Dear Readers, I began to write about Wendell Berry, who died this week, and haven’t had time to finish what I started. I’ll keep working on it and will probably publish it next week.

In the meantime a few photos:

Wendell Berry next week.

Now is the time for digging out the old leafmould and volunteers at Calderstones started work on that even as, the day before, other volunteers began collecting this year’s crop.

At home I collect leaves and put them directly on beds, hoping the worms will work them down, which they do, to a certain extent, but it has been a revelation of the extent of my sandy wormlessness, seeing in which areas (hottest, driest) the leaves stay unincorporated.

At Calderstones we built three one metre square wire cages and are currently emptying the first, and harvesting our long-matured 2024 mould. It looks and smells delightful - slightly leafy, slightly woody and sweet.

How to make:

1. Collect fallen leaves, put in container - could be a used compost bag. We use the wire cages because we have a lot of easily accessible leaves.

2. Water them as they go in.

3. If it’s a bag, pierce in several places with garden fork

4. Wait a year or two or three then dig out and sift.

Leafmould can be made from all sorts of deciduous leaves (but not mixed with evergreen - the waxy coating means they are harder to break down). Rumour (and the RHS) has it that beech leaves are the best but as leafmould is not high in nutrients I assume that is to do with how well they break down rather than what they break down into.

If it is not ‘nutrient’, what’s it for?

Everyone says it is an excellent soil conditioner and I had to look up what is meant by that: it is about the structure of soil rather than the nutrient content. For clay, as at Calderstones, it can help lighten up, and for sand, as at home, it can help put moisture holding properties into the mix.

Rough leafmould (a year old) can be used as a mulch and All Mulch Is Good - covering the sol, blocking light to weed seeds and feeding in organic matter - but well decomposed 2-3 year or older leafmould can also be used to make potting/seed compost.

And this is what I want it for…In the olden days, BGC (Before Garden Centres) gardeners used leafmould to make potting and seed compost, mixing it with (ideally) ‘sandy loam’ and ‘fine grit’. For some reason, I want to do that, too. It feels a bit like home baking, or making your own jam. It might give a taste of something impossible to achieve by mass production. I don’t have ‘sandy loam’ - just sand - but I will mix it with allotment compost ( though how can I ensure weed seeds are obliterated?). I can buy ‘fine grit’.

I’m off to think about how to neutralise those weed seeds and to re-read Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘This Compost’, which finishes:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. 

And to eat some of my first making of Raspberry Jam, from allotment autumn fruiting raspberries. You can’t buy this stuff.

On that first visit, I asked Margaret a question about dear Erigeron Schneewitten, (find it at Beth Chatto), which is still beautiful in her border - though rather less fulsome in mine - and as we spoke we made a short gardener’s contact - that lovely simpatico buzz - that allowed to me to go back to her to ask if she and Neil would become mentors for us at Calderstones. Astonishingly (ask a busy person etc) they agreed, and our garden and people have been in relationship ever since.

Today (weds 12th August) half a dozen volunteer gardeners went over to Norley for a summer private view, taking a picnic lunch along with us.

Some pics from Paula:

Some pictures from Christine:

And finally here’s Hiep, our volunteer from Vietnam, doing a bit of gardening for the Holdings, enjoying the garden and an English village.

‘It’s not like my village,’ he said, as we drove away. ‘But it reminds me of my village.’ Touching his heart, ‘same feeling.’

Hmm, I thought, growing thyme is something I’m not very good at. Need to learn. And then I was thinking about how I’ve been learning how to grow vegetables at Allotment. It’s been seven years now since I got my first plot and it has been a slow process. Very hard! I’m so envious of people who learned at their Grandmother’s knee!

I realised that the learning can’t be merely theoretical - I’ve read a lot of books and watched a lot of videos, and I don’t knock them, they do really help. But it is the practice, year on year that really does it. That’s what you’d get in the experience of the Grandmother, if you had one.

So… Tomatoes - a-ok, those I have more or less learned. Could be better, I’m sure, but I’m happy with what I’ve got so far - this year, Heritage Seed Library, Stoners no 2 and Brook’s Special and the magnificent Wladeks.

