Gardening

For the past three days I have surrounded myself with growth and life. On Friday I spent a fruitful morning in the company of Mrs Sunday Writer tilling the soil on our allotment at my local Quaker Meeting House, planting first and second early potatoes. On Saturday we visited a plant stockist to collect some new residents for our container garden, and today we visited a rare plant fair, where I picked up some new herbs for my herb planter, as well as some seeds for the medicinal & edible herb plot on the allotment.

Image used with kind permission,
© 2010 Julia Anderson.

I haven’t written fiction in months. [Fiction] Friday and #FridayFlash pass me by on a weekly basis. I have a WIP that remains “IP”, with very little “W”.

But I have been thinking. And I have been reading. And I have been imagining.

When you visit a garden at the height of the growing season, you see a riot of colours, full blossoms, ripened fruits, a cornucopia of life and growth. But visit in the winter, or at the very start of spring. Twigs. Bare earth. The garden is dormant.

To achieve the fruits of summer, you must till the earth, you must make the ground fertile, and you must plant the seeds.

Thought, consideration, reading. These are like the fertiliser and the seeds. The garden of bare white pages on my desk may look empty, but I have not been absent, as I had thought I was. I have merely been dormant. The ground has been worked over, the seeds have been planted.

Now is the time to start looking for green shoots.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin…