Ranking - Positively Fourth Street

The wonderful thing about this song is not how vicious and heartfelt the words are, nor how compelling that is in itself.  Nor is it the way those words are set against a friendly but ordinary melody.   It's something to do with the hopelessness of a relationship gone utterly to the bad - unfolding and falling to bits before your very eyes.

As I hear it, the song is about how one artist responds, with dislike and arrogance, to the concealed jealousy of another.  That is to say, it is about the unavoidable, but hurtful and diminishing, ranking of creations, and especially the disputatiousness and rancour rendered by that very act.

What a low point to begin a new series of posts.  And yet, something has got my juices flowing once again.  Venom stimulates I suppose.

Let's start with a visit to Le Jardin de Berchigranges in the Vosges.  We slipped it in on our way down to Mondovi', driving -  as we had a lot to bring.  I have been wanting to visit since I read Noel Kingsbury's piece about it being the most beautiful garden in France, or Europe, or the world, something big anyway.  So I went, primed with something alert in me- something like suspicion: maybe jealousy,  maybe contrariness?

Well it's lovely.  And special.  Fairytale prettiness made palatable by wit and sophistication. On a blazingly sunny early April Sunday afternoon there was a full car park and a lot of activity in this distant mountainous outpost.  Motor bikes roared round the curve of the road which embraces the garden and yet once you were inside the row faded away and it felt like a peaceful hub of busy enjoyment.

To add to the pleasure there was a daffodil festival in a nearby town and everyone there was out picking the flowers and bunching them up to sell to each other, despite being mired in the traffic.  The little wild daffodils were everywhere, in all the damp meadows.

The garden was following the mood of the moment and running a daffodil election.  Each variety, and there were hundreds, was displayed singly, on tables in the centre of the garden and visitors were able to vote for their three favourites, ranking them in order.

I became absurdly over-involved, agonising over the twist of a petal, the length and frilliness of a trumpet, elegant under-statement versus sumptuousness.  It all seemed to really matter, for about quarter of an hour.  Justice to the daffodil seemed to require full attention, wise perception and rigorous judgement.

I suppose that's the benefit of ranking things - that it makes you look hard at them and think about them.  But it's like thinking it's reasonable to have a favourite colour - ultimately a childish activity. It's something we learn to lose interest in, preferring eventually to embrace complexity and difference.  At least that's what I like to think, until I find myself caught in the wheels of the same old disorder, exclaiming at a judgement disagreed with or vying with others for my own preferences. Surely we're old enough now to compare and contrast without having to put things into orders? Finally I understand about comparisons being odious - it's taken me this long to really hear that phrase.






Anyway, Berchigranges.  It's full of surprises and hangs together really well.  Partly through being all arranged together in rising tiers on an ampitheatre-like slope, partly through having the same level of intensity thoughout.  By intensity I mean, a smallish scale and high, absurdly high, amounts of care and attention.   It could be fussy, but it's not, it's just intense.

The hedging and plant-sculpting is exquisitely trimmed and maintained.  Like sheared lace at this time of the year before the leaves emerge on the hornbeam.  Especially the boundary hedge, which you can see above.  It must be fairly new as the trunks and main branches are slender and lacy too - just one of many bewildering achievements - do they keep replanting it to achieve that very effect?

Most shapes in the garden are curvy - whirling and interlocking curves on the ground, larger hanging curves, again made of hedging, some coloured.  The drapery of an upside down arc of palest mint green sorbus gave me a shock, it was so clever and so original. Water flows through the garden, grass paths are luminous and scissor-edged - their curves unnaturally sharply-defined and the beds full to the brim with promising plantings.






In these poor photographs we see huge numbers of daffodils but masses of perennials were also emerging, including some terrifyingly invasive types - variegated petasites and knotweed, as well as a fancy equisetum.  But nothing was out of control or escaping beyond its boundaries.  There are hardly any shrubs to invade the middle height  - edging and containment are a significant theme

As ever, nothing is truly natural in a garden.  This one is as if every Alpine, gingerbread cottagey, backswoodsy element were maximised, brushed up and made over.  The wooden constructions, which serve every possible garden purpose, amaze with their prettiness and ingenuity. A large body of completely clear water reflects the sky but it is narrow and, set high in the garden,  not always in view.

I felt there was something strange about the atmosphere which might have been something to do with the uniform scattered intensity and the lack of dominant structures.  A kind of calm came over me, unexpected amongst all the detail.  It was to do with absorption in the closeness and complexity rather than a strong sense of push or pull, from one large feature to another.

It's a garden that plays with your sense of scale.  I was mesmerised and confused, but also quietened - a strange combination.