This year I’ve done an experiment and put the usual half dozen plants in my tiny greenhouse, and another 6 in the asparagus bed. Greenhouse have been warm and watered, Asparagus Bed have been competing with Asparagus, not watered at all, and in the open air. They seem to have better flavour than the greenhouse toms. Can this be the case?

My experiment is, of course, flawed, in that I didn’t label them properly and some I didn’t label at all, so I can’t be totally sure what is what… but I think it is the outdoor Stoners no 2 that is the utter best. Even better flavour than Wladeks.

So tomatoes - I have learned to grow them. If they were piano, I reckon I’d be grade 3.

Some thing are so easy that you don’t need to learn much - once they are going, courgettes are go-ers, all the grower needs to do is keep the water coming. I’m baking them here, with the tasty flowers on, with very thinly sliced Elephant Garlic (yes, I’ve learned how to grow garlic and had a good crop this year).

And it was baking these courgettes where I needed the thyme. I did have some - and as you can see, I have Sage and Rosemary, which I”ve always been able to grow, no problem… and I have learned to grow Parsley, just to complete the song. But thyme I don’t get right.

Have some at Allotment too and it’s even worse-looking than this. It’s always a bit twiggy, just hard sticks with a few leaves. So there, that’s a resolution, get better at growing thyme.

After starting to write this, I looked around Allotment to see some good, and one not so good, thing. Let me start with that baddie. Regular readers will know I love homemade compost, I love making it, I love producing it, I love using it. Happily (and perhaps, sorry to say, proudly) I laid a 6 cm layer of my Black Gold across an empty space and sowed some Florence Fennel. A couple of weeks later up it popped, thickly germinated. That’s good, that’s brilliant, that’s the value of organic, homemade compost, I thought. Fennel’s always been really hard to germinate in the past. I think we’ve eaten one homegrown bulb. But look here! Massive success!

Yes, when they had grown enough to be distinguishable, I saw they were all tomato seedlings! Those seeds must have gone into last late summer’s heap, as unripened fruit. There are hundreds of them, and I can’t see one Fennel seedling. A lesson: put the Black Gold down. Let its seeds germinate, hoe all the seedlings off, then sow your Fennel.

And what is Good on the Lotty?

The beetroot seemed to take about 4 months to become very small roots - I learned I probably didn’t water them enough earlier in the dry weather. But they have good flavour, and I’m sowing more now, in the hope that I can use my learning and keep them well watered. French beans - had a lot of trouble germinating them this year and in the end only had two plants of Giant Purple. But those two plants are producing massively. There is also a white-flowered bean that has just started producing flowers now.

Until I started growing them I had no idea how wonderful French Beans could be, and I’d encourage anyone with a square metre of ground or a large pot to set up a teepee and grow some next year.

This year I tried to learn how to grow squash. I’ve failed with these in the past, failed to germinate, or failed to successfully grow, failed to crop. I am still not good on keeping track of the names of varieties - must try harder - but this is definitely Hokkaido. I have some others but I’m not sure what they are called. We’ve eaten one of the Hokkaido - roasted with Allotment onions. Delicious. Many more on the vines. Wonderful when learning has such tangible, such edible, results!

Below is Roald Dahl, with (I think, Vanessa Bell in the background, and on the wall down at the bottom, Lady of Shallot. Perhaps Bathsheba is in the mix, too.) We took the colour palette we are trying to develop in the Theatre Garden from these, as they were almost the first things planted, when, as the pandemic began to take hold, The Reader, opening Calderstones Mansion House after it’s £3m restoration, and with no money left for gardening, received a gift of 50 literary roses from David Austin.

As we went into lockdown I heeled them in to this very border, empty then, wondering if they would ever be planted properly. It was raining. I was digging alone, feeling for foolish for caring about roses as life began to lock down. As I stood on the spade I was astonished to find the ground was a thick reddish clay. Gardening at home on almost pure sand I hardly knew how to get the spade in. But, oh, how the roses have loved it.

That was the first donation from David Austin - I wrote to the man himself, explaining our reading mission, our lack of garden funds and our love of ‘the literary’. He responded ‘yes’ and handed my request on to someone who sent me a very large parcel indeed.

A second, equally generous, donation followed in 2025 when we had begun to establish the borders and knew what else we needed. The literary roses are wonderful (look up Emily Bronte, Desdemona) but I soon began to simply want the best colour whatever the name, hence ‘Summer Song’ which even though in place for only a year, is shining out across the lawn from the Nellist border.

