The Calm Place E-Book

Jackie Kirkham

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

A heartfelt ode to the natural world, The Calm Place is Jackie Kirkham’s story of finding meaning in the simplest of places. As the nation enters lockdown, Jackie chronicles a year observing and discovering the tiny ecosystem of her Scottish garden as she relearns how to appreciate and cherish the plants and animals that share her space.

From scheming pigeons to ninja slugs, exuberant flowers to acrobatic sparrows, she finds abundance and wonder in the ordinary. Her reflections offer a profound reminder of the resilience and beauty of life, even in the face of adversity.

The Calm Place captures a moment when everyday life was shattered and so many of us reconsidered our relationship with nature. Rediscovering the natural world amidst the realities of modern life, it invites the reader to slow down and find delight in simple things: solace, connection and hope.

Leseprobe

The Calm Place

Discovering nature in a year like no other

Jackie Kirkham

Wynding Way

Copyright © 2023 by Jackie Kirkham

Cover design by GetCovers

Formatted with Atticus.io

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Jackie Kirkham has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN (paperback) 978-1-7394678-1-4

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-7394678-0-7

Contents

Introduction1.January2.February3.March4.April5.May6.June7.July8.August9.September10.October11.November12.DecemberAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorAuthor note

Introduction

It started as the simplest of ideas. I wanted to write and improve how I describe the seemingly simple, elevating it to something special. I didn’t need to go on a fancy quest or far away, just somewhere nearby and pleasant enough that I knew changed over the year, so I could get better at noticing stuff and writing about it. In my reading life, I’d also found myself drawn to accounts of nature and place and thought one day I might like to add to that canon. So I hatched a plan: a year in my garden, watching it change and grow, and recording it in my notebook. I couldn’t afford a Creative Writing MFA, but this could be the next best thing.

New Year's Day, 2020. My Facebook status? “Happy New Year! May 2020 be infinitely better than 2019 for us all.” When I started this project, I had no idea it would come to mean so much more in the midst of the chaos of, well, 2020.

We’re lucky to have a garden, but it’s not what you’d describe as extensive. Out the back, we have a courtyard shared with four other houses, covered in tarmac and home to a set of washing lines, plus a few pots with plants in varying stages of neglect and a raised bed where we grow a few vegetables every year. Even with my capacity for nerdily noticing minutiae, I would find that hard-going for an entire year. Out the front, a not-quite-enclosed garden which is all ours, about five by six metres total. It’s got a few mature bushes, a tough-as-old-boots clematis, some rampaging ivy, some bird feeders and a scruffy lawn which, however hard I try, can’t help but lower the tone of the neighbourhood. A bit more promising, but whatever I came up with, it was unlikely to be a literary masterpiece with this material. But that was okay—this was for my eyes only, a record of the garden and a record of my hopefully improving eye for detail and description. Nobody else would ever read it.

I’m not an avid or particularly skilled gardener, but when I lived in London I moved to a property whose garden consisted of a concrete patio and a biggish patch of mud which the Housing Association hadn’t quite got round to turfing. Something clicked. The next four years saw me digging, planting, scrounging cuttings, sowing seeds, laying a gravel path, and making compost, and I was hooked. It was never going to win awards anywhere, it was far too chaotic for that. Still, it was my space to learn and grow and breathe, a space to leave behind the stresses of London living, at least for a while. As well as missing my friends when I left London to move to Scotland, leaving that garden was the biggest wrench, and I still feel wistful when I think about it and wonder what it’s like now.

For my first few years after moving from London I didn’t have a garden, not really. My Glasgow tenement flat had a shared back court and I put a few pot plants out there (most of them died), but other than occasionally hanging out my washing, or taking the rubbish out to the bins, I had to make do with the local park (which luckily was magnificent) for my outdoor fix. It was lovely, but not the same.

