Threshold

Not the prettiest part of the year, but this is where the garden turns, even if it doesn’t look like it yet.

Early February rarely has much to show for itself beyond cold and damp. No colour to speak of, no real surge of growth. Just the work that makes everything else possible. Beds cleared. Edges reset. Space opened up for what’s coming next.

For the past two years this place has mostly been surviving. Before anything new can go in, something usually has to come out.

This time it was the laurel.

It had been failing for a while. Pale leaves, thin growth, never quite recovering. By midweek it was down. A pile to deal with, and a space I hadn’t immediately planned for.

It took the hellebores with it. Flattened more than anything, caught underneath the branches. They’ve been lifted and set aside for now. They’ll sulk for a bit, no doubt, then carry on as if nothing’s happened. They’ll go back once this corner is brought back into line.

A lilac and a smoke bush will go in. Something with structure, height, and stems worth cutting. 

For now, it’s about getting it back to ground level. Once the clearing began, I realised how much had moved in while I’d been away.

Not just weeds, but life.

A whole scatter of froglets tucked into the damp edges. Dozens of them, some no bigger than a thumbnail. No pond, nothing planned. Just ground left long enough to become something else.

It stopped me.

Because to get this place back, I have to disturb it. That’s the work. But it’s hard not to notice that the garden has been carrying on perfectly well without me.

Left long enough, a place begins to believe it belongs to itself.

And it doesn’t give ground easily. Moss and buttercups thickly knit over the paths, smothering the line of them.

The rest of the month has been the sort of work February often turns into. Perennial weeds lifted and left in small piles across the plot to dry for burning. Brambles pulled back where they’d started claiming the edges again. Ground elder threading through beds I thought I’d cleared. Mares tail already pushing up in places it shouldn’t. Plum, pear and apple trees cut back to open a right of passage. Sapling everywhere, hawthorn, sycamore, holly, as if the place had started planting itself.

Nothing dramatic. Just the steady, back-breaking work of taking ground back inch by inch.

Slowly, though, it begins to shift.

Paths reappear. Beds are redrawn.

Space opens where there was none before. A place for the new rose bed. A better position for the peonies and the hydrangeas. Some needing evicting to better homes, while others have been waiting patiently in pots for years.

This potager hasn’t been properly worked for some time. You can see it in the ground. Life pulled me elsewhere for too long and it carried on without me.

Now I’m back.

February hasn’t brought flowers yet.

But it has brought work. The kind that breaks the ground open again and lets the light return.

The work continues.

The kind that brings you back to the threshold.

Jane