Day 11 of the 100 day project

Today I thought I would tell you a bit more about why I have embarked on the 100 day project.  Gardening and blogging have been long standing passions for me and over the last three or four years I have in some ways lost touch with them both.  Gardening was the first to go.  We have nearly two acres here.  When we first came there was an intensively gardened kitchen garden and one or two small areas which were planted up but most of the land was a large field with two apple trees, one walnut tree and a lot of rough grass.  For the first six or seven years we were here making a garden out of a field became an obsession.  I read about plantsand gardens night and day.  I tested the soil.  I sketched and researched and made plant lists and planted and planted.  Some of that was successful: the fruit trees grew in the little orchard, the mixed native hedging grew and so did the native trees.  Daffodils grew although there were never enough.  Some things died.  Quite a lot of things died to be honest.  Even though I knew our soil is thin and stony and tried hard to grow things that would thrive in our conditions lots of things didn't.  It is quite high up here.  Some things are entirely happy but lots of plants, even those which I thought would survive, never managed to get their roots down. 

After my mother died suddenly life changed in so many ways.  We spent a lot of time away trying to support my father as he faced the hard decline of motor neurone disease and that took us physically away a lot and also used up the energy and passion that had been going elsewhere.   The garden had to take not second place but last place.  There were people: as well as my father there was my father in law who was living with us, our children and grandchildren, and my sister and her family who were also deep in the struggle to support my dad.  I look back at my blog and see that before mum died I regularly spent two or three days a week working in the garden.  That seems extraordinary to me now.  But after Mum died that stopped.  Gradually the garden, always a wild and rural affair, became full of weed and overgrowth.  It was a field and it wants to return to a field.  Creeping buttercup, couch grass and bindweed choked everything out.  It got to the stage where I didn't even want to walk around it.  The sense of it all falling apart depressed me and yet there was no point in depressing myself.  It was just soil and plants.  Dad ceased to be able to walk, to talk, to eat and still we went backwards and forwards for more than two years because even then you could see that our presence mattered.  Ian's father died.  The wind blew very cold.

It is two years now since my father died and during that time I have not returned to my passion for the garden.  I don't mean that I have not gardened.  I have weeded and wandered a bit.  We have some help in the garden once a fortnight and I have appreciated the difference it makes to have someone else mulching and clearing out the fruit beds.  But it is as if, having wrenched myself away from the garden, I can't love it again. 

And I have also found over the last year or so that I am ceasing to blog too.  Now both these things have given me enormous pleasure over the last ten years.  I have met some great friends through blogging, both face to face and virtual.  I keep on limping back to blogging because I know that I love to write and that my life would be immeasurably poorer without it but somehow I have lost my voice.

I came across the 100 day project on Instagram.  It seems designed principally for artists but for some reason it really struck a chord with me.  Both things and people respond to attention.  What, I thought, if I gave my garden some attention on every day that I possibly could for one hundred days?  And what if I gave my blog the same attention by recording the process?  Maybe I would fall back in love with both of them.  And if I didn't, well my garden would be tidier and I would at least have flexed my writing muscles.

So here we are.  It is day 11.  Have I fallen in love again?  No.  But I am enjoying almost the intellectual and even the physical challenge of working out what I can do in the garden with a limited amount of time and energy right now.  And this is the right time of year to do this.  I have always been a spring gardener.  I love the colour and energy and life of new growth and a new season.

Will I keep it up for one hundred days?  I don't know.  But that it why I am trying.