In time, I made use of a guerrilla garden a few minutes’ walk away: a tiny patch of wasteland between a couple of tenements, which a local Glasgow community group had reclaimed and was using for planting, composting, and providing work experience for clients who were down on their luck. It was an oasis in an area of deprivation, a lovely patch of colour in a vibrant but slightly tatty neighbourhood, and I loved that I could take my old vegetable peelings to their compost heap and give them back to nature. Of course, developers found it eventually, and the group were evicted so a residential home could be built for people with dementia. Something that’s much needed, definitely, but there? Near a main road, no green space at all to sit in, just somewhere to shut them away. I was sad for the garden, and for the new residents. But I’ll always be grateful for those couple of years, which showed so powerfully the difference a tiny bit of green space could make to a neighbourhood, and to the people in it.

A few years later, we moved out of the big city to a much smaller one, Stirling. Ideally, I’d have wanted a bigger garden, but it was the one tiny downside to a host of advantages, and I reasoned a tiny garden was better than nothing. A small front garden probably wouldn’t be the green haven I craved, but it would do for the time being. I hoped it would at least be enough to ease the sense of disconnection between me and the natural world that urban and suburban life seems so good at fostering. So often in our urban areas, building up and out and on top of are prioritised over recognising the abundant life that gives so much pleasure and enriches both us and our natural environment. I’m as inspired as the next person by the plucky plant that forces its way through cracks in the tarmac, and am as liable as the next person to turn it into some trite, inspirational truism. But honestly: there’s something about getting your hands dirty and watching something you tended growing and producing food, or a big old stop-what-you’re-doing-and-look-at-me flower, or a gnarly bark face in an old tree, that just makes my soul soar. I hoped my little garden would be enough.

When I started my project of writing and noticing, the news of a new virus in China was worrying, but not obviously immediately relevant to my life on the other side of the world. I couldn’t not think about it for long though. As the coronavirus spread westwards, we gradually all started waiting for the time when it would arrive in the UK, likely England first and then here in Scotland. Then the rumours started—there would be a lockdown, schools would close, people wouldn’t be able to go to work, and for people like me who worked in the National Health Service, the threat/promise of redeployment to the front line. The collective anxiety was palpable, just below the surface. It was just a matter of time. What impact would this virus have on me, my family, our jobs, our communities? I tried not to think too much about it, to go with the flow, and hope the flow wouldn’t engulf me.

The first couple of months in the garden that year, then, were a mixture of denial about what was going on in the world, and delight at the emerging signs of spring—earlier than I’d noticed them before. Was that because I was taking the time to notice, or was it really earlier because climate change was impacting even this far north? Either way, as those first budding leaves, increased birdsong and activity, and even the first bees started to reveal themselves, I relaxed, breathed, started to learn the patterns and rhythms of the garden, and allowed myself to feel rest and hope.

Come March, denial wasn’t an option any more. As the global pandemic was declared, and the virus named COVID-19, society locked down. Like parents up and down the country, we prepared for home learning with apprehension.

My husband, HD, geared up for full-time working from home, and I got the email telling me that, twenty years after last working as a ward nurse, I was to put my research job on hold and return to the ward. It wasn’t a designated covid ward, but none of us knew if or when we’d be taking covid patients, and what that would mean for us all. We all seemed to go into self-protection mode: heightened anxiety and hypervigilance, feeling our way as policies were revised daily with increased knowledge. At work and in society, we felt like we were under siege.

Added to all this, the reality of trying to home educate six-year-old DreamGirl, and explain what was happening in an age appropriate way when we barely knew ourselves, compounded the anxiety and brought the stress ever more into the foreground. I worried about her education, my inadequacy as a home educator, on top of the stress of work and societal change, fear of contagion, concern for far away family, and a general feeling of powerlessness and lack of control. Like pretty much everyone else, I needed to find somewhere, or some way, to escape, reset, and fill the mental well to enable me to get through this.