It was with great sadness that the gardeners at Calderstones heard the news that David Austin had died. Read what his loving colleagues and family had to say about him here. And in the same week, we welcomed two of the company’s rosarians to our garden and had a terrific morning showing them around, picking their large, rosy brains, and sharing a lovely lunch.

We looked at all our roses one by one and Katie and Nathan gave encouragement and advice (Too many roses on the pergola, move a couple in winter. Can’t believe this garden is only three years old! You are doing well on the wall pruning! Shorten side-shoots to about 4-6 inches. Mary Delaney - prune her all the the way down to get flowers all the way up… ) To sum up most of that advice was : Be bolder with your pruning! And feed them!

We certainly fed out guests - we all thanked volunteer and retired chef Simon for his magnificent version of Ottolenghi’s roast garlic tart, and Nathan asked for the recipe, so there it is in the link.

And much tea was drunk, witness Elaine’s cup:

On behalf of Calderstones Garden and Gardeners, many thanks to David Austin Roses for generous practical support in the form of roses, and truly abundant moral support in the form of wise and friendly encouragement. And it wouldn’t be a David Austin visit if one of them hadn’t jumped in and set to … so well done Nathan:

And we went out Front, too, but I didn’t take any pictures, so here’s one from the end of June:

• Update on the Annuals Bed

Simple report: it is flourishing! Thanks to all who helped create this, and especially to our own ‘Seeds’ Christine.

This is, first off, an extremely long-standing, capacious, willingness to tolerate the imperfect. Or mess, as some of my friends and relations call it. I sometimes look at a room and think ‘Help! There have been burglars!’ and then realise it was me, pulling all those drawers out looking for some item I once put in a safe place. But it is not just my own mess. It is messiness in general. I can stand unhealthy amounts of it. Today at Calderstones found a Geranium Rozanne (no one would call her neat, either) which someone had bunched together with some black garden twine and tied to a support stick.

‘Why has that been done?’ another volunteer asked me.

‘I expect this has been done by a garden volunteer who doesn’t like mess, wants things tidy,’ I replied, cutting the string and removing the stick.

‘It is a bit of a mess,’ said my colleague. ‘Let’s cut it down and it’ll start again.’

And so we did. I made a mental note - I would have left that because, polar opposite of the support-stick-gardener I am, I had hardly noticed the mess Rozanne was making of herself. I’d have walked right past.

Second, I am over-prolific. I do too much. Make too much. Take on too much. I’m seventy now and I’ve had a life of it, and have necessarily learned some self-editing but, as I wrote last week, in garden terms I’m still young. I’m new to it. And I’m always over-proliferating. I gave the example of Very Small Pink Border looking exactly like something I would do.

I promised I would report back on my efforts. Here’s the before:

First, I set to, trimming down the Atriplex Halimus, which I had realised it too big for the spot.

Yes, good to cut it down, but it is a plant that grows to two metres.I can’t keep cuting it off at the waist. I need to replace it with some other grey-leaved evergreen shrub that only reaches 1.00 m or a little over. What can that be? A Cistus is the obvious answer…and I’m looking at Beth Chatto’s Cistus Monspeliensis. Grows to one metre. But what will I do with the Atriplex? Move it to Front Garden where I want more shrubs.

Secondly, you can see that in the ‘Before’ picture, I’ve moved three large pots of Agapanthus round the corner.

It was Patient Logman who suggested moving the Agapanthus away from the path, which was a great idea, immediately giving a feeling of space. I put them out of sight, in front of the big metal pot that holds the Oleander, so that only the handsome blue flowerheads are visible. Pleased with that.

I’m not sure whether the Albizia will thrive or even survive. I choose it to cast gentle shade, but mediterranean as it is, I think it is struggling in the gravel and sand it’s planted into. Watching brief.

Last week I said I would move the Salvia Patens ‘Blue Angel’ (which is in a pot) , and I did that, taking it out of the centre and placing it next to the Fig pot. The other Salvia there, which is in the ground, immediately moved over and stretched out - ah, space!