Odd how restful the completed work of others can be.  This is a garden where the minutes, the months, the years have all been put to their maximum use  The owners must be driven by a perfectionist madness of creativity.  One imagines them whittling, cutting and shaping deep into the wintry nights.

These are the things that are interesting a about a garden - what the makers have chosen to concentrate their efforts on, what they have felt worthwhile - that is the story the garden has to tell and just like any other story you want it to be something you have not heard quite like this before. Ideally, you want it told with wit, grace and clarity.  A little ambiguity doesn't go amiss but it needs to hang together and make sense and Berchigranges succeeds on all those levels.

This garden reflects the owners' interests and their beliefs about what is beautiful and satisfying to see, but it has an added dimension - that of being a garden ready to receive the public, children and all, ready to entertain and engage, a show garden, singing and dancing, new features at every turn. It's quite clear that it demands everything the owners have to give - all their time, their energy, the very sap in their veins.  We can see all it has cost written in the land.

So we've chosen our three best daffodils, we've viewed a delightful, unusual garden, and we've had a chat with one of the makers, Monique, who enquired how I had heard about it,  When I mentioned Kingsbury's name, she looked rueful and gave me the impression that she was a bit worried that I might have come with excessive expectations. This sense of wobbly anxiety is the curse of scoring highly in ratings and brings us back to the song,

It's not a kind song, it's not generous, it's not gracious.  But it is astonishingly complete as a picture of a relationship.  The protagonist has won the competition of talent and achievement, the so-called friend has been surpassed and hates him for it.  The protagonist claims to desire honesty from his friend - but that would amount to a declaration of that self-same jealous hatred. The protagonist does not want the hatred but knows it's there and hates his friend back.

And where can the listener stand in this sad and tortured tale? Reluctant sympathy for the dishonest friend, whose misery and loss of self-confidence can be deduced.  Reluctant agreement with the unkind protagonist, who offers no way forward.  The final, and famous couplet, where the tables are turned, and turned again, floors us all.  The offer to stand in another's shoes is usually an invitation to understand and sympathise, but in this case the protagonist uses the expression to show exactly how remote understanding and sympathy are - for, stood in those shoes "you would know what a drag it is to see you".  How clever to fool the listener, even for a second, into thinking something different might result.  We too jump back, slightly scorched.

Well, it's an old sad story, this one of competitive wins and losses.  And it's not one that can disappear.  I like the song, because it tells a truth and it tells it well. The success of one person should not require the failure of others, but it might, and then the field is open to damage and rancour.

I was surprised at how strongly that simple, perhaps slightly off the cuff judgement of Mr Kingsbury affected my visit to Berchigranges.  In the past the knowledge that, say a Denmans or a Ruston Old Vicarage rank highly in the world of gardens to visit has not seemed to matter particularly - in this case, something slightly different happened, which I found it hard to cast off.  Perhaps it was the words "the most beautiful" lying there like a gauntlet.  One sets out almost determined to prove that that isn't the case.

Ridiculous though, to want gardening to be a bed of roses.  As Dylan shows us, creativity cannot help secreting a little toxicity sometimes - the venom of a distorted longing.

Learning To relinquish - If You See Her Say Hello

The act of letting go, abandoning and relaxing the grip on something we thought we desired seems contrary to our modern world, where energy and achievement have greater purchase on our imaginations. And yet we all know we cannot have everything we want.  We should perhaps learn to exercise the muscles of release at an early age, the better to let go of what we cannot really have.  Or is that sadly defeatist? And how is gardening to help us learn to liberate ourselves from our more unreasonable desires?

Simple really, and everyone who gardens has experience to help them.  You sow a packet of seeds, and admittedly sometimes only three spindly plantlets survive, two of which are chickweed.  But sometimes hundreds emerge, falling over each other, masses of glassy white legs.  As soon as you can, you must prick them out, and you must stop and destroy the remainder when you have enough. It's pointless to have dozens more than you need, yet it is hard to resist the wordless pleas of the dependent little seedlings.  Buck up, pull yourself together and throw what you don't need away.

And gluts.  How dreadful it is to have too many courgettes, too many plums or quantities of lettuce all ready at the same time. Everyone is trying to give the same things away, it's a nightmare of useless abundance.

This year in Italy the trees were bowed with cherries, both cultivated and wild, making good on the promise of the their tall snowy grace earlier in the year, when I marveled at the number and distribution of them throughout the woodlands.  But the endless picking, the cleaning, the stoning, the cooking, the bagging, the freezing!  And there were more, and still more, ripening and glowing seductively among the leaves.  No end to them and the sticky entrapment of red fruit,  Only one solution - extinguish the desire, turn away, turn them off, liberate yourself.