The garden—this tiny, insignificant, suburban few square metres—could not have been more different from the news, and it soon became a refuge. Pulsating with energy and purpose and new life, it constantly astounded me with its abundance and simplicity, and its contrast to our other daily reality. It helped clear my head, got me breathing more slowly, noticing not only what I could see but also how I felt. The daily doomscrolling obsession with death and sickness and societal stress came face to face with this tiny patch of thrumming, pulsating, in-your-face life. The fear and guilt and stress and reluctance of home learning was relieved in this place, where we could both learn and relax and get to know the lives with which we shared this space. After the stress and conflict of trying (and often failing) to persuade DreamGirl to just do one more activity, this was the place where we could reconnect, not just with nature but also with each other.

When I started this project, I hoped I would notice little things going on in the garden, and find ways to write about it, enjoying practising the craft of writing. I also hoped that I’d enjoy some moments of peace and quiet, and that the fresh air and sunlight (yes, even in Scotland) would help me feel better, both mentally and physically. I experienced all that and so, so much more.

As the world teetered in the confusion and uncertainty and fear of covid, unstable politicians, climate emergency, ongoing discrimination and conflict, this little postage stamp of ground became an anchor and a haven, as I got to know the characters of the birds and plants and other life that inhabited it. I gained a sense of rootedness in place, home, history, even as the world seemed to shrink.

It also—unexpectedly—unsettled me. It asked me difficult questions about community, about belonging, about privilege, and about my own personal ethics: not, it turned out, always as perfect and ‘woke’ as I’d like to think.

Ultimately, experiencing this same tiny plot of ground over the course of a year like no other taught me the importance of living in the now, of cultivating wonder and gratitude, of treasuring simplicity, of re-evaluating what significance and a life well-lived actually look like. But it also taught me the importance of appreciating how precarious and connected the world is, and how easy it is to exclude and limit true belonging.

At the end of the year, the last thing I wrote in my garden diary was this simple phrase:

I have enough.

It is my hope that this book captures some of that tension and wonder, and shows the amazing complexity of even the tiniest patches of our incredible natural world. I also hope that my voice can play a part in helping everyone, whatever their background or circumstances, discover the beauty all around them, on their doorsteps.

January

Something deeper lies behind the practicalities of learning to notice. As I get older, and see my young daughter growing up into her own person, I feel a strange urge to memorialise this life, at this time, and acknowledge its significance. Not that I have ideas above my station: I know in the cosmic scheme of things my little patch of existence is neither here nor there. But I have practical and emotional significance to my loved ones, including the responsibility to nurture my daughter and encourage her to be all she can be. On top of that, my creativity, the urge to share with others the beauty and bonkersness and awesomeness of this little bit of life, won’t shut up and leave me alone. So here I am, recording the garden year, and hopefully learning and growing as a writer in the process.

Here in the northern reaches, the turn of the year can sometimes be crisp and clear and invigorating and inspirational. More often than not, the constant gloom leads many, including me, along the path of anxiety and fear. Fear that this will be the year that the warmth won’t return, that nothing will ever change, that despite my pretensions I won’t ever amount to much. This feels like one of those years, not helped by a creeping and incessant anxiety about impending environmental and political catastrophe. Maybe writing about my garden is the ultimate indulgence. Fiddling while Rome burns, gazing at my navel while the world goes to hell. Could I—should I—be doing something properly useful, instead of stroking my chin thinking how interesting I am? Sitting in the garden in the midst of this tension between wanting to express and improve my creativity and wondering what the point is of even bothering, I’m not sure I know where to start.

There’s only so much you can fit in a five or six square metre front garden. A scrappy lawn that can comfortably fit three people on camping chairs, although four would be a squeeze. Some mature shrubs and bushes: a big cotoneaster under the front window, some unidentified bushes which, from left to right I refer to throughout this book as the toilet brush hedge, the sparrow hedge, the waxy leaved bush and the smelly bush1 which separate us from the neighbours, and along the ivy-covered front wall a conifer, a ceanothus, and a giant hebe nine or ten feet both tall and wide. Added to that is a big clematis to the left of the front door, some straggly honeysuckle to the right, plus Next Door’s tree. As I can see my neighbour’s tree wherever I sit, and it’s enjoyed by the same birds that hang out in our garden, I consider it an honorary part of our garden too. A few seconds, and you’ve literally seen everything there is to see.

