My New Copper Trowel

My new copper trowel arrived in the mail this morning.

It is truly a thing of beauty. When I unwrapped the parcel and took it out, it positively glowed. As I held it in my hand and admired it, it seemed almost a shame to put it into the ground.

We already had a trowel like this that we bought several years ago. But since we have two gardens—the one next to our cottage and an ‘allotment’ down the lane, in our neighbour’s field—only one of us at a time could use it. So last week, we made the big decision to buy a second one. At £30 for a small trowel, this was no small decision. These trowels are guaranteed for 25 years and in 25 years from now I shall be 102. It would be nice to think that I shall still be out there messing about in the garden at 102, but I think it is a fair bet that this trowel is going to outlast me by decades. But, as the poet said, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ And now we are a two copper trowel family.

The Austrian engineer, forester and wise elder Viktor Schauberger, best known for his discoveries of the energetic properties of water and his design of beautiful, functional flowforms, also did research into the use of copper in gardening tools. He came to the conclusion that cultivating the soil with copper implements rather than steel ones would be more beneficial to the Earth and lead to healthier plants. In his writings, he listed several reasons for this.

§                Minute amounts of copper create the conditions for beneficial micro-organisms

§                Copper tools penetrate the soil easily. Copper has a low coefficient of friction, therefore there is less tendency for clay to cling to the tool

§                Copper is not magnetic so it does not disrupt the electrical fields in the soil

§                Copper tools be kept sharp with a whetstone, file or by peening (hammering the edge against a steel anvil)

You can read a whole lot more about this concept—and about Schauberger—here

The other thing about the use of copper tools in the garden is that it is said to deter slugs. And here in our damp corner of south-west England, that is certainly a plus.

I carried my shiny new trowel up to the garden and I knelt down and stuck it in the soil. Kind of reverently. But isn't that how gardening should always be? Reverent?

On the Road Again (sort of!)

When my book Elderwoman was first published, I spent several weeks touring around, giving talks and workshops and signing books. It was all very interesting and enjoyable. I met some great people and saw a lot of places I had never seen before. It was also rather tiring and I was glad to get home again. I am an introvert by nature, so frankly I am more comfortable sitting at home in my slippers and sweatpants than I am dressing up and socializing. (I also wondered whether all the effort and expense had really been worth it.)

But now, there is a much better way to tour around. In terms of spreading the word about a new book it is a lot more effective, as it enables an author to introduce the book to many more people than the old-fashioned book tour. It incurs no cost at all. And best of all, you don’t even have to get out of your old, comfy clothes to do it.

It’s called a blog tour.

So as a way of taking the new book GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness out ‘on the road’, I am now embarking on a blog tour. The tour will take me to a number of interesting places over the next few weeks and I would be delighted if you could come along with me, read my blog posts and meet my hosts. In the process, you will, I am sure, discover blogs that are new to you, and if you like them, please bookmark them and come back to them often. I made the first stop today. So please come and meet my first host, Maddy Harland.
Maddy is the editor of Permaculture Magazine: Solutions for Sustainable Living and a co-founder of Permanent Publications, a publishing company specializing in developing our understanding of permaculture. www.permaculture.co.uk
She is also one of the contributors to the new book. Her chapter, which is one of my favourites as it is so comprehensive and practical and also very thought-provoking is entitled: ‘Permaculture: Bringing Wisdom Down to Earth.’
Here is my post on Maddy’s blog. It's called 'The Web of Connections.' And when you have read it, be sure and check out the rest of her blog and bookmark it. It is great.

Balancing Act

I’ve become a bit unbalanced of late.
No, I don’t mean that I have been toppling over or that my mental health is any more precarious than it ever was, but that the ratio of time spent sitting at the computer to time spent moving around and doing other things has been steadily shrinking over these past few months. The result: some strong warning signals from my body, including eyestrain and a sore shoulder, forcing me away from my desk. Which is one of the reasons why my blog posts have been sparse (and they were never all that frequent to begin with, as you may have noticed).
I find myself feeling thinking back nostalgically, from time to time, to the early 1990s in Australia when Sky and I were building our own adobe house, making fifty bricks every morning, then turning yesterday’s bricks and stacking the week-old ones.

