Whose garden?

The pretty leaves of bindweed have been emerging all along the fringes of the garden.  A few years ago, a resident in our block in Weston had to point it out to me.  I’d no idea what it was.  During my four years away, bindweed never occurred to me.  A few months ago, the neighbour on one side of the house complained that the stuff was encroaching from our front garden into hers.  That was my first spur to action, and my first stint of energetic gardening.

A week ago, the neighbour on the other side told me it was coming under her fence in the back garden, rendering her border useless.  She’d had a man come to poison it, but it kept coming back, so she and her daughter had simply given up.  I was clipping the front hedge on her side as she told me.  Guilt lurks like the subterranean spread of bindweed, in places I’d never expect had I not the cause to look.

So I lifted the paving stones the old man had placed out of sight behind two conifers; a short path to nowhere beyond what he’d intended to be a rockery.  I set to it, edging the spade under each stone, surprised at how freely they yielded.  It felt good to hold the rough weight by the tips of my fingers and swing first one stone, then all six, to stand on edge in a stack.

The exposed soil was alive, flat, compressed, a web of bindweed running across the surface like fat worms in stool.  I set them up as an enemy, just as I had the bramble and hawthorn before them, and raised the spade.

It cut cleanly, efficiently, driven four inches, then pressed on with the same Ecco shoes that had saved my teaching days, pounding the tunnels of Metro de Madrid.  I worked methodically, turning the sod and breaking it up with the blade to sever the roots and expose them to air and light.  I had the thought that I was working against nature, not with it.  A human, cultivating his patch of ground; clawing it back.

I worked my way to a clump of dried bamboo.  It must have held this ground for ten or twenty years at least, and not been touched since my dad had lost the strength or the will.  When I drove the spade in, it was like hitting concrete.  It’s thicket of stems was brittle and dry. 

In a flash, the strategy came.  I snapped the stems off in handfuls and walked them to the tip, then hacked at the base with the edge of the spade, slicing away piece by piece, then driving down underneath, levering and turning till the root began snapping, one piece from another, bringing broken lengths of primaeval tuber up to the light.  I repeated the method, turning over the soil and building a tangled heap of the shattered root.

Piece by piece, it came to the surface, dark, malignant and somehow obscene, from its lair at the heart of the secret web.  I left it to blanche in the sun and moved on, spade slicing into soil, cutting through bindweed, turning each clod and breaking it up.  Paying for each square yard with sweat, skin and blood.

When I leant on the spade and took a drink, I felt some kind of connection; of reclaiming my father’s soil somehow.  I'd never have considered it only a few short months ago.  Discovering nature’s deepest secrets; working with them and taking them on.  I see how contingent all of this is.  How precarious.  How temporary.

My mother occasionally looks through the window.  She wants me to watch the COVID briefings and bulletins.  She has no interest in any of this, except to seek affirmation of its loveliness.  It’s more cultivated and organised, for sure.  It seems I can’t stop myself.  But I can’t help wondering whose garden it is.