Wondering what to look at this first time out in the garden this year. What to notice, where to start? It’s nearly 3:30 and it’s getting dull already—skies are overcast, albeit with a tinge of pink over to the west which makes me think of Australia, burning even as I write with horrific bush fires over so much of the country. I must remember not only to not moan about Scotland’s weather so much, but to give thanks that, for the most part, it doesn’t try to burn us to oblivion.

It’s so easy to think we’re not linked to the rest of the world. We’re our own little enclave and the only thing that matters is what happens here. This reminder of Australia, where friends face real danger while I sit by my front door indulging myself in a fantasy of becoming a fabulous writer, surprises me with its force. If that’s what a tinge of pink sunlight on a cloud can do, what else is waiting for me here?

Crows cawing overhead, and cheeping from Next Door’s garden—some higher-pitched, some lower. I wish I was one of those people who can identify birds from their songs. The crows and seagulls are easy enough, of course, their cries are so common and well-known, but the other cheeps and chirps and chirrups could be anything. Mostly though, my soundscape is the cars on the nearby main roads, the bleep of the pedestrian crossing, and the smatterings of conversations from people walking past, mixed in with the sound of rustling branches as they’re caught by the breeze.

I always thought this was such a quiet, peaceful road. Near the main road, yes, but set away from the traffic with the brooding cemetery and only a few houses, so we’ve never had to deal with speeding cars or excessive numbers of people. But sitting out here, on a cold, dry winter’s day, it’s anything but peaceful. The birds are so loud, though not actually particularly close. I can see what looks like a sparrow in Next Door’s tree, and another unidentified bird on the roof over the road is yelling its head off. I can see some birds hopping about in the giant hebe too, but they’re too quick for me to be able to tell what they are. A coal tit flies up to the hanging fatballs, its high-pitched call repeated two or three times. Overall there’s a veritable cacophony of different rhythms and pitches, and I find it hard to separate them out or concentrate on one at a time. I expected this exercise in noticing to be mainly about describing what I can see in front of me, but right now I can hardly look at anything because the different rhythms and sounds of the birds are so overwhelming and tricky to identify.

Sometimes I watch the activity in the garden from indoors, through the front window. An occupational hazard of garden-watching is that your very presence puts off many of the garden’s regular visitors from showing up at all, preferring to wait until the coast is clear and then playing and eating and flirting and surviving in peace. Watching from indoors, it’s not long before there’s a ton of activity, with birds coming and going, uninhibited and undistracted by my presence.

But it’s clear that this is not the whole experience. Being separate from the sounds and smells and temperatures and textures makes the visual spectacle abstract and removed, even though it’s only on the other side of the window a few feet away. I make notes about the sparrows hopping and plopping about in the bush, the comings and goings on the bird feeder, the blackbird and robin trading places on a prominent hebe branch, then zooming across the garden to shelter under the cotoneaster when a group of children walk past on the pavement. But it feels like I’m writing one of those shots of text explaining the action in a silent film from a hundred years ago. I don’t think I’ll be doing lots of observation from indoors—suburbia feels unnatural enough, without hiding myself away even more from basic elements and sensations.

Heading towards the end of the month, we’re being overrun by workmen digging up the road right outside the house and garden—laying down new gas pipes, I think. So to the usual background traffic hum, with its regular bass drones from enthusiastic accelerators, is added the racket of reversing vans, beep-beep-beeps, engine revs, juddering pneumatic drills, and shouting, all drowning out the sounds of the birds and the breeze. I hate that noise, it’s become all that I can hear, and the birds are keeping their distance. More man-made ‘improvements’ divorcing us even further from nature. Even in my vaguely (if scrappily) manicured garden, watching nature these last few weeks has shown me just how full of life it is, but this incessant noise drowns it all out. It also occurs to me that, although I’ve lived in towns and cities my entire life, I’ve never really noticed this background noise before, and I’ve always managed to zone it out somehow. But now that I’ve noticed it, it’s like I’ll never be able to get rid of it—it constantly needles and demands my attention and just never goes away.