And then there are the plants I have longed for, and often acquired, only to fail with them. They now hover in my mind's eye, beautiful, incorruptible, too good for me.  They are pearls beyond the price I can pay and I renounce them. The list is long, and the cost often includes moist acid soil, excellent drainage, endless precautions against slugs and fiddling with soil amendments.

mertensia

Watsonia

Here are some of them -  mertensia virginica, galax aphylla, cornus canadensis, veratrum, kalmia, corydalis flexuosa, ligularia, iris ensata, trillium, watsonia, enkianthus and delphiniums. Gentiana asclepiadea and lutea, most hostas, tender ferns, celmisias, some of the more complicated salvias. Monardas because of  the mildew, the better kind of phlox, because of the watering required. Eremurus because they are inexplicable.

ligularia dentata 'Desdemona'

Perhaps this is a strange list, perhaps you might feel I have given up on plants I could succeed with. You might be right, but I will not try again, I have made my peace with that, and it is indeed a kind of peace, to choose to pass by.  These are not plants I dislike or think little of.  If I moved to another garden with completely different conditions I suppose I might try some of them once more, but there again hell might freeze over.

My most poignant relinquishment is geum rivale, Leonards variety - those nodding tangerine heads. They are a perfect combination of delicate form and colour, but they can never be mine again.  And I can't even find a photo of them.

The word relinquish is beautiful, offering acceptance and grace along with loss.  I have not succeeded with these plants, and the comfort is, I no longer want to.  In truth I long to relinquish, I relinquish whenever I can, it gives me a small but thrilling sense of control.  I doubt it would ever get out of hand - I'm unlikely to end up with peas in my boots, weighing six stone and a lunatic light in my eyes.  But giving up gracefully, on what you must lose anyway, that seems to me a good skill, one that ought to help with some of the worst trials of life, as well as the smaller nuisances.

There are so many chances to hone your renunciation skills when you take up gardening.  For example; as we all know, too many different plants wreck a scheme and subtract rather than adding to each other.  Dead heading and cutting back involve sacrifice if they are to be effective, plants easily swamp each other, you need to choose and eliminate,  or nature will do it for you.   Practice, practice, sometimes with regret.

Currently I am struggling to hang on to something I decided would be best to deny myself when I first started making my garden in Italy.  From the front of the house, where the main garden is, the view across to the town of Mondovi is something to which your eye is ineluctably drawn.  I decided the garden's theme, on that side of the house anyway, must be exposure and openness, to that view, to the air, to the sun.

The house, the nameless metal structure in front of it and the covered agricultural area below provide shelter, shade and sense of enclosure and that has to be enough.  Simple then, stop right there, you can't plant trees, large shrubs or even very big perennials on that side where all the current planting areas are. Renounce such ideas.  Think twice and let go.

And yet you can imagine what is happening.  I find myself drawn to the framing of views, through bending trunks or pillar like structures.  I fantasize the dappling of the ground with shadows, the walking through, under and out, to clearings hemmed with trees, to hidden places, to kindly shelter. I want what I cannot have and I find that discontent a most uncomfortable, unreasonable sensation, one I must rid myself of, with effort and energy.  A person as fortunate as I should try not to mourn the unlived life, not for long anyway.

I will admit, I have conducted a little sleight of hand, not quite paying attention to what I am pretending I am not doing.  A small magnolia and a little hawthorn have crept into place on the far lower left of the planted area.  A cherry, related to the newly planted concealed orchard directly under the house, has stolen outwards towards the pond area. These won't be obvious in the photographs, even I barely know they are there. I know in my heart that from the upper level, the most used, trees will look like lumpy blocky shrubs, for years and years.  They will have no grace seen from there, they will obscure the view annoyingly, not enhance suggestively, or frame elegantly.  I have given due consideration to planting trees at that highest level, but I have not convinced myself.  Time to leave it alone.

A trip round Great Comp, in Kent. which is a mature garden created in the full heathery conifery pomp of the 60s and 70s, has helped stiffen my resolve, despite these lapses.  I have known it for 30 years, not terribly well, for there was always too much heather and too many conifers, but I find it interesting to see how they are attempting to improve and update it.

It was a garden that depended upon a large number of brick and stone follies - twiddly towers and connected roofless walls, set among the dense evergreen cover.  Now the follies are much diminished for many of the trees have become enormous and bosomy.  They loom hugely against each other, begging to be thinned but the task of selecting and relinquishing such large healthy trees must surely daunt. if not overwhelm.

Now many of the heathers have gone and large areas of the woodland have a unifying cover of geranium endressii, which makes for a rather charming unshowy innocence.

