To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow. Audrey Hepburn
A square foot, a yard, some acres or less the little bit of soil that runs through your fingers that grounds you to the earth. The place to dig as a child, run through the sprinklers in the summer months. Build a snowman on the rare moments that it snows.
Dig deep and you find treasures hidden amongst the soil, a relic of time long forgotten, a pot that was smashed that may once have held spring flowers to be picked and brought inside to lighten the home or a clay pipe that a farmer would have smoked as he overlooked his crops during the summer months.
Our garden is blank – 32 slabs laid by the builders some top soil and nothing else. The fences and garage walls border the sides and back, the house the front. Nothing stands from previous occupants it’s just there. Outside the french doors waiting for us to build the garden that we want.
An outside room that is yet to be named, will we use it for dining, a kitchen perhaps, to relax and lounge on a summer day. Will it become a bedroom on summer nights for the children as they get older or will we grow things that make it inside to the kitchen, washed in the sink and prepared on the stove, plated up and eaten together as a family?
Six months have passed since we got the keys to the house. We have seen the light change over the canvas for half a year, we have watched the wildlife and pets from the neighbourhood explore the garden and now we are ready to break ground and create our own tomorrow.
With book shelves full of gardening advice, pin boards over spilling with ideas and drawings and notes on bits of paper we’re ready to go
