18 Cultivating inner & outer gardens

& tutelary deities; symptom as symbol; nettle soup

Hello my friends. Welcome to new subscribers, and I’m delighted you’re here. If you’ve been with me a while, apologies for an erratic posting schedule at the moment.

Wild Garlic

The wild garlic this year amongst the bluebell spikes
is suddenly prolific, pungent as parable. I’m gathering
leaves by the armful, and soon the starry flowers. For months
it’ll spice our table; better for the heart even than roses.

Everyone we love and everything we know will be taken
from us one day, or we’ll leave them. That’s what the wise
priest said at that wedding all those years ago. Knowing that,
how can I not love this world fully, while I may?

Roselle Angwin
(an earlier version of this appeared in my collection All the Missing Names of Love from IDP 2012)

The bees
First thing and last thing a thrush has been singing for hour after hour from one of the tall trees bordering the Home Meadow. I love how birdsong takes me closer to silence.

For two or three weeks now there have been fat bumblebees blundering around, and many brimstone butterflies. Yesterday in the polytunnel I picked up a little slender beetle that looked like a bright-coloured African mask, or a skateboard paint job. No idea what it was, but I set it down in the grasses anyway.

Today for the first time the honeybees from the many hives up the lane have appeared. They’re a bit edgy: hungry, probably, and just out of their winter retreat. But they were delighted to be on the pink camellia flowers (none at all on the white), and soon their pollen sacs were huge with gold. I watched them for quite a while, noticing how they wouldn’t feed on a flower that another bee had already visited: I’ve heard that a visiting bee will leave a ‘calling card’ in the form of a scent on its feet.

The soil, the soil
Here in Finistère the rain hasn’t actually gone away, but we’ve had some gentle days, with sun. How wonderful to be outside, then, hands in the gorgeous crumbly black soil. It feels like a long time. And as always gardening is so therapeutic – I think for many of us it’s been a long and here very wet winter.

As I garden, as when I walk, inner tangles start to unravel; priorities rather than emotional reactions rise to the surface; knots in the psyche dissolve; I have a keen sense, once again, of what matters. For a little while, to quote Marc Hamer, ‘… my mind is all garden: constant bloom and seed and bloom.’

In the outer garden, we’re proud of the soil: it began with cardboard and woodchip, topped with composted green waste. (My inner garden could do with a little composting and weeding, but that’s another story. When I was training as a psychotherapist, I came across the idea that a good therapist needs also to be a gardener. Time to apply that to myself, I think.)

We are aiming, as you’ll know if you’ve read previous posts of mine, for a vegan subsistence garden, with regenerative practices that are in harmony with the natural local ecosystems.

Where we can, we are using a no-dig method. We now know how highly significant the mycorrhizal network of fungi and bacteria is for soil, plant and tree health, and I minimise any intervention or disruption. TM, however, is reclaiming some meadow, and as we don’t have the time (or inclination) to use plastic as a weed-suppressant mulch, that has to be dug. (In another post soon, I will introduce you to Gareth, our friend at Subsistence Gardener, who has cleared his several small fields using only an old-style digging-hoe.)

After this start, though, wherever possible we layer various mulches to add nutrition and suppress weeds, and/or use green manure crops rather than digging over each spring. This produces a rich soil, and there are fewer weeds than in a traditionally-dug garden; what few there are are easy to pull out.

One of the best mulches has been woodchip. Yes, there’s a compromise: we’re trying to move away from fossil fuel, but the chipper uses it, albeit very little. Had we begun this project in our 30s or 40s we’d have been able to use time rather than machinery, perhaps.

All ours is what’s known as ramial woodchip: that is, small branches (under 70cms in diameter) which don’t rob nitrogen as they break down. It’s also part of our ‘closed loop’ system: the brushwood from the November 2nd storm, too small to make firewood, is going back to feed the soil. This circular dynamic is very pleasing. It’ll be even better when we have enough woodchip to allow some to compost down first. (I’ve said before I’m a woodchip nerd, and I’ll write more about that another time.)

At last my wild garlic plants – ramsons – are seriously leafing. Over the last few days we’ve planted out 300+ onions; resown broad beans that the voles had dug up; sown more broad beans in pots, plus spinach, Swiss chard, green beans, sweet peas, salad leaves (through in three days!). Soon the four varieties of chitted potatoes can go in outside; soon too we’ll be sowing many more beans, squash, courgette, sweet potato, sweetcorn, beetroot, carrot and our new trials of soya, chickpeas and green lentils, all vegan sources of protein, plus quinoa (also very high protein) and buckwheat. Then the many brassicas.

Whoever believed/hoped that life here, at our age, with the scale of our project, might be slow? I am at least as busy as before, and with less concentrated writing time. But I am determined to learn slowness, as I hope to learn repose; as I am learning to do what I’ve always aspired to: allowing my inner life and my outer to come together in cycling with the seasons. I haven’t yet learned the hibernation of winter; that will come.

Tutelary deities
I’ve been trying to remember that phrase all day. ‘Household gods’, we could call them. Last October, as the October before, we opened the kitchen door at dusk to find a toad squatting one side and a salamander (axolotl, perhaps, properly) the other. Last night, the salamander was back. Semi-mythical creatures, salamanders are supposed to be able to survive fire.