It is the garden proper that struggles to find its purpose and meaning, though perennials and grasses have been inserted to lighten and decorate it.  I rather loved this sort of thing.

But I found the hidden "rooms" exhausting and cluttered.  They were imagined, constructed and planted with such obvious hard work and care, and yet somehow they speak only of that.  I feel sorry and concerned - something is needed to give them fresh life, their ties to meaningful existence are loosening before are very eyes.  Time passes, aspects of culture float into disuse and disrepair, eventually decisions must be made.





Great Comp reminds us that, even in gardens, such a delightfully healing part of life, we are presented with the endless human dilemma of when and how to relinquish, sometimes through destruction or abandonment, something we once thought essential. We spend 50 years acquiring convictions, stuff and connections, and the next 20 or 30 years hanging on, or letting go, bewildered by how things change and in what strange directions.

So the questions that arise are: how do you bring yourself to surrender something that you have grown used to, that forms part of the pattern of your life, something in which, like an old car, you have invested, something for which you are still able to feel flickers of appreciation mixed with a clammy nostalgia.  Something that also arouses feelings of boredom and exhaustion, even entrapment.  Gardening helps - you see the rise and fall of plants and the seasons, time and change embodied. You learn to step in and manage the situation, where you can, and in ways that you wish.

In this song, If You See Her, Say Hello, from the album Blood On The Tracks, Dylan offers us an almost perfect paradigm of a very difficult relinquishment, struggling through a psychodrama of letting go. He works through all the stages of grief, putting words to each one, trying to reach release. Sometimes he seems to force the process beyond where he is ready to go  - the words ring truer as efforts than realities.

The first line, the title, is confident and casual, exactly what one would say if everything was fine at the end of a relationship, but the bright insouciance is a fraud and the song pulls it apart, showing the pain and loss it conceals, bit by bit. The melody goes round and round, the voice and the emotion spirals up as the spirits spiral simultaneously down.  As listeners we hear it all, we understand it completely, we are complimented and included by the emotional complexity.

The protagonist seems most engaged in his struggle to withstand, maturely and coolly, his own distress and the power of memories of happiness and its dissolution.  Reason is pitched against emotion, but neither comes off best.  He's finding out how to give something up, something that hurts, something he cannot quite bear life without.  He practices the words and the attitudes that might help but the loss is real.

Just at the end, as a kind of happy resolution, the door is propped minimally ajar.  The future is not closed, though the renunciation is as complete as it can be.  He suggests that his lost love could always look him up if she has the time.  Such ordinary speech, such a banal idea, but it is another kind of surrendering and a difficult mixture of courage and despair.

In the end we have to practice for relinquishment simply because there is no other way to go.  All those things that are dear to us, they will all go, as surely as the  innocence of our early years, as certainly as our youth, as time itself.  Letting go of others can be hard, even death does not guarantee it.  This song solves nothing, it simply describes  an emotional process, accurately and effortfully, and sometimes that has to be enough.

I'm quite keen on going gentle into that good night, choosing, where I can, the order of the necessary renunciations.  I watch my father and see him moving through that process each and every day,  That has to be the last joy and our final blessing, never to quite shut the door to more time, but stepping forward to meet what must be, managing the unmanageable.

Missing - Nettie Moore

Cancer removed my sister from the world on the second day of the year.  With this post I honour her, hoping not to be misled into a vulgar display, longing rather, to do her and the "distinguished thing" what justice I can. Still I must tell you that in the end when death came it was only dressed up as mercy, in reality a hypocrite, bearing unbearable gifts.

My sister's name was Barbara. I never remember my life without her and she was a pleasure and a joy to me. She was the sunniest person I ever knew, radiating energy. Only 61 years old, beautiful, talented and charismatic.  Funny too, a driven, good-humoured, whole-hearted artist of life.  She loved the sensual reality of things and was certain of her choices, always developing her practical competence.  She was visually alert and penetrating - by that I mean that she looked carefully at the world and perceived the reality in appearances, making sense of what she could see in an unusually thorough way.

Here I show a tiny fraction of an art she practised and took for granted - the art of the living human body, speaking, breathing, moving, resting.  She knew it through and through, more than I ever realised. These pictures and drawings were mostly executed quickly, with no fuss, and packed away, in heaps, exercises merely.  To me, now, they speak of the mysterious glamour of the body and its weight and beauty - they fill my eyes with tears as they fill the flesh with the loving meaning of life.

I have been away from the anguish and the hurly burly of the hospital bed for well over six weeks now and my eyes are still blinking, my brow still furrowing, the days making little real sense.  I'm waiting to come back, but I don't know if I will be able to.  Certainly not as I was.  Gardens and gardening wait for me, but I am not ready to find comfort there yet.  It's the usual thing, one foot in front of the other, all things must pass, hard to believe, hard to bear.

