The story behind the gardener’s journal
I feel like I have re-discovered a love of words. Had I ever lost it? I’m not sure. So much advice about finding one’s purpose and passion in life says to look back to one’s childhood; you know that quote about who were you before the world told you who you should be? My earliest memories are of putting rose petals in a saucepan of rainwater and calling it perfume, sitting on the big lions at Wisley, and reading.
Always, always reading.
Never writing though, although my best friend Alice and I had a tape recorder and we made recordings of our very own radio show which I could pretend was the precursor to the soon to be released podcast. But writing came much later. Being me, it was never going to be writing for writing’s sake. Not for me the unpublished novel, the starving artist in a garret pursuing art in its truest, purest form. I cut my teeth on academic journal articles, court reports, occasionally turning on the emotion for more casual writing. The odd website content. Do Instagram captions count?
One day, a piece of paper changed this. I had been wanting forever to write a newsletter. In the same way that I wanted to sort out the drawers in the bathroom, lose weight, or learn French so I could visit Prieure D’Orsan. Important, but never urgent. And slightly too inaccessible to reach the top of my to do list.
I was trying to throw away old copies of Country Living. Country Living has never really been my magazine. A little too pastel for me and actually, these issues are from 1997 and I was 17 then and living in a freezing cold cottage on a windswept hill behind a dairy farm, having left home under something of a cloud. I was existing as a farmer’s wife, and farmer’s wives do not read Country Living.
But I digress. Maybe I was meant to be looking through that particular issue, cross legged on the floor in my studio, unable to throw away such a treasure trove of pictures without carefully considering each one. I tore out a picture of a linen apron held up to contain a harvest of apples, pictures of sofas covered in dogs, bracken in bud vases, and almost every tweed jacket I came across. I bloody love tweed. And then I found an article about William Cresswell.
William Cresswell was a gardener at Audley End in 1874 and he wrote a journal. I was absolutely hooked. Each entry was only two or three lines. Mostly factual. Technical. Simple documentation of the meteorological conditions and his daily tasks with hints of life. Passing references to love, money, church. Each entry conjured up a sense of a world that I too know so well. Centuries apart but unchanged. The balance of practical tasks and technical skills of the how and the when. The preoccupation with the weather and its timing. The utter bliss of a day off when you know that your work is done and all the plants have to do is grow.
And that is the story about how, two whole years ago, I started my own diary. I don’t think William Cresswell ever intended his diary to be shared; it was found, by chance, when it simply turned up one day in a London fleamarket. My diary has always been for you. I wanted to tell you (show you?) my world. To share what happens within this garden, this field, this cottage. Sometimes my life, but I hope not too often for that to be the focus. You really can have too much of life I find.
I am going back now and reading then entries over. Now not words on a page but a script to be spoken. There are so many memories in the entries. The day in early June when the fields had been mown and Hugo ran across the windrows, leaping each one like a steeplechaser. Who knew a cocker spaniel could see a stride? Reading the entry back, I can remember the smell and the light of that day.
I am still very much practising and getting to grips with a proper microphone and how to record my voice without also recording my breathing in. Here is a little snippet of my first attempt. I can’t wait to record the whole Gardener’s Year and share it with you.