I had said I would add more of the delightful Clarkia unguicularis, but I took them to Calderstones instead, muttering, edit out, not add in, as I put them in the car. i realised part of my problem is the hoarding instinct - keep that, keep that, you might want it. I’m going to try to address that and get rid of stuff…

And speaking of ‘stuff’, I had to move a lot to create a clear space in front of the edited border. None of that shows in the ‘after’ shot. But here it is:

Hhmm. What shall I do with all this?

Well, first things first, I took the tomatoes to Allotment, where they should have been a month ago. Tomorrow I’m going to plant the Ageratum Red Flint in that white box (of which I have seven more, the rest went to Calderstones.)

But enough of my mess. Here’s the Nellist Border at Calderstones, not yet totally overcome by the proliferation tendency, and not just my own work! Thank goodness for colleagues who know how to say no.

The bottom end, in full south facing sun, is looking parched and thin. We need to grow our shrubs. Water! Mulch! But even so, and despite my wobbly camera work, I think it is looking rather Good in that particular Garden.

I have become me. And I was here all along. There are a handful of new bits, beads and feathers I’ve stuck on, things I’ve learned by experience and others copied from my life-teachers, e.g. how practical and kind Angie always was if you were sick, the food delivered, the book you might fancy; how enthusiastic Brian was about his likes : Battenberg ! Magnificent! But the essential Jane was me and was always there and she still is - that friendly, optimistic, excitable have-a-go mess-maker. Messes of various levels of craziness, not all bad, and sometimes, good stuff. Those astonishing dresses I made from old curtains on my junk-shop Singer treadle sewing machine aged fifteen.

Then came areas of life where I learned the hugely necessary skill of editing myself, editing my efforts, stuff I did. The first years of that, trying to get some ‘O’ levels and ‘A’ levels at the F.E. College, trying to learn to stick at it, learning to get beyond boredom. Jump hoops! They were very hard lessons.

At University, I learned that I had to learn not just to get beyond boredom, not simply to jump hoops but to concentrate and get involved. I copied out a sentence from Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, where Fanny Robin, pregnant and desperate, trying to reach Casterbridge, learns ‘that limitation, and not comprehensiveness, is needed for striking a blow’.

I recognised it, but I struggled to do it. When I started my Ph.D, Brian my esteemed tutor, and eventually lifelong- friend, shocked at the acreage of my first term’s writing, said ‘are you thinking the whole thesis will be about George Eliot?’ No, I said, perplexed - we’d talked about Hardy and Olaf Stapledon, H.G. Wells and Doris Lessing. Well, he said, leaning away from enthusiasm and towards tact, it’s just that this is rather a lot.

I hated cutting even one sentence but with his help I set to on the self-edits.

You can’t do everything. You must put limits on it. Remember Fanny Robin.

I learned it gradually in my studies, and in learning to run a home - my home - I’ve got good at laundry, having clean clothes and regular bed-sheet changing. All self-taught, all my own work. But as soon as it could be afforded, I got myself a cleaner. My nan was a cleaner, and I’ve worked as a cleaner, too, so it was odd to find myself a middle class woman, employing one. But I knew I could not do all that.

Such a decision was easy because I didn’t want to do all work and i didn’t want the chaos of not doing it.

Later, building The Reader, other forms of editing became possible, too, though often that took the form of other people saying patiently or exasperatedly ‘No, we can’t do that…or at least not for three years, Jane.’ And there were hard lessons in that twenty years of building which taught me about my down-side of my tendency to proliferation - the cost of too many ideas, too many projects, too many people getting too many chances. Gradually I did learn some of that. I learned it like you learn not to put your hand in fire.

Planning - I said to a colleague in the early days of The Reader - why? How can you plan when you don’t know what is going to happen? We make a plan, he explained, so that we can make it happen.

What amazing magic is this! I was bowled over by the idea. You can have control over what happens! (You can’t, of course, or if you do, it is only ever partial because life is always surprisingly happening and the unforseens are bowling toward you even now…)

And then I began gardening, a rather sensible old lady (I think?) who had a cleaner and at work could keep her own office pretty tidy … and the same old Jane sprang up, with too many ideas, too many plants, too many possibilities and a massive urge always to add to it. Proliferation you are coming to my town.

In my garden life, I am, as it were, young again, and I don’t seem to have been able to bring the planning lesson I learne through my Ph.D., and work life into action. I thought I had learned it but it doesn’t transfer over. Perhaps that is because I am still learning so much about plants and gardens.

