Dear,
I haven’t dedicated much time to the garden. Life has a way of disrupting even the most established of routines. Just before the Christmas holiday, I caught a respiratory infection. I coughed so much that I bruised my rib. Can you believe that’s even possible? I spent over five weeks in bed. Back on my feet again; I’m catching up with work and home renovations. Sadly, with a backlog of things to do, the plants in my allotment have been left to fend for themselves.
Nonetheless, I’ve experienced glimpses of my garden just outside the house. I don’t mean my allotment in the literal sense, but things that remind me of it or things my garden has attuned me to. Jackdaws are nesting in a broken awning under the roof of a neighbouring apartment. From my bedroom window, I watch them fly across the back gardens and warm themselves on the chimney pipes. I can also see them from my front kitchen window, where one in particular likes to sit like a crowning ornament on the peak of the opposite building. In total, I think there are seven or eight. But I can’t say for sure because they are never in the same place at one time. They’re a raucous gang and are always up to something. Darting from here to there, they caw back and forth to each other.
Actually, maybe only crows caw. Jackdaws have a slightly higher pitch and are more chatty in rhythm. Googling for their sound, it says they make more of a chack than a caw. And if I think about it, that’s probably true. Anyway, when I’m here at home, they keep me in touch with my allotment. They share the same airspace as my garden, and in many ways, despite the muffling sound of traffic and the never-ending noise of the auto repair shop next door, they echo, if only faintly, a similar soundscape.
Last year, when I lived in the garden house from April till the end of September, I read Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from Urban Wilderness by Lynda Lynn Haupt. Reading that book animated the birds in the garden in unexpected ways. Crows, jackdaws, magpies and Eurasian jays all have distinctly unique qualities. But I started to see similarities too, and of course, as they are all from the Corvidae family, that makes sense. Before reading Crow Planet, I never knew Corvids mate for life. It’s strange; that fact moves me, but why? It could be the thought that they commit to mutual survival, meaning they are in it together. I know, I know….. I’m aware I’m anthropomorphising, which is never an attractive wear on anyone. It’s the difference between saying, “I acknowledge you because you’re like me,” versus “I acknowledge you for who you are, which may not be like me at all.” But right or wrong-minded, it’s their pairing bond which is one of the many qualities that endears them to me.
Thinking about the jackdaws and projections, I can’t help but interrogate my sentimentality when it comes to the garden and the various creatures that inhabit it. I wonder when I go too far.
This brings me back to your letter. When I was reading it, I was struck by your desire to avoid sentimentality and nostalgia. On the one hand, I understand. Nostalgia is often regarded with disdain, and rightfully so. Such sentiments frame the garden as a docile and privileged space of retreat. In its lightness, it conjures up pastoral images and generates platitudes about landscape and place. And, most destructively, it is associated with myths of the motherland or fatherland where there are clearly drawn lines between those who belong and are entitled and those who are excluded, if not exiled. That said, I would be lying to say I don’t feel nostalgic when in my garden. And by that, I mean in the etymological sense of its Greek origins, “nostos” (to return home) and “altos” (pain). Even when radically different from the vast open landscapes of Texas, which I’ve known throughout my childhood, my tiny plot brings back memories of those places. Some are long gone, many I miss but cannot return to, and some going against any feelings of nostalgia, I wish never to see again. My garden elicits all those feelings by summoning the many landscapes found within me.
Ages ago, I remember listening to a podcast about soldiers during World War One dying of nostalgia. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the podcast’s name or even the woman who was interviewed. She described their sense of nostalgia as an all-consuming and painful longing to return home, a wish to reunite with loved ones and a desire to escape the horrors of the trenches and the inevitable death that surrounded them. At one moment in the discussion, she talked about nostalgia being listed on death certificates. And then, she said: “No one dies of nostalgia anymore.” While technically, that’s true, I suspect the symptoms of nostalgia still remain and are felt acutely.
I guess this comes back to our conversation about climate anxiety and the feelings of grief that accompany the multiple environmental crises we face. In my garden, there are infinite recollections from the past but also a persistent feeling in the present that this plot may disappear. Mirroring the encroachment on green areas across the globe, the allotment complex has also been whittled down to a third of its original size due to urban expansion. And it continues to be under threat from not only the municipality and property developers but also climate change. (Did I tell you that in less than a year, four of the pines surrounding the outskirts of my garden have turned brown?) Anyway, I’m trying to say that feelings of loss are experienced not just in relation to the past but also the present and future. And nostalgia might be connected to such sentiments.