The song that suits me best is Nettie Moore, from the album Modern Times.  Here love and loss are perfectly attuned, seeming to embrace each other over the sadness of the grieving survivor, as the weather swirls around, pushing life along.  The song beats like a heart, on and hopelessly on.

I have a vision of that march, that dark march, in which we must all engage.  My sister is up ahead, gazing wildly back as she slips out of sight, overwhelmed by the press and push of moving humanity. She did not think this would happen, right to the end she was astonished and enraged.  We told each other that it felt surreal, that she was there, having to die and it was the truest word we could find.

Barbara loved gardening, like many she was particularly in tune with vegetable growing, seeing the point of it all and mad to try new things every year.  She was unable to eat most vegetables for the last year of her life, perhaps more.  The losses grew and grew.  Her ability to move reduced, gradually robbing her of every joy in life.

We struggled out to the garden, to smell and touch the apple blossom last spring and it seemed like a promise at that stage, when she was recovering from her second surgery.  I wanted nature and gardening to help her, and stay with her through the terrible journey, but there was the awful flaunting paradox of attachment and loss to be dealt with.  We made three wheelchair trips to see open gardens, and she loved them all.  They inspired her to think about what she would do when she got better, but they could not help her bear what she had to.

 

About a fortnight before she died, I brought Barbara a beautiful and surprisingly large and healthy December rose.  It was a hybrid tea, high-centred and a glorious shameless dark pink.  A perfect specimen, seized from the bottom of an overgrown hedge surrounding a sadly neglected garden which I passed on my daily walk to and from the hospice.  I knew it was meant as a gift for her and watched it greedily for a day or two, then captured it for her at the perfect moment.

That rose was a rapture, she drank its scent and stroked its petals, loved it for three days.  It held together, exhaling perfume, though constantly handled, and she gave it her most considered attention, studying its velvety maroon and rosy interior as though it contained the whole world.  But of course it shriveled and failed, though she loved it to the end.  The word poignant is over-used, metaphors and similes crowd round the dying persons bed. Everything is loaded, nothing is just itself.





Her beautiful face, tilted to the sun.  The loss, to me, of an essential sight, a particular irreplaceable feel to the air.  A whole colour has gone from the world, a beloved voice and a particular, arresting point of view,  She was simple, direct and clear in all her pronouncements, not muddy, or confusing. One was left in no doubt.

And yet, extraordinarily, I find myself confounded by her mystery, now she is gone from me. I cannot make her expression out, and I long to.  I cannot make sense out of the space she leaves - what I knew and what I know don't add up any more. Funny that grief should feel so like confusion.

And that is why this is the right song.  I know it's partly a clever puzzle, a gamer's paradise, where each line in the verses harks back to other songs and other singers, playing with the challenge of accusations of plagiarism.  Some extract the guilt of the murderer from it. To me, the chaos in the verses and the confusion of inconsequential subjects and sudden attacks add up to a world that no longer fits or hangs together.

Against that background, the simple clarity of the repeated central theme, the chorus, shines out unmistakably - the sorrow of the loss of Nettie Moore and the world that has gone black before the protagonist's eyes. The song seems deeply felt and it deals not with the idle partings of love, but the incontrovertible break-up of death.    The depth is partly is the singing - strong, soft, warm and heartfelt, partly it's in the gathering and rising of the chorus's melody which lifts and falls like something nearly airborne, carrying life away.

If you have lost someone vital to you, as we all must, listen to the song and the care in the voice.  It brings a certain comfort to accept that grief can turn the world into such a difficult muddle for all of us.  That phrase, "the river's on the rise" is perfect, implying so much - a coming spring that is almost a threat, a moving, continual flux and yet also a kind of hopeless hope.

Barbara and I used to imagine, with pleasure, that we would be very old ladies together, helping each other about and wearing microscopically varied but similar garments, fussing about what to eat. That's all gone.  I am not alone, not at all, but it feels frighteningly like it sometimes. She was a familiar marvel and an everyday wonder.  The missing will never stop.

Barbara 1955 - 2016

Scylla and Charybdis - Idiot Wind

I arrived in Italy for a necessarily brief break and some fast weeding, only to be met by smashed trees and a series of landslips.  I have been startled, first by the dazzling sunshine, then by the meaningless destruction, snagged branches like broken teeth, strange angular misshapes in the hedgerows, confusion and disorder in the woodlands.  How did this happen?  Has some annoying giant tramped across the land, trailing enormous hands and feet through the vegetation.  How did it all get in such a mess?