We planted trees all afternoon and spent almost every waking moment outside except when it was pouring with rain—which in that drought-prone area it very rarely did.
We ate outdoors, showered outdoors, came in only to sleep. Maybe we were unbalanced in the other direction, but it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. We felt fit and healthy and full of energy. And our little computer that drew its power from a solar panel could only run for an hour or two a day.Human bodies were not designed for a sedentary life. Our species was certainly not designed for a life spent indoors, in airless, climate-controlled houses with fitted carpets and double glazing, eating instant dinners defrosted in microwave ovens. And our children and grandchildren were certainly not meant to spend huge chunks of their days and evenings in front of screens, either passively soaking up commercial propaganda and mindless triviality or vanquishing armies of virtual enemies with their thumbs.

It seems as though we have removed ourselves further and further from any real contact with the Earth. Small wonder, then, that we have wreaked so much mindless havoc. I am not the only one who’s out of balance. Two thirds of us are. And many, worse than me. At least I walk miles every day in the fresh country air, chop wood, grow fruit and vegetables and cook from scratch.

Even so, I have some way to go to get back in balance the way I would really like to be. Which is difficult, since I am a writer and an editor and in this remote, rural area of England where we live it is the Internet that keeps me connected to the wider world. Plus we live in a cold climate and it rains a lot.

Anyone else out there wrestling with a similar dilemma?

Midsummer…and the fullness thereof.

Have you noticed that there comes a point in every growing season at which everything suddenly seems to take off? One minute, there is space between plants and the next minute there is a mini-jungle happening. In the gardens, in the hedgerows, everywhere, there is a burgeoning of fertility that leaves one breathless.

The Devon lanes I walk along each morning seem to have become dark, green, growing canyons overnight, their high walls a tangle of brambles and nettles, grass and wildflowers. There are grass heads drooping heavily with seed, swirls of pollen in the honeysuckle-scented air, wild strawberries ripening, foxgloves surfing the white waves of cow parsley, insects buzzing to and fro, butterflies dancing, wrens quivering with song. Only the robins have fallen silent, hidden now in this vast greenness.

So much growth is happening around me that I feel almost breathless. I am drowning in those waves of white and green. I am being strangled by vines and trampled by trees. I find myself gasping at the sheer hugeness of the life force that is moving through the land—and through me—at an amperage so great it could burn me out like a light bulb.

Many people re-package Nature in their minds into a pretty, decorative concept—something to admire through a window, in a vase or on TV. Others, seeking direct contact with Nature’s raw reality, climb the mountains, raft the rapids, hike the trails and pitch their tents in the back country, the domain of bears or rattlesnakes.

I have done both. I, too, have ‘loved’ Nature as brought to you by Hallmark. And I, too, have laced up my walking boots and set off into the wilderness. Right now, in the warm, fecund fullness of this midsummer, I just went for my morning walk with all the doors of my senses wide open, and feared I might die from it.

Welcome to our Garden, Tullio Two.

Fig trees are not something one would normally associate with cool, damp England, even in this milder, south-western part of it where I live. But the gardening catalogue assured me that the Brown Turkey fig grows quite happily here. And I know that to be true because there’s one in the village that yields dozens of ripe figs every year. So I ordered a fig tree. A small one, in a container.

A crazy thing to do of course, given our tiny, already-crowded garden. But there was one warm spot with nothing growing in it. The little fig tree, in its pot, was a perfect fit.

I’ve named it Tullio Two.

Gardening, for me, is not just about growing food. It’s about relationships. Relationships with plants, with the other creatures who share our space and sometimes even with people.

Tullio Zola was a tall, thin, affable, Italian man with sparse grey hair, glasses and impeccably gracious, old-fashioned, European manners. If you had ever enjoyed a bottle of wine with dinner in Melbourne’s elegant Windsor Hotel, it would probably have been Tullio who advised you on the vintage. You would have been well pleased with his choice. Tullio knew his wine. He knew good food. He knew figs, too. In his garden he had a huge, spreading fig tree. Sometimes it would throw up suckers from its extensive roots.