For me, they hold joyous memories of being in the Pyrenees as a student in the summer. Often in July and August the sky turns clear green; there’s a tremendous electrical storm; an hour later the land is wet, but the storm has passed and the sky is bright blue again. Not knowing about the salamander phenomenon, I felt like someone in a fairytale walking out into oak and chestnut woods and seeing these amazing reptiles all over every path, with their gold and black splodges.

Shy creatures, with rather sweet faces, and that rarely bite, salamanders, like toads, can nonetheless when threatened excrete a substance from their skin which is toxic when ingested. I ask myself what it might symbolise if these two creatures are our tutelary dieties?

Which I suppose leads me on to…

Symptom as symbol
I’m writing this section not to be self-obsessed, by the way, but in case it’s helpful to anyone else.
At last, even allopathic medicine is acknowledging that mind and body are deeply interconnected: external symptoms generally have an inner correlate. Of course they do. From a holistic perspective, it might be seen that physical trouble or disease begins on an inner level, an interior susceptibility, if you like – given also heredity, predispositions, diet, circumstances that conspire. We do, after all, all of us run patterns of thought and behaviour that can become, in the end, somatised, ossified (interesting choice of word there). Almost always, there’s an element of stress: a kind of inflammation (see below).

‘Our life is the creation of our mind,’ as I wrote in a previous – I think my last – post, from the ancient Buddhist text The Dhammapada. I have written before here how my recent bad bout of labyrinthitis mirrored my own inner sense of imbalance. What I haven’t written about is that for the first time in my life but for the past few months I’ve had a seriously crippling experience of what I imagine is arthritis; certainly inflammation. As a result of two or three accidents with young horses, a big passion of mine, when I was younger I fractured various parts of my body, including my vertebrae, ribs, collarbone and fingers. ‘Expect arthritis in those when you’re older’, warned so many medics.

Well, that’s not happened, except for a rib, which has recently opened up and/or been badly inflamed and caused me a lot of grief on more than one occasion. But I’ve never hurt my knees, and I’m used to being reasonably fit and nimble. Not any more. I woke up one morning last year with one knee badly swollen and so sore I couldn’t walk on it. Tellingly, there was a very clear psychological correlate for me: the day before, I’d had a sudden and enormous trauma that upset and hurt me very badly, but also angered me.

Inflammation? Just a bit. Friction? Ditto. That knee began to clear up, after months and a certain amount of personal self-examination, plus the mantra of which I’ve spoken: ‘Quiet mind, quiet heart’, to calm my inner conflicts – for who doesn’t experience, sometimes, contrary pulls of needs, desires, impulses? – In this case, love vs ‘righteous’ anger – and some dietary changes and herbs, a few weeks ago.

Then after a minor upset in a different area of my life, the other one gave way and has since given me a lot of pain.

Back to the comfrey ointment and the tough old crucible of inner work, looking at areas of internal friction and places where friction happens ‘out there’. What is it preventing me walking forward?

Ha! It’s only as I write this that I think back to that mythic quality of salamander: the ability to survive fire. Inflammation in the body is, speaking in terms of the archetypal elements, so central to eg Platonic and later Renaissance thought, and also to ‘true’ esoteric astrology, an excess of the element of fire. Adopt salamander as symbol, then; for the world is full of them (symbols).

Tonic nettle soup
Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?! But nettles are an addendum, not the whole. They’re a tonic after the winter, and nutritious; and if you can find and identify cleavers, or goose-grass – the sticky one we used to throw on others’ jumpers when we were children? - that will also help cleanse sluggish winter blood.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve made this soup every February or March. By now, the first young succulent shoots of nettle have emerged; when you pick them, make sure they’re above dog-pee level and not by a main road, and use a plastic bag over your hands to pick the tips.

I’d always add wild garlic, if you can find it: so good for the heart. If you can’t (or are not sure of identification), see if you can find three-cornered leek. Or use a couple of cloves of ordinary garlic.

Then sauté 2 or 3 chopped potatoes – skin on if organic – in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add a chopped leek or two (we’re eating leek at every meal at the moment, it being plentiful and almost the last of our crops) and soften.

Then throw in the washed and chopped herbs, stir for a minute or two, then add hot water or, better, stock. Season to taste and simmer for 40+ minutes.

I blend it roughly and stir in some plant milk, or serve it with a dollop of plant yogurt.

Gremolata
To top this and just about anything else I can think of, I’m making a winter garden gremolata. This is a thick green oily ‘sauce’, raw, rather like a liquid pesto without the nuts or seeds. I use some young kale leaves and some of the flowers, some sorrel leaves (garden or sheep sorrel; the usual warning about identification applies – please be very sure as I cannot be held responsible); I used a little purple sprouting broccoli, and whatever fresh herbs I can find. At the moment in the garden for me this means three-cornered leek, chives, fennel leaves, a pinch of mint and some parsley. I wouldn’t use sage – too strong.

Wash it all and pat dry with a tea towel. You can mash this in stages in a pestle and mortar, or use a stick blender. Put the torn-up or crushed greens in a bowl, season, add a dash of lemon juice and a small clove of garlic if you need to, and a stream of olive oil to taste. The stick blender will turn this into a lovely greengold liquid.