For now, I would propose keeping the word to better understand its various shades and textures – especially in relation to grief, which we have touched on so many times in our conversations. In general, let’s continue to hold places for incomplete forms of thinking in our correspondence.
Continuing along these lines about fostering places for the emergent, I’ve been thinking a lot about exactly “what”, or better yet, “who” is being gardened in any garden. Yes, there are vegetables and flowers, but something else is always happening internally, and I wonder how the gardener is simultaneously cultivated, perhaps even more than the land itself.
To me, it’s striking that we are both foreigners here, and I can’t help but think that one of the many other reasons we have gardens is our need to feel rooted. I don’t mean this as a metaphor or not only as a metaphor. I don’t know about you, but cut off from my roots and some of the people I love, I find getting my hands in the soil consoling. But it’s also a way of getting to know this land, integrating into it slowly and feeling its particularities. With my hands, I process and mix the landscapes I have known with this place I now call my home.
We once had a conversation about seeing our allotments as learning grounds. That is, our gardens provide grounds for learning, and in turn, that learning keeps us grounded. The garden’s lessons are tangible and durational; they are experienced rather than explained.
Looking at the time, I better wrap up this letter and cook dinner. Before signing off, I wanted to say that I took a short break to go to the garden. Because this was the first winter where I missed doing the usual tidying up to prepare for spring, I expected the worst. Looking around at the collapsed brown fern fronds, the rusted leaves on the roses and the apple tree covered in water sprouts, I was struck by the ongoing processes that continued without me. Then I thought about the jackdaws nesting in the dilapidated awning of the neighbouring apartment and how they found a home in a neglected space. Maybe through my unanticipated lack of attention, something similar is happening in my garden.
When I came home, I pulled Crow Planet from my bookshelf and saw that I had underlined the following sentence: “Nearly all of our urban planning frames the city as a home for humans, and fails to account for the presence, and needs of nonhuman animals.” Haupt has a point. Rather than neglect, I tried to imagine what the world would look like if the jackdaws were afforded a home by design.
Take care, and hopefully, we’ll see each other soon.
Renée
I haven’t dedicated much time to the garden. Life has a way of disrupting even the most established of routines. Just before the Christmas holiday, I caught a respiratory infection. I coughed so much that I bruised my rib. Can you believe that’s even possible? I spent over five weeks in bed. Back on my feet again; I’m catching up with work and home renovations. Sadly, with a backlog of things to do, the plants in my allotment have been left to fend for themselves.
Nonetheless, I’ve experienced glimpses of my garden just outside the house. I don’t mean my allotment in the literal sense, but things that remind me of it or things my garden has attuned me to. Jackdaws are nesting in a broken awning under the roof of a neighbouring apartment. From my bedroom window, I watch them fly across the back gardens and warm themselves on the chimney pipes. I can also see them from my front kitchen window, where one in particular likes to sit like a crowning ornament on the peak of the opposite building. In total, I think there are seven or eight. But I can’t say for sure because they are never in the same place at one time. They’re a raucous gang and are always up to something. Darting from here to there, they caw back and forth to each other.
Actually, maybe only crows caw. Jackdaws have a slightly higher pitch and are more chatty in rhythm. Googling for their sound, it says they make more of a chack than a caw. And if I think about it, that’s probably true. Anyway, when I’m here at home, they keep me in touch with my allotment. They share the same airspace as my garden, and in many ways, despite the muffling sound of traffic and the never-ending noise of the auto repair shop next door, they echo, if only faintly, a similar soundscape.
Last year, when I lived in the garden house from April till the end of September, I read Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from Urban Wilderness by Lynda Lynn Haupt. Reading that book animated the birds in the garden in unexpected ways. Crows, jackdaws, magpies and Eurasian jays all have distinctly unique qualities. But I started to see similarities too, and of course, as they are all from the Corvidae family, that makes sense. Before reading Crow Planet, I never knew Corvids mate for life. It’s strange; that fact moves me, but why? It could be the thought that they commit to mutual survival, meaning they are in it together. I know, I know….. I’m aware I’m anthropomorphising, which is never an attractive wear on anyone. It’s the difference between saying, “I acknowledge you because you’re like me,” versus “I acknowledge you for who you are, which may not be like me at all.” But right or wrong-minded, it’s their pairing bond which is one of the many qualities that endears them to me.
Thinking about the jackdaws and projections, I can’t help but interrogate my sentimentality when it comes to the garden and the various creatures that inhabit it. I wonder when I go too far.