It is said that root suckers don’t always make good trees in their own right. So I had low expectations of the one that Tullio dug up and gave to me in a pot. I stuck it in the ground. But when the Spring came, nothing happened. I decided it was probably dead. Being the lazy gardener that I am, I simply left it there. Another whole year went by and still it sat there, this thin, brown stick, a foot high, doing nothing.

Until, suddenly one day, late in the second Spring, it sprouted a leaf. And then another.

I thought to name it Lazarus, this little thing that had returned from the dead. But instead I called it Tullio in honour of the old man from whose garden it had sprung.

Fifteen years later, when Tullio the man died. I helped to arrange his funeral. Meanwhile, Tullio the tree had been steadily growing bigger and bigger, and every year it produced more and more delicious, juicy figs. Eventually, in order to pick them all, I had to climb up into its branches. What an amazing feeling that was: perching high in the branches of a tree I had known and loved since it was a twelve-inch high stick!

I felt a deep kinship with that tree. So much so that when I left that place for the last time, I found it harder to say goodbye to the tree than I did to the house.

Melbourne’s climate suits figs really well. Devon, England, not so much. But Tullio Two is a Brown Turkey fig and it will survive here. Maybe even thrive. This morning I noticed several new leaves. I think it likes the spot I chose.

I doubt I’ll ever climb it. But I’ll love it. And if it ever gives me ripe figs I will eat them slowly and reverently, like a sacrament. Welcome to our garden, Tullio Two!

Musings on Firewood, and Other Earthy Things

A Woman Gathering Faggots
at Ville-d'Avray, ca. 1871–74
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(French, 1796–1875)
Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher
Collection, Bequest of Isaac
D. Fletcher,
1917 (17.120.225) Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/

I've spent several hours this morning doing something that I find marvellously satisfying, and that is gathering firewood and breaking it all up into the right sized pieces for our ancient kitchen range.

I suppose some people would think that is utterly mad. In this push-button age of oil-fired central heating, why would anyone want to go wandering around collecting sticks in order to keep warm in the winter? Don't we pity those poor souls from earlier centuries who had to chop wood and carry water, wash their laundry by hand, grow their own vegetables, sew their own clothes …? Well actually, no. (Except for the clothes, that is. I never did enjoy sewing). When I have to spend any length of time cocooned in indoor spaces and surrounded by labour-saving devices like dishwashers and microwave ovens, I start to feel marooned, alienated, separated from the real world.

I love the physicality of firewood. The satisfying snap as you break a dry stick in your hands or against your knee or under the heel of your boot. Now that we live in a small cottage, all I have to do with those broken pieces is to pile them in a basket. But years ago, when I had to carry the pieces some distance, I used to enjoy making them into sturdy bundles. 'Faggots', as in the title of this Corot painting. What a lovely, old-fashioned word that is. It makes me feel connected with all the other people, all down through history, who have brought their firewood home this way.

I love the physicality of gardening, too, and the deep feeling of connection that comes from plunging my hands into the soil. As I pull weeds or plant seedlings, I see the robin nearby, head to one side, waiting and watching with a black and beady eye in the hope that I shall turn up a juicy earthworm, and suddenly we are companions in the task, each with our own reason for being there. I feel the breeze on my face and in my hair, and in the air I smell the season – right now, the moist, mushroomy aroma of autumn. In moments like that, despite all the problems in the world, everything feels OK.

My back aches a lot these days. Seventy years of walking upright and sitting in badly-designed chairs and all those decades of overriding the deeper needs of my body in order to earn a living have all taken their toll on my spine. And physical tasks – particularly gardening – all bring with them, these days, the possibility that some thorn, some jagged edge, some projecting object will pierce this unbelievably thin skin of mine. The merest bump, like brushing too hard against the corner of a table, will tear the skin on my arm as though it were tissue paper. I stare in amazement at the oozing blood and say "Gosh, all I did was …" Now I understand why elderly patients in hospitals are so prone to bedsores. Our skin has lost its robustness.

Yet paradoxically, as my energy ever-so-slowly declines and my body gradually becomes more subject to aches and bruises, my delight in the physicality of living close to the earth seems to increase. I can't do the hugely physical things I did years ago, like building a house and backpacking around the world. But the small, physical tasks I do outdoors, like pegging out a line of laundry in the garden, spreading compost, planting seeds, collecting kindling for the fire, bring a measure of delight to my days that I would sorely miss.