And so to the new Pink Spot, in Back Garden, with the house wall behind, totally south-facing, in the blazing sun, with courtyard style heat-build. I looked at this recently and thought - that looks like something you would make, Jane. There is just too much stuff there. It needs editing.

So let’s have a think about that.

It started with a David Austin rose I admired at Calderstones, ‘Mary Delaney’. It’s most unusual shade of pink, a slight blue-ness to it perhaps? No, that’s too strong. A slight listing towards a very cool shade of near mauve.

I absolutely loved the slightly pointed shape of its petals. And its colour got me leaning favourably towards pink, a colour not much liked previously. I imagined ‘Mary Delaney’ climbing up the back wall of the house and I liked what my mind’s eye saw. So I bought it, bare-root and planted it last October. As the soil is sandy-parched and thin here, I dug a big hole, half a metre square and filled it with composted well-rotted manure. That should get Mary going, I thought.

I say ‘it started’ but I’d already planted Atriplex halimus, a silvery, waxy-leaved shrub

And, for what I had hoped would become light, dappled shade, Albizia julibrissin ‘Ombrella’, a tree I had admired in Spain. Like the Atriplex hamilus, it might do well, in this hot, dry bed.

You see the last two in that first picture, and the rose is there, tied in, but out of sight. I planted the rose with Clematis Princess Diana, a magnificent, strong coloured, lily-flowered-tulip shape. And they have both flowered well.

And in the large metal pot outside the kitchen window is a pink Oleander, from a cutting given me twenty-odd years ago by a gardening friend. But what else is there and why did I so strongly feel ‘needs editing’?

I planted three Ricinus in large pots at the back where the soil gives way to house foundations/concrete. I’m happy with them. Behind the, also in a pot, is a Cordyline australis, which looked good earlier on but is now getting lost behind the Atriplex, which is going to continue to get bigger and is probably too big for that spot. And in addtion, I’ve stuffed in lots of other things - allowed a large self-sown foxglove to establish and flower and fall about, planted a Diascia to hide the pots of the Ricinus ( because it was pink and I had one to hand). But is also too big. And a bit spindly too. Put in a big pot of Salvia patens - the brightest of all blues - grown a from a cutting. Lovely, but hidden. There’s another Salvia in there, a turquoise one, not yet flowering and almost completely hidden. I can’t remember its name. And then down in the jostling mosh-pit, all kinds of elbowy characters who should all have had more space somewhere else - Dianthus chinensis (BQ cheap bench) Amaranthus from seed, salpiglossis from seed, and my lovely new discovery of an annual, Clarkia.

I didn’t say that in the corner by the Garden Room is a fig in pot and behind the pot, over the drain has self-sown Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) I left that in, like the foxglove, because I have trouble getting rid of things that want a chance. But it does crowd the fig and look like something that wasn’t meant to be there.

Plan:

1. Cut back the Atriplex and shape it

2. Take out the Diascia, Foxglove, Mullein

3. Put the Cordyline on a taller stand/box - if it’s going to be there I want to see it

4. Move the Salvia patens, and let the turquoise Salvia have the space

5. Take the Amaranthus -and anything else that is in there - out

6. Plant more Clarkia

Here’s to Fanny Robin and her understanding that ‘that limitation, and not comprehensiveness, is needed for striking a blow.’

Will report back.

I came by to turn on the tap and found two admiring gardeners looking at it with that assessing and acquisitive that is the eye of someone trying to see how the magic trick is done. ‘I have Cosmos envy!’ said one of the women.

Another lady stopped me to ask the name of the lovely dark pink Malva. We admired the green centre together.

Another time it would be worth sowing some of that Malva in big pots to fill the gaps that begin to appear around mid-July. Given the spectators’ joy, we could probably sell them on our plant stall, too.

Listening to a back episode of my favourite garden podcast ( Talking Dirty Trust me, it’s not what it sounds like.) I heard Alan Gray saying that visitors to his garden (East Ruston Old Vicarage) often lose interest in a plant they have admired when he tells them ‘it’s an annual’. That may be a kind of perennial snobbery, or, more generously, it might be that people think, I can’t do that/ haven’t the time/space to raise annuals.

But I’d say have a go… Cosmos, of course, and Tithonia (though my own seem to have come to nothing so far this year) and Snapdragons!