A heavy fall of wettish snow in February seems to be the answer, not something that would make more sense, like a weak hurricane, or a strong wind.  The weight broke the branches and then melted away, like a thief in the night.  I'm left astonished that I ever thought I could plant interesting or beautiful trees here.  The ones there were are dying anyway, poor drainage and alternating droughts and swamps leaving them vulnerable.  Walnuts, elms and chestnuts suffer from blights, oaks seem to struggle and fruit trees drown.  Only tall matchwood poplars of the cottonwood variety, silver willows, robinias and ailanthus seem to bounce back.  And hazels of course.  And ramshackle elders.

As a bit of a ramshackle elder myself, I turn to the song of the day with a sense of my own history overwhelming any chance of a fresh , untrammelled hearing.  It's Idiot Wind, from the album Blood On The Tracks, or better, in my view, the version on Hard Rain, sung with controlled vim and relish.

It's one of the best of all songs ever, at least about this sort of thing: grief and loss in prospect and the final failure of love.  And I remember the shifty eyes of the young man who introduced me to it, way back when.  Poor boy, he thought a woman might feel obliged to take it personally.  The meaningless hot air of the chattering beast and so on.  To him, just cause for female offence.  Such deep water, such endless layers of misunderstanding, how could we even begin to straighten it all out?

And so we never did.  I cannot say that his view, which seemed to fit with that of many other men, did not affect me.  It made me nervous of the song and afraid I hadn't understood the meaning of the anger.  It felt like men were receiving it as a secret message about what they really knew about women, but were too evolved to mention.  But I never thought there was any proper misogyny in the song itself, not really, just sadness and rage, the usual human stuff.  Inevitable and thrillingly, economically, thoroughly expounded.  Male or female, you identified with the feelings of the protagonist, not the object of his ire.

Here in Mondovi, in early April, the fierce light of spring shines without pity.  It shows up every detail of what's gone wrong in the garden over the winter.  Like the evidence of a crime, convincing and hopeless.  Much has gone well, and there are things to be learnt from that.  But how quickly I turn to what has failed, to everything that hasn't worked.

I'm a fearful pessimist: my fortunate and relatively pampered life sometimes resolves itself into a series of shocks and alarms, worries which I overestimate and concerns which shatter my equilibrium.  This song reaches across the years with a reminder of misery and anger that one never imagined woud fade and yet has done so.  While there's life, there's hope, they say: above all value life.

So I turn to the small stuff of horticultural hope and ambition.  I am pleased with what has done well though admittedly the winter was never truly cold and I strive to be less disheartened by what hasn't worked.  My transplanted celtis australis, grown from shrivelled scattered berries, found in the parks of Turin, seem to have survived their move, dying back only a little.  I have great hopes they will prove tough and graceful trees. though they grow in a thanklessly droughty position at the top of a bank, still currently running with water making its way downhill.  I plan a delicately shaded woodland area, cyclamen and bulbs at their feet.

A two year old gaura lindheimeri is dead as a doornail, but surrounded by seedlings, themselves stained with purplish red, like holy relics.  I redistribute some, leaving the others in the places they have chosen, for they are likely to do better there and why look for trouble?  Gaura works best as an active, moving annual, or biennial, rather than as a static perennial,  just as long as it will seed for you.  None of these things are as fixed as one might think.

Gaura in July last year, with unknown blue erigeron in front

Many low-growing small-leaved Mediterranean evergreens  with small tough leaves have survived well in the sandy mulch I put down two years ago - there are tracts of micromeria and thyme, rich pickings amongst the oreganos, expansion in the hyssops and varied sages.  Oenothera missouriensis and acualis are breaking through strongly and my slender pale yellow hemerocallis, variously named, are looking happy and much increased.  Peonies, santolina, iris and echinacea have all survived, as of course they tend to do - I have not chosen difficult plants.

In this climate, and under these soil conditions, plants are required that can create an extensive root system, well underground, so that they search out any moisture in summer and recover from the effects of serious cold in winter.   Thrifty growth is what's needed, an almost unimaginably old-fashioned virtue.  I don't want height and overfed expansion, masses of rich leafage, followed by large flowers, then panting expiration and collapse. Summer-dormant perennials would be good, disappearing underground when the heat and drought strikes, but, of those, the oriental poppies hate the drainage problems and I have lost two out of every three.  Dicentras, in the same group, are worth a try, though I have become unreasonably tired of the maudlin bleeding heart. Geranium tuberosum though, that's something I must get hold of, delicate flowers in May followed by complete disappearance till next spring.

In general, plants need a good deep root system to give them a degree of drought-resistance and stability.  Plants that need a lot of dividing cannot be considered stable and have no time to develop deep roots.  So I ought to practise a little resistance myself and avoid those daisies that need frequent division - many asters (now called symphotricums), erigerons and tanacetums.  But I don't, and I can't, they simply give me too much pleasure.

