Growth

Can you write something about plants and growth they asked? You trundle along to these writing groups in the hope of being challenged: trying to get out of your safety zone; writing outside the box. That sort of thing.

Look at a box of plants and I’m depressed. Unlike other people in my family, I’ve never been one for the old green fingers. Give me a house-plant and my heart sinks; my soul descends into the very core of the earth. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. How lovely I say. How kind I gush and secretly know that it won’t see the week out. It’ll be too dry so I over-water it. It wants to be wet so I forget it. It likes the dark so I put it in the kitchen window. I place it in the gloomy hall and it cowers in fright, scared of the dark. I move it around the house when it’s still recovering from the journey here and wanted to stay still. It might want to be talked to but it curls up in embarrassment when I attempt a conversation. Never will it indicate what it wants out of life apart from an overwhelming desire not to reside in my home where nothing survives except dust.

I have an old footstool in the corner of the inappropriately named living room that has been requisitioned to display not mouldy old smelly feet, but beautiful deep red roses. Are they real the folk that don’t know me ask in wonder and envy? They’re not real are they those that do know me ask in shock? Of course they’re not real; close though.

Out in the garden things are different: growth is abundant. I have a fig tree that currently boasts seven figs. No leaves, but seven figs. They bear little resemblance to any figs that I’ve ever seen but I know that this is what they are because…..it’s a fig tree. I also know that by the time the leaves make their appearance, the figs will have gone. They might have blown away in a Dorset summer hurricane or something may have eaten them. What the something might be is anyone’s guess because readers of this blog will know that if there’s one thing that grows in my tiny garden, it’s wildlife. Especially since other nameless Twilight Zone inhabitants had all the trees in the area cut down. My little patch of grass and overgrown bushes are certainly reaping the benefits of the non-eco friendly neighbours. In fact, I’m thinking of opening my garden to the public.

Each day that I look out provides a source of joy and amazement surpassed only by the triple episodes of Judge Judy available on Tuesdays. We’ve had the rat saga, the nesting pigeons and the giant cuckoo attacking its small surrogate starling mother. If you want to know where Britain’s missing sparrows are, look through my patio doors. Want to see the biggest squirrel in the world? Look no further than the one with a six foot tail that hangs off the nut dispenser. Sunday, a Jay arrived; a startling flash of blue investigating a small uninhabited patch of Leylandi. And yesterday? No, of course it wasn’t a Dodo. That was last week. Crawling around the herb filled tubs was David Attenborough.

Of course, there is one thing that grows more prolifically in my garden than in anyone else’s I’ve ever seen. Other people’s rubbish. I am the queen of car boot sales and I have the evidence to prove it: painted pots, old lamps and heaters; hanging things that glisten and catch the sun; strange ornaments that ring and clatter; a herd of miniature elephants; two mirror tiles to offer distorted perspectives; varnished cast-off furniture and battered stone owls. No flowers but I like it. And so does my not-easily pleased granddaughter.

And talking of the brat…. after fifty-seven years, I discover that my bright-green-fingered mother and I do, in fact, have something in common. Six-going-on-thirty year old granddaughter, on considering visits to my house and that of my mother, raises a question of huge philosophical and intellectual importance: ‘why do grandmas cook better dinners than mummies?’