I’ve always had January pegged as grey and dreich. To be fair, it often is. But the colours in this place… If you’d asked me before this year about the colours in the garden in January, I’d have said mucky green and muddy brown, and grey overhead, but oh my goodness! Up till now, I would have said the sparrow hedge was completely bare, just stems and twigs. Now that I’ve bothered to look close up, it’s actually dotted with tiny blobs of youthful lime-green proto-leaf buds, vividly contrasting with the more sombre dark greens of the waxy-leaved bush and cotoneaster. And the waxy-leaved bush itself has berries, bright red against the deep dark green of the leaves, a welcome splash of colour amongst the gloomy green and brown surrounding it. I honestly can’t remember if that bush has ever had berries before, or if I’ve just not bothered to look or notice before.

Elsewhere, the heather by the front step, below the clematis, has new red and yellow leaf bursts highlighting the green foliage, particularly at the part of the plant nearest the wall. I wonder why some bits of the plant have different colours when it’s all just the one plant? Who knew plain old heather could be so varied?

Even the grass on the lawn has turned out to be much more interesting than I’ve ever given it credit for. Below the bird feeder there’s a weird clump of bright green grass, obviously different to the rest of the grass. A couple of months ago a delivery driver dumped a parcel just behind the feeder, underneath the conifer in the corner, presumably thinking it was more sheltered there than by the door, and he’d bumped into the feeder and knocked out a load of the seeds onto the ground. We didn’t bother picking them up, partly because it was wet and muddy (the ideal place to leave a parcel, then), but mostly because we assumed the birds would hoover them up. I’m glad they didn’t get all of them though, that clump looks much healthier and more vigorous than the rest of the lawn!

Although the lawn is only tiny, right from when we moved here there have been several varieties of grass growing together and looking a bit out of place. There’s ivy creeping along and mixing with the grass too, and near the house is a clump of thicker, faster-growing grass. Along the edges of the beds and round the compost bin it grows long and stalky, where it’s harder to reach with the mower. Moss is starting to move through a lot of it. I don’t mind that, it gives it much more colour and character than a monochrome lawn—or, god forbid, that hideous fake grass that so many people are going for these days. I don’t suppose we’ll win any awards for it any time soon though.

There’s some new life emerging, even in January. A couple of years ago, during the Beast from the East storm that dumped a load of snow on most of the UK, the cordyline I’d planted a few years before had snapped under the weight of the snow. I’d put the snapped off bit in the garden waste bin, but the stump of it I’d left, assuming it would rot down eventually and return to the soil. That was mainly laziness, to be honest, and not having anything else to put in there. But I’ve noticed not one but two baby cordylines emerging from next to the stump, and am pleased to see new life emerging despite my neglect.

The variations in light and colour saturation are infinitely more varied than I’ve ever realised before. One day the sky is a mass of grey clouds through which the sun tries (and mostly fails) to burn through, but then all of a sudden it’ll be a pale, washed-out blue. With the thin, wispy white clouds it looks almost like a blue wash put down before the painter adds the depths of colour and detail. I’ve always said nowhere does blue sky like Scotland, but I usually mean those piercing Saltire blue summer skies. This pale blue, which we’ll all have seen a million times before, feels brand new. And in the evening, the darkening blue becomes more dreamy, and the dark silhouette of the hebe branches and leaves against it yells out to be noticed.

I’d also have told you, if you’d asked about the garden before I started to actively look at what was there, that unless there’s a howling gale going on it’s pretty still. But it turns out I would have been wrong about that too. Looking up at the giant hebe, I can see just the very tips of the branches moving almost imperceptibly with the faintest of breaths. Of course I can’t hear its breath like I can hear my own, but I know that even with last year’s dead blooms still hanging on, it is teeming with life, and right at this very moment is getting on with the simple yet hugely complex job of surviving to see another summer.