Oenothera missouriensis and Erigeron White Quakeress  - both flower for months.  Here they have just begun, in May.

Years ago, I learnt to divide these daisy relatives in spring rather than autumn, finding they needed to move fast and keep on moving, that a morose winter after splitting spelt death to their simple hearts, but that leaving them alone year after could mean another sort of death by overcrowding of the new shoots.  Not true of the real species asters or the old Michaelmas daisy, ramping around at the back of the border, but those with masses and masses of small  bright daisies, those hybrids with complicated sap-lines like Little Carlow, like Esther, like Erlkonig - they don't have it in them to stay in the same spot and keep at it year after year without human intervention. They reappeared this spring, their shoots crammed together and exhausted-looking, old woody roots exerting a stranglehold, a relationship on the rocks for all to see.

So I have intervened, fearful only that the threat of hot dry early summers and spring division would be mutually incompatible.  All my daisies did well last year, the pale yellow anthemis tinctoria became enormous; erigeron White Quakeress, solidaster Lemore flowered beautifully.  This year they could do with rescuing from self-strangulation, and, not to be sniffed at, I need more plants to cover more ground, so it's time to turn to and do the dividing.

Solidaster Lemore - flowers for ages if dead-headed, from June onwards

I started this in April of course, and since then have had to return to England.  I ripped the plants apart, and replanted them, straight into my unpromising soil, watered them well and walked away.  It felt precarious, balancing the one imperative against the other and steering between opposing forces. All I can hope is that there's enough moisture around for the next month so that the plants can start to grow independently and make it through to flower later in the year.

So my theme is rescuing  a disaster in the making by risking another, trying to find a way between them.  It leads us into the song, which starts completely off the point, with a complaint, followed by a complicated joke about being lucky.  Already we're staggering about, trying to fit apparent contradictions together. Anger and sorrow at a dissolving relationship follow; the song can be seen as an attempt to reconcile snarling and crying, rising above the one on the back of the other.

I remember the same moment of shock as he expresses,  when I too was breaking up, and was faced with what looked like a completely altered mouth and evasive eyes. We've all noticed that, probably, but I can't  think of anyone else who pinpoints that detail, at least in a song.  He has lost his love - lost his love in two ways for he now feels something close to hate, and she has completely changed, even her face looks different.  The dreadful truths of a decomposing relationship are here: scenes of domestic life and an exhausting series of arguments and scenes, all culminating in frantic baroque imagery about holiness and howling wolves.  Reconciliation cannot work, sorrow cannot temper rage, all is lost.

I love the song for the emotional precision of its striking imagery about the way the protagonist feels.  The burning boxcar, the running boards, the cypress trees - that's destruction, flight and sorrow in a couple of phrases. The song is most marvellous for its lengthy elaborated insult, the one that worried the youths of my day, the one about the idiot wind blowing across the world,  out between the teeth of the estranged partner, out of her empty corrupt mouth, saying and meaning nothing of worth and intelligence.  I can't help it, I just love that level of accuracy and care with a metaphor, however corruscating.  Such descriptive diligence should be rewarded with release from the grip of the emotion, but his anger damns him, perhaps even in his own eyes, out of his own mouth.

So finally I return to the damaged trees and landslips, the smashed road edges, the general destruction now disappearing under the rolling waves of green.  To be honest, they are far more like the sentiment of Idiot Wind than any of my complicated notions about oppositional forces and clever steering between them.  That final conciliatory "we're idiots" weighs too little against the devastation and blame described in earlier verses, the sentiment is too effortful, human but flawed.  And that, of course turns out to be the whole point of the song.  We're not talking about anybody getting anything right, it's not a song about things going well, it's a song about an uncontrollable veer in one direction, straight into disaster.

Jagged Edges - Tough Mama

Tough Mama is the first song on the album Planet Waves.  I've never liked it, it seems objectionable to me and I object to it.  But it puzzles me too, I don't have to think it's a great song, but the sense of actual objection ought to be unnecessary, once you've realised that low-level sexism is a simple fact of life. It's more a sense of resistance to physical discomfort.  The song jerks me around - stop jerking me around!  I may be tough, I'm not a sack of potatoes.  Find a rhythm and try sticking to it for more than a phrase - that would be a start.

And another thing.  This meat shaking on her bones.  No one should have to put up with being spoken about like that, as if they were in an abattoir.  It may have a long folky history, but I don't like it.  I reject it.

Discomfort breeds irritability unless you're a very good person.  And I'm uncomfortable and out of sorts, nothing seems easy, every day another jolt, every step another stumble.

