heartbreak and hope that often goes hand in hand in times of upheaval. Collected stories of love and loss providing comfort and validation. The shared experience and the guiding hand. A need to delve deeper into issues around dwelling, placemaking, ownership, loss, and our connection with nature and the land.
Leaving a garden had, in many cases, provided a pathway to more communal appreciations of nature. Volunteering in a community garden as a way to still partake in the act of gardening. Taking daily walks in a park or nature reserve. Visiting public gardens to smell the roses or bank design ideas for the future. Keeping a daily nature writing journal. Or in my case, a combination of all the above, plus a new role as the local school gardener one day a week – a job that allowed me to still have a garden, albeit one I shared with nearly 400 children. As thanks for their enthusiasm in keeping me in the gardening game I also raised enough money to build them (and me) a large greenhouse to work in.
Living with my ex for a year while we divorced, the garden now a kind of torturous timeshare making working in my beautiful book-lined, rose-scented studio too painful to bear, I also found much solace in roadside verges, while I sat in my car sobbing away the stresses of consoling worried and confused children, the burden of endless legal and moving home admin, the weight of strained friendships and family relationships that inevitably run parallel with separation, and trying to present a professional public face. Cow parsley and brambles have never been so comforting.
I write this now over a year after I first started noting down my thoughts about how to leave a garden, and over six months since I finally moved house on the Spring Equinox of this year – a fortuitous date for new beginnings. As the synopsis for my book hopefully outlined in its earliest incarnation just after I moved, I have now shifted from uproot to bloom, petals unfurling towards the end of an imagined two-year transition zone. I left my garden way before I physically took my last steps down the garden path for the last time. But I’m not sure I would have made it so quickly without the analogy of leaving a garden and the bittersweet rawness of the ephemerality of the seasons and nature carrying me through.
As I now begin the weaving together of narratives, I’d love to hear from you as well. The views you’ve left behind, the practical ways you’ve brought your garden with you, the ways you’ve found your a nature fix or way back to the land. The collective tales that could help others find their way back to the blooming stage of nature too. Some will make their way into the book, all into a collective body of work that I’ll be sharing into the future via various feeds but also through exhibitions and artworks.
I’ll be touching on the practical side of leaving a garden in further posts and articles, from cuttings and divisions to seed saving and flower drying and pressing, but in the meantime do email me at hello@abotanicalworld.com with your thoughts or to arrange an interview – in person, on the phone, or online. I’m happy to listen and talk. Or leave a note in the comments, which I’ll bravely leave open on this one. It is the stories within, the mid notes that make us who we are.
Welcome to a new series of Mid NOTES a place to share nature-inspired happenings from my botanical world, including articles and books I’m writing or editing, my home garden and school garden, upcoming artworks and exhibitions, and things to look forward to over the coming season. Connect with me on Instagram @sonyapatelellis or email hello@abotanicalworld.com. For books, prints or a full author bio visit www.abotanicalworld.com.