The sparrow hedge too I often see shuddering—not the gentle breathing movements like when it’s caught by a breeze, but jerks and judders which indicate there must be some birds hopping about in there somewhere. And sometimes a sparrow or three will suddenly whizz past my head from behind, so close I can feel the breath of their wings.

The cotoneaster, so much chunkier and thicker than the other bushes, is often more still. Having such a thick trunk and branches means it doesn’t bend to the light breezes which brush the other garden plants. Its healthy and shiny green leaves show there’s plenty of life going on there though, despite its outer stillness. It carries the promise of life to come, as in late spring and summer it is always mobbed by bees seemingly deranged by its potent, tiny flowers. Here in January, though, it is still, brooding benevolently, standing firm as it watches over the tiny world of this garden. I like the sound of benevolent brooding. Maybe that’s what this project is all about for me too.

One thing about being in a garden this small, and this close to the street, is that I feel so self-conscious. Partly because I know I look a bit weird. How many other people are sitting out on their own in their front garden on a camping chair at the start of January? Plus because it’s so small, and only takes a few steps to walk the entire length of it, I’m aware of how much of the garden is being taken up by me. I feel out of proportion, like Gulliver in Lilliput. What will the neighbours think?

As well as self-conscious, I also feel insecure in my utter lack of knowledge about this place. I can’t name the birds that come to check out the feeders. Tit? Finch? Note to self: bring the bird book out here next time. Several of the bigger plants could be anything. The names I’ve given to some of the plants (sparrow hedge, waxy-leaved bush, etc) are meaningful to me, but I’m aware that it would be hard for anyone else to picture them if I can’t give them their real name.

Names are such weird things. Ultimately a random collection of letters that form random sounds, yet when they’re known they convey such meaning and reminiscences, a sense of legitimacy and belonging, at least to us. The plants and birds of course have no idea that we call them ivy or sparrow or rose or seagull, so the meaning and sense of belonging and legitimacy that we get from knowing is just a one-sided construct, nothing more. But sitting in the garden barely able to identify anything beyond ivy, rose and sparrow, I feel, not stupid exactly, but not quite belonging. It’s an unsettling feeling. I want to know who and what I’m sharing this space with; I want to know it intimately and familiarly, rather than feel like Jackie No-Clue.

There are some garden secrets I do know though, and I feel a lovely conspiratorial buzz as I see them reappear each year. The clematis, as always this time of year, looks completely dead. No leaves, old woody stems, last year’s remains coiling round the old faithful thick stems. But I know it’ll only be a few weeks more and the leaf buds will appear, followed by hundreds of pregnant bulging buds waiting to burst into pink flower. I always prefer the promise of the buds to the actuality of the flowers, lovely as they and their burst of colour are too. Watching them fill out and start to bulge, the anticipation of spring and new life is exhilarating. It gets me every year.

1. . I’ve since learned that the smelly bush is a choisya (aka Mexican Orange), but the others remain unidentified.

February

This month is starting wet and cold, and I’m feeling self-conscious as I’ve dragged myself out into the rain, wrapped up awkwardly in waterproofs and trying to look natural as I sit on my camping chair under the umbrella, hoping that none of the neighbours will notice. Looking at the garden from beneath an umbrella is an unexpectedly strange experience—I hadn’t realised how accustomed I’d become, in just a few short weeks, to the sky overhead as an integral part of my experience of the garden. The tops of the tall plants too—conifer, hebe, clematis—have suddenly disappeared behind the canvas dome of the umbrella, and my world has shrunk. I can hear bird cheeps in the background, but the predominant sound is the drip of rain on my hood and umbrella. New rhythms to add to the increasingly familiar patterns of birdsong.

There’s a visible lack of birds. Up to now, I’d thought they were getting used to me, and weren’t particularly bothered by my presence. My umbrella isn’t bright, but it is patterned, and so is new and unfamiliar to them. Never mind—this is Scotland, so I’m sure they’ll have plenty of opportunities to get used to it.