The title of my first published pamphlet, (a chapbook for Hen Run/Grey Hen 2012) is Gardening with my Father and the title poem was my poem of the month in 2017. My dad died when I was 23 and I took up gardening when I retired. So I have gardened without my father for over 20 years. Yet sometimes when the greenhouse is filled with the warm sweet smell of ripening g tomatoes I can feel him with me.
Me question for this month’s blog is what should a gardener do in the presence of climate breakdown? My tentative answer is the same as for a poet, as I wrote in a previous blog: observe, record and adapt.
My allotment has given me a microcosmic view of the effects of climate breakdown. This year it is twenty years since I got the allotment, just a short wheelbarrow push from my house. In that time I have noted warmer winters with less snow and ice and wetter early springs followed by very hot late springs in April and May when the plants are taking off. Gradually every year I have tried to he more prepared to deal with the change.
I have recorded these observations in my allotment notebook but also have done so in a number of poems, some about the allotment gardening specifically and the wonderful characters who inhabit that world, and some about the wider impact of climate breakdown on the city where I live and its surrounding countryside in terms of the storms that we have experienced.
Like all gardeners I am obsessed with the weather but now I watch and adapt accordingly even more closely. I put my greenhouse shading up sooner and harden off my young plants in the shade, have got more dedicated about regularly watering and maintained the gardeners’ age old philosophy which is about taking nature as it comes and embracing its glories at every moment.
To end on a cheerful note: when I took copies of the chapbook to the local tourist information centre they offered to sell some. When I returned a week later I couldn’t find them, only to discover they had put them in the gardening section. They took some persuading that they were poetry books not gardening advice, but now looking back I find the overlap perhaps greater than the distinction. Certainly both activities nourish my creativity even in these dark times.
Poem of the month is The Fruit Grower from the pamphlet and I hope it illustrates for you the delights of allotment gardening both as a hobby and as a community to enjoy.
My reading life
I am reading Karen Solie again very slowly, taking time over each poem and also enjoying 100 Poems to Save the Earth an anthology (Zoe Brigley and Kristain Evans eds., Seren 2021). The first poem, The Creel, by Kathleen Jamie is worth a look. It is published on the Seren blog for World Earth Day 2022.
In prose I am still reading Domination by Alice Roberts, a fascinating archaeological perspective on the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity its wake. I have started on Laurence Rees’s The Nazi Mind (Penguin 2026), which is both illuminating and depressing in equal parts.
My writing life
I have at last managed to get back to my poetry magazine submissions chart and submit to three magazines in the last couple of months but no Hare in the headlights just now. This is time of solid grind with more headlights in the future I hope.
‘til next time…