Despite Tithonia, (of which more next week) I’ve had a couple of good successes this year.

Clarkia I found in the Chiltern Seed Catalogue. It was the picture that got me.

I couldn’t quite imagine what it would look like as a flower in the garden, despite being so attracted to the picture above. Was it the bi-colour/ the slightly faded 1940’s print that got me? But what was its form?

As they say in the catalogue, it was easy to germinate, and I took some to Calderstones, and planted some in the new Back Garden ‘pinks’ bed.

There is more to say about this new little bed, but I’ll say it next week.

On to annual no.2, also in Pink Bed: Ricinus

Also from Chiltern seeds, and I got scared of this one. Highly poisonous! (But then so are many garden plants)

12 seeds in a packet and 6 or 7 germinated… I didn’t want that many, and I was afraid to sell them on the Calderstones plant trolley…and afraid to plant them in Calderstones borders…Managed to give one to ‘Seeds’ Christine but the rest have hit the compost.

And yet they are so handsome! I will grow them again and find more places for them in Back Garden. But should they go in public place? Do local authorities ever plant them in parks? Perhaps next year, when we have the fence, they can go in at the back of Calderstones Front Border? Thoughts on that please!

Christine shared some photos of her best annuals:

That blue Ageratum is a stunner/

I’ve grown some Ageratum houstonianum, 'Red Flint', to plant in Front Garden and at Calderstones. Meant to do that today, but it was just too hot, so I had to bring them back home with me. They are just about to open so I’ll see what kind of red they are and report back when - next week - I do tough love look at some of my mistakes this year. You know, learning points. You know, ouch. But leave those ouches til next week.

It was a boiler today and we had to knock off early or pass out. Luckily, Simon had prepared a delicious lunch for us to enjoy under the trees.

But you don’t come here for talk of kitchens. And so, to the bees.

The Echiums in Front Garden are nearly done - towers of seeds now - and so the biennial cycle starts. But I noticed a couple of side-shoots and wondered if they might take as cuttings, and if they did, could I get new Bee Towers for next summer, rather than waiting for the two year seed cycle?

I consulted Chat GPT. I must say it has improved at a tremendous rate since I asked it about lilies in D.H. Lawrence and it helpfully created a false chapter that sounded really like Sons and Lovers but was completely made up. I think that was a year ago.

I was oddly proud to have ‘quite unusual’ axillary shoots, and I realised that they probably began to grow when the plant was tottering badly sideways, before two of us hefted back towards the vertical and propped it up with rebar stakes. Plants often shoot from the main stem if they have fallen sideways.

So I took two cuttings and we wait to see if they take. Interesting.

Chat GTP asked me to report back on what happens.

But as far as bee support goes, when I finally got back to Allotment, (the heat, Old Pal’s final days of illness, more heat then lowness of spirit kept me away) what I found was that the whole plot has been taken over by Borage.

Well, there’s a job of work to get stuck into. That hedge of Borage hides the raspberry bed. Completely, on both sides.

This be the lesson - when you see small Borage seedlings Do Not Say : oh Borage is good for the bees. Say instead, Borage! Out with you!

________________

Good at Calderstones:

And yet more good:

Another week of short rations here, but, dear reader, I know you will be patient. And I have much to write about planning next week.

But in the spirit of not planning (my significant talent) I share the poem I read at Old Pal’s funeral today. You’ll find it here, on the Poetry Foundation Website.

Turn off the road whenever you see the sign.

You need to dig some drainage in, I said, when she moved in and things she planted began to drown, you need to dig in gravel, chippings. But she didn’t want the bother of all that and said she would just keep it as lawn and have some pots.

And so the pots were always important, they were the garden, and she was good at it. A few permanent residents - a clematis and some honeysuckle, hydrangeas and later, roses, a fatsia japonica and then, the summer visitors.

She would find particular favourites - the brown orange bidens returned year after year and purple scaevola, a bedding plant she discovered at Port Sunlight Garden Centre and loved. It has v-shaped flowers, flowers like little birds, arrowheads. There would always be blue lobelia, too and various open-faced, daisy-like flowers, osteospermum, and a fabulous tomato soup red echinacea.

