Rituals of maintenance

What holds a life together?

There comes a point every April when the garden can wait no more. In February, we wander out on a dry day to see if anything is poking through the soil. In March, the plum tree comes into flower, leaving the patio slick with fallen blossoms. But, until April, we mostly retreat behind glass. We are garden spectators, waiting for the thaw.

I am drawn to improvised rituals that mark time, that indicate a collective choreography of living. When I lived in the suburbs of Boston, there was always a day in the early spring when the people of New England had visibly had enough. Enough of the wind chill and the ‘wintry mix’ and, worst of all, the ambiguous pile of slush, lingering somewhere between solid and liquid, threatening to destroy a shoe or a hipbone. On the first day the sun could plausibly be imagined to hold some warmth in it, the women of New England would come out in their sundresses, no stockings or thermal tights or parkas made of goose down. It did not matter that it was not actually warm or that, by 4 PM, most of us found ourselves wishing for a cardigan or three. The point was the collective but unspoken agreement to turn over the leaf of a season. There was usually a blizzard after Sundress Day, but the day worked its magic nonetheless, willing us all a little closer to the light.

The seasons in Scotland do not work that way (not least because, at the height of the frosts, there is still that one guy walking to the corner chip shop in shorts). Spring here can neither be willed nor awaited. At some point in April, still donning our thermals, we must simply go outside and begin to unpick whatever winter did to us.

In this Fife garden, April 20th was that day. It is our second spring in this house, and I have spent some of the past year tracking the light. Our garden faces north and is in the shadow of three buildings, meaning whole swaths of soil do not see direct sunlight between October and March. In the alchemy of care gardens require, light and warmth are key ingredients. When they are in short supply, gardening books and accompanying TV programmes start to speak of “challenging conditions,” complete with a furrowed brow.

I grew up in Greece, where you knock over a packet of seeds and wake up to a feast. Before I moved to Scotland, I called Colombia home, where life similarly insists on springing from every crack. There are, of course, Scottish gardens that bathe in abundant light, where the soil warms to a hospitable temperature early in the year. Ours is not one of them.

In our second spring here, I am slowly learning to cherish the grace of a respite. Early in the year, most of the work of life in the garden unfolds away from view. Bulbs grow a root system underground, worms move mulch deeper into the soil. We help these processes along where we can, but we also know to welcome the gift of hibernation. It is the gift of being able to turn our attention elsewhere, of trusting that life will go on, even in the absence of our stewardship.

Come April, the first day back in the garden requires a reacquaintance. Neither Malachy nor I recognise every plant struggling through the surface of the soil, despite having planted most of them ourselves in previous seasons. We vow to keep better records, all the while knowing that, in all likelihood, we will find ourselves in the same spot next year, playing another round of is-this-a-weed. There are other things we have forgotten: the way the extractor fan of the pizza place next door noisily blows burger smoke over our heads, the shuffle of exchanging garden clogs for house slippers every time we need to wash our hands, the trail of muddy fingerprints on a hastily drunk cup of tea. By May, we will be less attuned to these rituals of becoming gardeners again. At this stage in the season, though, we return to the garden almost from memory, and the garden returns us to ourselves.

In defiance of every flouncy daffodil I relentlessly share on Instagram, most of these rituals of care and return are not photogenic. I spent several hours on Saturday scrubbing the greenhouse, clearing moss and mud off the gutters, and wiping last summer’s pests off the windows in the hope that this year’s pelargoniums will breathe with more ease. I relocated living snails and swept away the corpses of dead slugs. I argued with my own Greek upbringing about how my chosen sustainable way to clean the windows—the way that guarantees that the water that runs off to the flowerbed is not full of harmful chemicals—does not really clean. I remembered that the point is to let in a little more light.

Alongside me, Malachy dug and raked and planted sweet peas and Googled when the right time to prune the jasmine is (apparently: last summer). We cut back the ferns to let more light into the root ball, so the new fronds can unfurl. Much of the work of the garden this time of year is the work of maintenance: sanding away chipped paint, laying on new varnish, wiping down windows, clearing space, oiling tools, laying bark chips on paths that washed away, cutting off old growth to make room for the new.

When I used to watch my parents do that work as a child in Greece, I thought that these were mostly aesthetic choices. I assumed that it bothered my mother (as it bothers me) to see the paint peeling off the shed, and so she slapped on a fresh coat to make everything a little more palatable to the eye. I did not know then that the fresh coat of paint protects the timber, that the sanding and varnishing and wiping and washing are all gestures in service of sustaining life.

“I don’t like trimming the hedges,” Eula Biss writes, “but I feel anchored by the chore.” In her book Having and Being Had, she traces how backyards tie us to place and money and capitalism, yes, but they also tie us to time. My body complains more than it used to about my insistence on acrobatically cleaning windows far beyond my reach. I flirted briefly with the idea of paying our neighbourhood window cleaner to rid me of the task, but ultimately, I unfolded the whiny green ladder that overwintered between bags of leafmould, dipped a rag in water, and began.

It is the thread of weeding and feeding and coaxing and pruning—and dying back and wilting and turning to seed—that keeps me returning to the garden. It is that very thread that distinguishes the garden as spectacle, the garden as an outcome, from the garden as a site of life becoming. Wiping spider carcasses off the greenhouse windows is part of the chain of care that links me to this place, this time, this season of death and life. “Maintenance is the tax I pay on this life,” Biss concludes. “And that is why I want to do it by hand, with heavy shears.”

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• For more on ritual, I loved

  Heather Parry
  ’s recent thoughts.

• For more on gardens, I’m slowly working my way through the revival of

  Anne Helen Petersen
  ’s Garden Study.

• I recently talked about care and compost and the joy of loving a place on the Looking North podcast - you can listen here, if you’d like (or wherever you get your podcasts).