An awakening

Liz Charnell

There is a moment at the beginning of the year, about this time, when despite the weather, the grey, the cold, the wet and the mud, when us gardeners start to feel into the future. Impossible you may say, and I would entirely agree, and yet every year I feel it.

So, let’s call it an awakening. 

There is both the glee of thinking about the coming growing season, and then the terror of thinking about the coming growing season. It is this mixed blessing that is gardening, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It keeps us on our toes, present to the now that is the mud and the grey, and present to the months ahead, the longer light, the longer days, the warmth of the sun and the full on production of the garden.

As you know we have a new Garden Manager in Emma. She has never ‘grown’ here before. The same can be said for the garden apprentice Mandie, she too has never witnessed the growing season that is Plaw Hatch Garden. I catch myself looking at their faces when they cast their eyes at all they have sown. It has already germinated and is now being planted out in newly prepared beds in tunnels that have felt so neglected over the past few weeks. 

They both have the excitement of the innocent (that is how I see it). It is infectious in a benign way, like the beginnings of a smile when you see the new shoots of bluebells in the forest, or the heads of daffodils pushing up through what you thought was frozen ground. 

We cannot stop it, this growing. As much as we would like to think we are in control we are not…it is determined by forces out of our control and all we are tasked with is to, in many ways, hold its hand like you would a child over uneven ground. If done well we will reap the rewards on our plates and you will taste the difference of something that has been tended and loved from the moment of germination.

And so we awaken, and the new growing season begins.

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