Round Each New Corner....

The road goes ever on and on, said the Hobbit, and thus it is also with work in the garden.  As you near the end of one stretch of edging, weeding, or pruning, another space presents itself to the eyes and wakens the imagination, as it asks you to attend to its particular needs or potentials.

Spade an edge clear of twisting, burrowing tendrils of grass, making a clean border twixt lawn and garden, and the neat line of fresh soil calls attention to the weeds lurking between favoured plants, or highlights the dying tussocks that now slump down across next winter's daffodils and next spring's irises.

Though the spade in your hand still has more work to do, other tools are calling - hoe, weeder, secateurs, and rake, all crying out for their chance in the sun.  A bare patch of soil is begging for a cutting, seedling or rhizome from some other, overcrowded corner of the garden.  Perhaps the shade that covers that bare patch says violets, or the bright sunlight asks for a daisy or gazania. 

A newly mowed lawn makes even a slightly dishevelled herb or flower bed look like the proverbial sore thumb - though a wind such as the one that galloped through the Blue Mountains last night and this morning will soon cover such distinctions in a carpet of tattered leaves and torn twigs, and the grass rake will stand up eagerly, hoping for employment.  And so the work begins anew - and all the while the words are gathering in an unused corner of your mind, preparing to leap onto the page when you return to your desk.

For me, the routine work of the garden - be that garden a few square metres next to the house, or a few acres of squarely spaced watermelon or pumpkin vines unfurling their first large leaves towards the sun - is a meditative time in which my mind can wander far and wide across memories both past and future, undisturbed by the demands of society. 

Characters long forgotten, or newly created, can act out their parts on the broad stage of our imagination, unfettered by mere reality, while the hoe continues inflicting its routine, repetitive destruction on the weeds that have dared colonise the territories around these favoured plants of mine.