from somewhere in the blue remembered days of the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular
Into a new gardening year in the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular.
Now, where am I?
Now, where am I?
‘Now, where am I?’ is a question I ask to express a need
to refocus and re-orientate myself in order to re-connect with something. In
‘the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular’, that question could be put
more ambiguously as, ‘Nowhere, am I?’
According to some, the beginning of October marks the end of
a gardening year and the start of a new one. This period of transition is a
time to reflect on the gardening year past and a time to look forward to another anew, and possibly re-imagined.
Perhaps the garden exists as much in my imagination as it
does in reality. Gardening is one way, in an increasingly virtual world, I
think I try to maintain connections with reality. However the garden is also a
mysterious and temporal interaction of Nature and nurture and looking for the 'Nowhere',
as in an idealised sense of the garden, tips the balance between the real and
imagined; a tip in the direction of imagination
and the imaginary. A question about this
here gardener (of Nowhere in particular) is, how imaginative has he been, is he
and will he be? What is it he imagines he has done and what is it he has really
done? Of course I am 'he', I think.
I made a wholehearted commitment to gardening ‘the allotment
garden of Nowhere in particular’ in the gardening year of 2015-2016. I didn’t
keep a precise record of the amount of time I gardened there however I made a
sustained effort to keep a digital photographic/visual diary of each of my
visits. From 1st October 2015 to 30th September 2016 I
visited the allotment 207 times.
There are 207 digital folders containing just over 14,200
photographic moments, each a virtual blink of an ‘iphone’ camera, a 33rd of a
second here, a 1000th of a second there. Every one of the photographic glimpses
put together potentially makes for a minute or so of real time and, perhaps, some
lost time in the allotment garden. I wonder if accumulating as much data has
limited a more full experience of the place. In this particular landscape of
memory there is a lot to be remembered and imagined if that is what is required
to create a complete memory or reflection. Of course a garden and gardening is
much more than a digital visual experience.
There is also a diary in the shed. The diary has brief handwritten
notes made about each gardening visit. As a record of what has been done and
achieved the diary is quite inadequate. I did not succeed in keeping more
consistent and detailed records about some of the basics of our gardening –
sowing and planting times, quantities and varieties of plants, yields and
losses, expenditure, and so on. There are those 14,200 images that might
provide opportunities to retrieve the lost learning. I have reassured myself I
have absorbed a lot of the garden/gardening experience intuitively and
haptically and that the absence of a detailed notebook does not mean all the
learning is lost. A lot has been dug in – a lot can be dug up. I excuse my
lackadaisical record keeping on account of the whole exertion – that I couldn’t
find the time, space and energy to maintain that aspect of the gardening; that
a comprehensive annal of the gardening year was lost to an overwhelming array
of other things to do.
Each gardening visit involved a fifteen mile round cycle
ride; that’s over 3,000 miles just getting to and from the allotment,
amounting to something like 276 hours/ 11.5 days of cycling over the course of
the gardening year. The visits varied in duration however I estimate I put in
about 900-1000 hours of gardening over the course of the year. I doubt I could
have committed much more physically to the allotment garden however I think, or
imagine, I could have gardened very differently. Excuses, excuses!
I would be misleading you up the allotment garden path of
Nowhere in particular were I to pretend I have gardened alone. At the start of
the year there were 4 of us sharing nearly 4 full sized allotment plots (c.1000sq
metres). Two of our fellow gardeners were able to come once or twice a month
for a few hours until their circumstances changed and they were no longer able
to sustain that commitment. They left in May. Alan has managed a day or
afternoon a week fairly consistently over the course of the gardening year – as
well as evening visits for watering during the summer. Most of our surplus
produce has been used to supply my work mates with seasonal fruit and veg’ –
about 130 carrier bags full so far this year – each bag sold for a small price
of £2 in order to help out with some (but not all) of the costs of the
allotment garden. That harvest is a relatively small achievement, given the
size of the garden, however were there more gardeners it could have been
increased quite easily, in terms of the quantity, quality and range of produce.
Three very full carrier bags are about as much as I can carry to work by
bicycle at any one time.
The garden occupies a very substantial place in
my life, a landscape of memory and imagination, and of thought and action. I
don’t recall at the beginning of October 2015 imagining I would commit as much
time and energy to the allotment garden as I did, however, here at the end of
October 2016 (just a month into a new gardening year), I am thinking about how a
similar effort might be manifest in the allotment garden (and gardener) by the
end of September 2017. The garden embodies a range of ideas, beliefs and
purposes, every one of them requiring energy – or energies – interacting and
collaborating – dynamic and latent – and for some time I have been trying to
create a map that expresses some of the complex nature of the garden. Each
mapping attempt, in previous years, has reached a hiatus with the arrival of
various seasonal gardening imperatives. A map seems an apt way of representing
and exploring how a garden space can absorb time and energy and presents
opportunities for seeing the garden anew and then more imaginative gardening. There is a lot of potential for
imaginative interpretation as to how the map expresses the interplay of the
garden and gardener. The map may well become a companion to the moments and dreams, those rapid eye movements and other senses stimulated by, ‘the
allotment garden of Nowhere in particular’.
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