I am taking the pots away, a car bootful at a time. Those I haven’t been able to take yet I’m watering. Inside the house, which I see through the kitchen window, the side patio door, she isn’t there. Everything looks as if she might be there - it is the same house, the same table, the same things on the windowsill.

Friends in the Paradise Lost Shared Reading group sent me this poem - new to me - by Emily Dickinson, which painfully touched the spot of her absence. But we must touch the spot, testing the extent and depth of the bruise.

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity –

I bustled pots of roses into the boot of the car. Some of them are suffering, the heat has been remorseless and in their pots they can’t really stand more than a day or two without watering. I’ve brought them here, to stand in buckets of water in the shade. These are the yellow roses she loved and had gone on an expedition into Cheshire to find at one of the last local rose nurseries.

I thought it was just going to be ‘collecting the pots’ but of course it was more like mourning, what Emily Dickinson calls ‘the sweeping up the heart/putting love away’. Each pot was a pot she had loved and whatever was in that pot was something she had chosen, had been in relation to. I felt both close to and distant from the living hand that had planted the scaevola, had planted a great display of bidens.

The pots are staying with me for a while until Angie’s daughters take any they want, and then I’ll take the rest to Calderstones.

***

And at Calderstones life this week has all been about watering. Watering our pots and anything newly planted - trees, shrubs and even the new annuals bed. But nothing else - the borders and lawn must take their chances. And yet because Calderstones earth holds onto moisture our David Austen Roses are looking magnificent.

We said a fond farewell to Jigdee (Jigdbayar) who has been with us (from Mongolia) since April. And we welcomed a new volunteer, Miranda, whose (Chinese) family live very close to Jigdee’s part of Mongolia!

Front Border is in its height of June glory (but don’t look too closely, lots of weeds) and the David Austin roses here (Gabriel Oak) are beginning to provide the thing we need to work on - the repetitions, the rhythm.

Get in the shade, readers!

Readers here may remember her as Old Pal.

I have been so glad of the garden as a place of distraction and refuge and sheer busy-ness, as the blow of her going rained and rained. There would come a moment when I would be distracted enough to forget about the loss and then, you turn and - blow, winds and crack your cheeks! - it hits you again. Then the poems I have, many times, shared with her, or she with me, slam into my mind.

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

                                                           Wordsworth

I was thinking how painful it is, the losing, and thinking about the talk of gardening being good for mental health but I don’t think what I’m experiencing here is mental.

I know we all use the phrase and we all have some usefully woolly shared understanding of what we more or less mean by it, and that a huge breadth of conditions and feelings - from a bit down to complex psychosis - are covered by it. But it doesn’t feel like the right word to me.

In the first days after the death it felt like a deep bruise, an exhausted battery. And yet I had to have something to do so I said to myself, ‘Sort those bloody pots out! You can put pots in order.’

I sorted them rather slowly and I then brushed the dirt from the garden room floor. And as I brushed I thought of George Herbert’s poem, a poem we would sing on car journeys to gardens, remembering our (very different) school assemblies. Neither of us Christians, we loved to sing the old Hymns Ancient and Modern of our childhoods.

Teach me, my God and King,
         In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
         To do it as for Thee.

         Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.

         A man that looks on glass,
         On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
         And then the heav'n espy.

         All may of Thee partake:
         Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—
         Will not grow bright and clean.

         A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th' action fine.

         This is the famous stone
         That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
         Cannot for less be told.

                                           George Herbert

Remembering this poem (and asking myself who or what am I brushing this floor for? if i don’t believe in God, yet there does seem a for) made me realise that my state was one not of mental health or ill-health, but of spirit. Something has gone and my spirit is bruised, shocked. I am brushing this floor, sorting these pots, to achieve a rhythmic action that induces a kind of equanimity. As an adult paces with a desperate middle of the night baby. The shuddering gradually subsides.

I found myself also distracted into joy; ‘Surprised by joy’, as Wordsworth says.

Look at the rose, Mary Delaney.

I planted her in the autumn, and here she is now flowering against the warm south-facing wall. She’ll be really wonderful next year, and is growing so well with Clematis Princess Diana - and then - slam - I first saw this clematis on an Old Pal Outing, in a National Garden Scheme garden that she had spotted and pencilled in. Lots of lovely things we enjoyed in that garden, but C.Princess Diana and a trailing geranium ‘Choun Cho’ especially. ‘Look how they are doing,’ I would tell her.

