Miles Collins

An horticultural restorative in a time of need..

Having endured and continue to endure a few weeks I’d rather forget about I look to the small things in life to keep me going. It’s not that easy to write a daily blog during a seventy hour working week, inspiration can be somewhat short on the ground, not to mention the time involved to write, process photographs, reply to comments and delete those fifty spam mails from insurance groups.

Most of these posts are written after dinner service and I am sure my mood at the end of service dictates to an extent the type of post I write. When I go for a long period without time off the thing I miss most is going for a walk in my favourite woods with my camera slung over my shoulder, second is spending time in my kitchen garden.

A few days of rain followed by a week of sunshine can create havoc in a garden. Weeds shoot up from nowhere, plants burst into life and suddenly you find yourself behind schedule all over again.

Some things will only cause you more stress such as the glorious flea beetle killing every brassica you have sown from seed, nurtured through cold spells, watered and planted out-thirty of them in my case. But for every flea beetle there is a ’pick me up’. Today that ‘pick me up’ was the sight of tiny fruits on my old English apple tree… 

It may seem trivial to some but to me it meant a lot. It took my mind off the more unpleasant matters life throws at you and gave me the opportunity to be ‘me’ again, the real ‘me’ for a short while. I thought about the stress the apple tree had suffered through transplanting followed by a long winter and bouts of prolonged rain and dry spells. But there it was, still standing, still producing fruit. In other words it carried on its work despite everything, including my lack of prescence.

As Confucious said: “If your Laxton Old English Apple tree can survive without you then so can your place of work”

Moving on down the garden I came across two neglected leeks, annoyed with myself for not having done something with them sooner I was about to dig them up when I noticed their seed head standing tall and proud. I was struck by the aesthetical quality of it, a display of nature taking its own natural course…

A garden is/can be so much more than what initially meets the eye. It can be a couple of window boxes in the middle of London or New York, a singular pepper plant in a rented apartment, whatever it is, the principle is the same as is the feeling of escape, however brief.