Tag Archives: keats

The Turn of the Year

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAIt’s New Year’s Eve – a time to look forward to the clean slate of a fresh 12 months of hope, promises and ambitions.  But it is also a time to reflect and it is in that mood that I am spending this year-end.

2012 was a year in which we as a family put paid to the shadow of major illness, so far as Claire is concerned, with  her final course of chemotherapy and stem cell transplant to guard against recurrence of AITL non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  And it was not long after the completion of her treatment and while she was in recovery that I started this blog.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI have said before that I feel closer to the memories of my mother when I am gardening and to some extent I suppose there is an element of the Keatsian search for the eternal.  I have a heightened sense of the turning of the year and of the natural world about me.  I am but a small part in the great scheme of things and it all helps to keep my sense of perspective in other aspects of life.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAKeats looked for eternity in the song of the nightingale and the repetition of the seasons.  The trees in the garden or field have a air of permanence about them, but that is coloured by the brooding menace of ash dieback on the horizon.

For Keats perhaps eternity culd be found in the bold robin getting under foot as I dig; the bright crisp morning when we get up to let the chickens out; or, more pertinently today, the drenching rain that puts paid to any serious work outside and leaves the hens lurking in the undergrowth like refugees.

The rain seems to have been falling for an eternity, though we were lucky with our Christmas break in Arran – of which more in a subsequent post, hopefully – but when the rain stops I will be out there to get stuff going.  It won’t be long before spring will be with us and I will want to be ready for it all – with good planting plans and a well prepared garden.  Even now, there are shoots coming up in the tubs by the door, and with the crap weather at least I have my seed catalogues to divert me with thoughts of the long hot summer to come, and no worries about droughts…

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Process or Results

“A dreaded Sunny Day, So let’s go where we’re happy…Keats and Yeats are on your side”.

Anyone for Pimms?

So sang Morrissey with The Smiths. I like the line (as I like the Smiths) but I have had to carefully edit the Smiths lyrics to take out all the pathos and depression.

Likewise one has to do the same this summer: carefully edit out the dreadful rainy days and think only of the sunny ones. And at last we have had just that: a sunny fortnight with which we have been blessed with sunshine.  It was perfectly timed to coincide with our summer celebration for our Silver Wedding which we had ambitiously planned to have in the garden.  Two days prior to the event, the rain stopped, the sun came out and we were able to get the garden looking spick and span.  The edges were done, the lawn mown, the mole hills squashed and rabbit-proofing chicken wire taken down from around the cosmos and Nicotiana.

Beer tent with two barrels of Palmers Ales

It was a fab evening with great friends and family.  It was, to a great extent, what I had been working towards with the garden so I was pleased with the results, though a few more hours of sunshine might have got the potted sweet peas blooming and a little more colour around the garden.

To a great extent, though, gardening is about the process as much as the result.  The repetition of planting, watering, hoeing, weeding and general maintenance becomes an end in itself.  The final moment when you pick your flowers or vegetables is merely the ultimate stage in a succession of worthwhile activities.

Tables and chairs – heavy lifting instructions required

Ultimately, though, the garden is there to be enjoyed, and the sunshine gives us the opportunity to relax and take in the sights, and sounds.  So my obligatory morning coffee is taken on the grass, sitting on the wrought iron seats (purloined from my brother’s former bar – and built to be so heavy you would need a gold medal in weightlifting to be able to draw it to the table, let alone throw it across a crowded bar).

For me, making coffee has become a ritual in which process adds to the result.  I use coffee beans – from my good friends at Azorie Blue – which I grind freshly for each cup with my Krupps grinder.  I then make an espresso with our neat new Aero Press.  While I am doing this I have put the milk in the microwave to heat, then I froth that and add to my espresso for the perfect latte.  I have taken some stick from one of my more cynical brothers for the lengths to which I go for a home brewed latte, but it makes me happy and I definitely get a better cup of coffee.

And it tastes even better in the sunshine in my garden.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; coffee in the garden is a joy for now.

A break from gardening…