And yet my garden here in England is tidy, and improving all the time.  It's full of birds too, eating their heads off.  Spring is on the horizon, this is usually a time of looking forward.  Working in other peoples gardens in the mornings sometimes soothes me for a short time but I can't integrate that  feeling into the general buffeting around me.

Dissatisfaction and discomfort are a problem for those of us who preach the therapeutic comfort of gardens, and garden work.  Winter is always a challenge, no-one likes the way the cold, cold soil strikes through gloves to the fingers, and through the fingers to the bone.  Who could enjoy working braced against the chilly wind and the occasional burst of sleet?  Someone young and cheerful I suppose, someone unworried, with lots to look forward to. 

I usually warm myself up by cheerfully complaining to other people about how hot it gets inside modern clothing.  Bravado can be surprisingly effective as heating.  And it does get warm, you end up with an overheated heart and cold cheeks and forearms.  Chilly legs, uncertain lower back.  Hope and enthusiasm might help too.  I must get some.  It won't be from this song though, which alienates me on nearly every level.

Is it that thing about the muse?  I fear it partly is.  Muses are horrible vapid creatures, balancing on their uneasy pedestals, being inspiring, even in their least febrile forms.  When they're haughty, sultry or tempestuous my irritation at the falsity of their position knows few bounds.  How did we women find ourselves here?  Again?

I know people can inspire other people and I believe an artist who needs a muse will always find one.  Like the child who cuddles a doll made out of a corn cob, or the addict fetishizing dependency, it's all part of the endless resourcefulness of the human brain.

The battle between artist and muse glories in details which quickly become tiresome to those outside of the relationship and here's a song celebrating the toughness of a failed figment of the imagination.   Again I mislay my patience, along with the tools scattered amongst the chilly snowdrops, like my wintry wits, my confidence and my comfort.

A relevant digression here, even in a warm winter you can't avoid the fact that small scale ornamental gardening is compromised in all directions, not being natural enough to be real, not being arty enough to be exciting.  And so we witter on hopefully about its vaunted therapeutic qualities, true, so true - a real truism.  And sometimes we're just fooling ourselves, slamming about with heavy mulches, stabbing at the drenched and stony clay to drag up the yellow roots of nettles, longing for it to be finished.  No therapeutic value there, only the slight self-congratulation that arises from having done enough to permit oneself to stop.

I have been wondering, as I jab irritably about, whether gardening could become part of  mindfulness, and revitalise itself into a mass movement that way.  Drifting, a sense of oneness, opening, healing - these sound like reasonable ways of calming down and reaching for a sort of peace.  But as I scrub around in the dirt, hoicking out the weeds, breaking the roots of peonies as I move them from places that have become shady and overgrown, I have no sense of gentle acceptance.  Struggle and judgements are the order of the day.

I understand you neither judge nor decide anything if you're being mindful, you observe, you permit, you let it all go, successively and continuously.  People say it's hard work, this business of stopping the mind and liberating the self.  I can see it might be.  That kind of therapy is too difficult for me, gnawing at my problems and worries with jagged uneasiness.  I prefer to rush outside and plant something, or rip something up. I banish plants, or I increase them against their own wills and desires.  I rule, I govern.  See how tough I am, a very tough mama, swiping about with my tough words.

Perhaps mindfulness never accompanies the attempt to make something, but only opens the gates, somewhere else, distantly.    

If mindfulness won't work, gardeners have to fall back on some sort of inspiration to get them through the hard times.  But we don't generally have muses, as far as I know, and if we did, they would not be human or female but elemental, though still difficult and capricious.  No songwriter, railing against the unreliability of his own unhelpful muse, has any idea how tough a mama nature can be, along with her evil sisters, time and weather.

Gardeners find it hard to have subjects to be inspired about anyway, because gardens are their own subject matter.  Any meaningfulness they hold arises from a mixture of contrasts and integration, harmoniously developed.  The meat should not shake on their bones.  There should be some sort of rightness.

But it's horribly hard to get it right, and trying harder can sometimes fail worse.  Can you hear me whining?  Try listening to the song, and take in the full range of slightly aggressive, slightly sexualised supplication.  The singer's muse is both relentless and useless, she may have the long night's journey in her eyes, promising, promising, but she's not about to help, you can tell that from the music, which never quite catches up with itself and never finds a way to integrate a beat.

And now for some kind of testy resolution.  Gardening does not always help with the travails of life.  Sometimes you can hunt for peace and a feeling of success there and find only continued disharmony and new kinds of discomfort. The song reminds us that what we would like to rely on doesn't always work.  And it does it, with bitter irony, by being a bit of a dud itself.