We - well, you mostly - created an oasis in our back garden. I helped but in a random way, buying plants here and there but you did the digging, the planting, the tending.
I took advantage of the council's offer of a compost bin. Twenty years of good, rich fertiliser from vegetable peelings. Twenty years of decayed soggy lettuce, sprouting spuds, wet parsnips and wizened carrots. It made me feel less guilty for over buying and not producing as many home cooked meals as intended.
You made the little pond for frogs, filling it with tadpols and oxygenating plants with the help of interested friends.
We left the self seeding Elder, which was little more than a bush when we moved in, to grow tall. You hung seeds, peanuts and lard cakes for the birds on its boughs.
I saw some gold finches in the clough and a colleague told me how nyger seed would attract them to the garden. Flashes of red, and yellow jostling for places on the feeder. Their high pitched musical twittering a sweet addition and, in the evening, the blackbird's resonant song.
We - you mostly - created this green space between the high laurels, planted by a former owner, a miserable bugger by all accounts, who wanted to screen out his neighbours and, in doing so, gifted us this private space, this little oasis visited by hedgehogs and squirrels.
Somewhere to chill. Somewhere to forget the petty conflicts of family or work and the state of the nation with its never ending meaness, injustice and scandals
Somewhere to screen out thoughts of people being bombarded by bombs thousands of miles away. People whose oases have been ripped up, ripped apart, ripped away.
Destroyed.
Thousands of people who have lost those they love. Injured, uncertain. afraid; who have to start over with nothing.
Joan Bailey