But she is not here to tell.

And so the spirit level tips and I’m down again, the blow of her going - it’s raining again, the clouds have blown in - and I’m undistracted from my grief again, feeling it.

Just take it, Jane.

Back to pot-sorting, cleaning out the shed. These are self-punishing jobs, it can feel, but it’s not me I am punishing. It is my enemies, the universe, mortality. Off to the dump with you, you who have clogged up the shed for so long.

Then I sat in the shade and had a cup of tea and the winds quietened and the rain blew over and I thought how she would admire the new pot on the new path. She saw it in position, empty, a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s planted.

The next day the clouds were back and i felt heavy and slow. I said to myself, ‘Move all these things that are hanging around waiting to be planted! Plant them!’ And I spent hours planting and planting. The soil was dry and parched. I need bloody desert plants, I told myself, digging angry holes in the sand.

In my furious-spirit-ness I sliced through three in-soil dahlias that I had forgotten about and which weren’t yet above ground - but when I looked closely they were above ground. I wasn’t looking properly. Agh, mess.

But keep planting, Jane, get all this stuff planted, FFS. I had about twenty cuttings of Salvia Royal Bumble - I had been growing them to take for sale at Calderstones but instead I planted them all in my got-to-plant-frenzy. I’m going to have a mass of Royal Bumble - a plant I first saw with Old Pal. We bought it at the plant sale in Burton. We loved the colour and cut of its gib.

I was tired at the end of Frantic Planting Day and slept well for the first time since she went into hospital.

The next morning delicious June sunrise set Rosa ‘Lady of Shallot’ afire, and I thought, Angie would have been glad of this day, would have been glad to see The Lady looking so spectacular.

A lot of her Ph.D was about Tennyson. I remembered ‘Crossing The Bar’, I remembered, ‘Tears, Idle Tears.’ I remembered phrases from ‘In Memoriam’. Phrases like ‘and yet we trust/that somehow good…’

Do we? Do we trust? Well she did. I let myself be calmed by the light on the rose, by the little eager faces of Eschscholzia caespitosa, ‘Sundew’

A kind and spirited correspondent wrote me to say ‘To life! Celebrate your long friendship with Angie!’

And I wanted to. So I deadheaded, painstakingly, in a way I never have before, the Bidens. Because Angie loved Bidens and I want it to bloom and bloom.

Then I went in and lay down on the couch and went to sleep. ‘Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care’ as Macbeth says. In the middle of the day. It felt good.

In the afternoon I decided to repot Hosta ‘Empress Wu’ She wasn’t looking as strong as she had in previous years, and maybe she needed more space. But the pot was rounded, slightly curved at the top and I couldn’t get her out, so in the end after what seemed hours of carefully and pointlessy loosening the soil round the edge, I threw that pot down hard on the brick path and smashed it. And that was momentarily extremely satisfying. And then I calmed my boiling spirit by gently splitting and repotting the Empress. So now she is two.

The next day, with the Empress in mind, I took on re-potting the fig tree. That was another job that required a fight and I was glad to have it. But it was a much bigger pot and no way could I have hurled it anywhere, and anyway it is a pot much admired by Other Half, so it had to be trowel work and shaking, trowel-work, loosening and trying again. Other Half helped. Think Chuckle Brothers with a Fig Tree.

Mind your back! I’m minding!

We forgot about our grief.

When we got it out, I was filthy with soil and my arms were aching but my spirit was up. So I went to B and Q to get some topsoil because the Fig’s new home is an enormous steel drum which will take some filling. On the way I played Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ and began to cry and had to pull over.

In another world, darlin'
In another world
In another time
Got a home on high
Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
In another land
So far away
So far away
                                       Van Morrison

Had the kind of laugh in BQ that I could have told Old Pal about with incompetent funnyman on the orders desk - ah sorry love, not the golden gravel? What’s your number again? Ends in a 07 does it? Not double 07? Also got two trays of trailing verbena from the cheap stall for £1 each. Drove home. Played Leonard Cohen ‘So Long Marianne’ and sang along at the top of my voice. No crying.

Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again

                             Leonard Cohen

Got home.

Filled pot.

Got fig in.

Planted all the trailing verbena on top.

Knackered.

Spirits - for now - level.

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