This brings me back to your letter. When I was reading it, I was struck by your desire to avoid sentimentality and nostalgia. On the one hand, I understand. Nostalgia is often regarded with disdain, and rightfully so. Such sentiments frame the garden as a docile and privileged space of retreat. In its lightness, it conjures up pastoral images and generates platitudes about landscape and place. And, most destructively, it is associated with myths of the motherland or fatherland where there are clearly drawn lines between those who belong and are entitled and those who are excluded, if not exiled. That said, I would be lying to say I don’t feel nostalgic when in my garden. And by that, I mean in the etymological sense of its Greek origins, “nostos” (to return home) and “altos” (pain). Even when radically different from the vast open landscapes of Texas, which I’ve known throughout my childhood, my tiny plot brings back memories of those places. Some are long gone, many I miss but cannot return to, and some going against any feelings of nostalgia, I wish never to see again. My garden elicits all those feelings by summoning the many landscapes found within me.
Ages ago, I remember listening to a podcast about soldiers during World War One dying of nostalgia. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the podcast’s name or even the woman who was interviewed. She described their sense of nostalgia as an all-consuming and painful longing to return home, a wish to reunite with loved ones and a desire to escape the horrors of the trenches and the inevitable death that surrounded them. At one moment in the discussion, she talked about nostalgia being listed on death certificates. And then, she said: “No one dies of nostalgia anymore.” While technically, that’s true, I suspect the symptoms of nostalgia still remain and are felt acutely.
I guess this comes back to our conversation about climate anxiety and the feelings of grief that accompany the multiple environmental crises we face. In my garden, there are infinite recollections from the past but also a persistent feeling in the present that this plot may disappear. Mirroring the encroachment on green areas across the globe, the allotment complex has also been whittled down to a third of its original size due to urban expansion. And it continues to be under threat from not only the municipality and property developers but also climate change. (Did I tell you that in less than a year, four of the pines surrounding the outskirts of my garden have turned brown?) Anyway, I’m trying to say that feelings of loss are experienced not just in relation to the past but also the present and future. And nostalgia might be connected to such sentiments.
For now, I would propose keeping the word to better understand its various shades and textures – especially in relation to grief, which we have touched on so many times in our conversations. In general, let’s continue to hold places for incomplete forms of thinking in our correspondence.
Continuing along these lines about fostering places for the emergent, I’ve been thinking a lot about exactly “what”, or better yet, “who” is being gardened in any garden. Yes, there are vegetables and flowers, but something else is always happening internally, and I wonder how the gardener is simultaneously cultivated, perhaps even more than the land itself.
To me, it’s striking that we are both foreigners here, and I can’t help but think that one of the many other reasons we have gardens is our need to feel rooted. I don’t mean this as a metaphor or not only as a metaphor. I don’t know about you, but cut off from my roots and some of the people I love, I find getting my hands in the soil consoling. But it’s also a way of getting to know this land, integrating into it slowly and feeling its particularities. With my hands, I process and mix the landscapes I have known with this place I now call my home.
We once had a conversation about seeing our allotments as learning grounds. That is, our gardens provide grounds for learning, and in turn, that learning keeps us grounded. The garden’s lessons are tangible and durational; they are experienced rather than explained.
Looking at the time, I better wrap up this letter and cook dinner. Before signing off, I wanted to say that I took a short break to go to the garden. Because this was the first winter where I missed doing the usual tidying up to prepare for spring, I expected the worst. Looking around at the collapsed brown fern fronds, the rusted leaves on the roses and the apple tree covered in water sprouts, I was struck by the ongoing processes that continued without me. Then I thought about the jackdaws nesting in the dilapidated awning of the neighbouring apartment and how they found a home in a neglected space. Maybe through my unanticipated lack of attention, something similar is happening in my garden.
When I came home, I pulled Crow Planet from my bookshelf and saw that I had underlined the following sentence: “Nearly all of our urban planning frames the city as a home for humans, and fails to account for the presence, and needs of nonhuman animals.” Haupt has a point. Rather than neglect, I tried to imagine what the world would look like if the jackdaws were afforded a home by design.
Take care, and hopefully, we’ll see each other soon.
Renée
in my
absence
tuning to other frequencies
sounds of birds written in words
feathered monogamy
mirrors versus windows
blindsighted by sentiment
longing for home
sifting the sediments of landscape and memory
death by nostalgia
here and in other green spaces
there is grief in the soil
i am its cultivation
non-native rooting
with my hands in their land
learning grounds
this garden does not need me
designing for jackdaws