What I see

The table in my study is placed in front of the window that looks down onto the kitchen garden, across to the flower field. All against the dramatic backdrop of Pickeridge Hill.

It is a drizzly morning on the last day of October. Usually, the wooded hill would be starting to turn in its colours and be patchy by now. Sharp, acid yellow in some places (the hazels), muddy pink (the cherries), and grey-brown (the ashes).

There is enough beech, my favourite tree, in the woods to make my heart sing, and enough variety to make me think of the perfect tweed, all through the autumn. Soft mottling in the mornings as the sun rises behind it. A landscape of glowing fires as the sun sets facing it in the evening. Not today though.

 

There is a long native hedge between my desk and the orchard. The amelanchiers studded through catch my eye and light up the middle ground. But more directly in my eyeline are the thugs of the native trees, the hawthorns and the Cornus mas. They have burst through the definition of a hedge, and are fast fulfilling their destiny as trees.

They have grown far beyond what I can manage with my battery powered hedge trimmer (I cannot be bothered with any tools more complex than a lawnmower with a petrol engine; they never seem to start and their weight reminds me every time I touch them that the world is designed around men.) and every day that passes, the hedge gets taller, and I feel more powerless.

I am in limbo. The farmer that trims the hedges around the church yard trims it some years, and some years he doesn’t. The farmer is a very important person in the village, one of the few born and bred here, and he is to be treated with deference and respect at all times. He is also a very busy man, and I feel I cannot bother him, that he might roll his eyes at me, and that I should sort this out myself.

 

Ah. The loneliness of the competent woman. The title of my next book.

 

If only I could just ask for help.

 

But if the hedge blocks off the wider view, it brings into sharp relief my kitchen garden, and my studio. Every cloud. My beautiful studio, built by hand by my husband, and now transforming into a potting shed. The windows need painting. I never liked the colour F&B Tanner’s Brown) and they are starting to peel. I don’t know what colour to paint them, so I remain in a state of paralysis of indecision. I resolve daily to email Cassandra Ellis and ask her what she recommends, but I don’t. The windows therefore irritate me whenever I catch my eye.

 

I wonder if I should think about the tones of the terracotta pots that I put on a table in front of the potting shed, a colour combination that I adore, and that makes me smile. Although it irks me that they are on the wrong side of the door. The right, rather than the left, as I look at it from my writing desk. But there is a sink on that side, full of Briza media, and it has become too heavy for me to lift. And I don’t have anywhere to put it anyway, so there it stays. Irking me.

 

I trimmed the bay tree, but I need to sweep up the clippings. The jostaberry is spreading across the path and needs cutting back, because it drenches anyone who passes on wet days.  The damson tree needs a prune too; why are they so difficult to keep tree-shaped? They seem to want to just keep shooting up to the sky in a terribly columnar sort of fashion.

The kitchen garden is due for a rebuild and so I have let it go a little in the last few months. It looked shaggy and wild for a while, and we were happy together in a new, more relaxed regime. Now it looks neglected.

 

What I think others see

A work colleague needs me to do them a favour, to talk her through something on one of my non-working days, and she said that she could come to me if that was easier. I was looking out of the window as she asked, and I saw the garden change when she said it. All the things I thought wrong with it, the scattered bay clippings, the peeling window paint, the overgrown hedge, the tatty chard bed, leapt into sharp relief.

It’s fine, I said. I’ll meet you somewhere for coffee.

 

What others actually see

When I get a little above myself, or I have achieved something that I am slightly smug about. my husband says ‘way to go, Grace’ in a terrible American accent and roars with laughter. This is something Erin of Floret said when she reviewed my book, Grow and Gather, and he still finds it hilarious. The view that I see every day, the view that I am looking out at now, was photographed for the book and forms one of the full page images, somewhere near the beginning. What Erin said about the path was ‘don’t you just want to step into the picture and walk down that little path?’

(I can’t link this video, but it’s in my story highlights on Instagram.)

 

I shared a snapshot of it in on Instagram the other day, and someone (thank you Graham) said that an image of this exact view from spring was his phone wallpaper. There is simply no higher honour.

Tell me I’m not the only one

 

I don’t think I am alone in this. What we see when we look at ourselves, at our bodies, our faces, our hair, our houses, our gardens, is not what anyone else sees. We apply different rules to ourselves than we do to others. It is almost as if we see things with a different set of eyes.

 

In someone else’s garden, I would exclaim at the perfect studio. I would gasp at the beauty of the hill. I would consider the shaggy hedges, and the rampant fruit trees as evidence of almost magical, other-worldly wild beauty. I cannot be sure that I would notice the state of paint at all.

 

In some of the third wave psychotherapies, there is a distinction made between the thinking self, and the observing self.

 

I can think about how the overgrown hedge is a physical embodiment of my hopelessness, my lack of forethought in booking someone with a tractor and some flails, my lack of courage in cornering the farmer after the last Parish council meeting (although who wants to be that person who corners? I do fear turning into Linda Snell). I have let myself down. I have let the garden down through shoddy neglect. I have let you down because you think I am a good gardener and my hedges say I am not.

 

I learned in a mindfulness class to notice thoughts, to not respond, and to just categorise them as what they are.

Mine go something like:

 

Thinking thinking.

Judging judging.

Striving striving.

 

(No, I don’t know why repeating the word makes a difference, but it does. Try it.)

 

In the time that it has taken me to write this, the sun has started to come out. My cleaner, an absolute treasure, has arrived, and I make coffee for us. I climb the stairs to the study with the cup in my hand, and I pull out my chair, the landscape revealing itself as I come to sit again.

 

What if I observe my thinking thinking, judging judging, and see it like gravel being kicked up in the bottom of a pond. A reflex reaction borne of a lifetime of feeling not good enough, of feeling behind. I observe the thoughts, pausing only to send a quick email to chase a quote for a tree surgeon who has a tractor and hedge trimmer, and then let the gravel settle. The water clear.

 

I choose to notice notice. To see what is truly there, not the things that I can berate myself for.

 

I notice the nasturtiums, escaping from the courtyard into the vegetable beds.

 

The yellow crab apples on the ‘Butterball’ tree.

 

A single lime leaf that flutters from the majestic trees at the front of the cottage, over the peak of the thatched roof, and down past my window.

 

The last fat, bright red apple in the tree at the end of the garden. For all the world like something out of a child’s fairy-tale.

 

Birdsong, just audible over the spaniel snoring next to me.

 

Not just nature. I notice the gate at the end of the path that I found in a reclamation yard on a random Tuesday and which fits to absolutely perfectly. The last tepee sticks of the sweet pea seed harvest, still holding up a grey tangle of old vines. A garden that exists at the point of human endeavour and nature doing what it was going to do anyway.

 

So much of gardening is about control. Maybe this is why it is important to do. Because I cannot think of any other activity which is so finely balanced between effort and acceptance.

 

If it feels like hard work, if it feels like you are failing, more observing self, more acceptance. More noticing noticing. Your brain will revolt, and try you bring you back to thinking thinking.

Notice that too.

And then just stare, without judgement, out of the window again.