Comings and Goings

I don't know much about astrology but since I have so many friends who do I'm never short of someone to explain me to myself in terms of the stars. Right now, still jet-lagged from a trip that whisked me from England to California to New England and back to Old England again, I am reflecting – for the hundredth time – that travel can be especially tough on us Cancerian types who are loth to leave our sheltering shells.

First, there's the preparatory grief about leaving home. This time, I had to depart just as the bluebells down in the woods were reaching a state of perfection, the hawthorn tree outside our bathroom window was bursting into leaf and the dawn chorus each morning was a crescendo of delight. It's a particularly tough time of year to have to go away, especially when one is a keen gardener. But when family members set their wedding dates they don't usually consider the annual bluebell cycle or the needs of seeds. So this time, I had no choice.

The pain of leaving, when blended with the excitement about the forthcoming trip and reunion with distant loved ones, always creates such a weird state of mind that checklists are for me an essential guide to staying sane and focused in the week before departure. Thanks to my lists, I usually make it out of the door with everything I need and all the necessary switches and taps turned off. Even so, I worry for several hours that I have forgotten something important that will cause the house to burn down as soon as I am out of sight (despite the fact that it has been sitting there intact since 1733).

Then there's the travel itself, with all the physical and mental disruption it causes. I really don't think it is good for the human body to be hurtled around the stratosphere in a pressurised, steel capsule at six hundred miles an hour, strapped into a narrow seat, breathing stale, endlessly recirculated air, and eating weird substances out of little plastic containers. Neither is it easy to find oneself disgorged at the other end into a completely different time zone. The reward, of course, is the ecstatic hugs of reunion that wait just beyond the customs hall. I'd suffer anything to get those.

Despite the delight of being there, homesickness still grips me the very first night away from home, just as it did when I was a child on a longed-for visit to grandparents. Like many other animals, I sleep best in my own, familiar den, where the walls hold me safe, the night-time creaks have known origins and the sheets smell right. During my youth, I learned to suppress the homesickness but now I am in my seventies it seems to have become worse again, for some reason.

I adjust, of course. And within three or four days, I feel perfectly fine and normal. But then, all too soon, the trip is over and we have reached the most horrid part of all – the tearful, agonising goodbyes. "I just can't keep doing this", I said to myself this time, between sobs, while tying my shoelaces back up again on the other side of Security. But I can, of course. And I shall. For as long as I am physically able. It is what goes with having a geographically distributed family. My daughter and I like to think of each painful parting as a beginning – our 'payment' for the next batch of happy reunion hugs.

Now I am back home, waking late, dealing with a mountain of mail, a garden-turned- jungle and all the problems of re-adjustment. Nothing feels normal again yet. But in a few days, it will. It always does.

The view from the bathroom window is like a snow scene now, for the hawthorn tree is flowering. So are the wisteria and the campions, the hedge parsley and the wild garlic. While I was away, the swallows returned. I wonder if they find their annual comings and goings easier than I do. They probably do. Since most of them hatch in May, they are not Cancerians. That must surely help.

And speaking of help, I have some in the form of Bach flower remedies. There is honeysuckle for the homesickness, walnut for coping with change and mimulus for fear of all the things I am afraid of, like flying. I also take melatonin tablets for a few days at each end and try to get as much sunshine as I can, both of which help to re-set the body clocks.

There's to be another family wedding in July. Two overseas trips in one year is bad news, environmentally, and I feel guilty about that. But I am going, anyway, and will try somehow to balance the carbon debt in other ways. So I've just started on a new checklist. And I have already paid for the arrival hugs. They cost me a lot but they will be worth it.

Gardens of the Mind
Today is a special day. There’s a day like this every year – usually some time in January – and it is a day I enjoy very much. It is the day I place my seed order for the 2007 growing season.
I have two gardens. One of them is the garden that I see when I look out of the window, or when I put my boots on and wander up the path looking for something to pick. At this time of year, it is a rather dismal scene out there. The kale plants are trying valiantly to produce new leaves faster than we can pick them, but with the days still short, the light still scarce and the cold, north wind blowing, it is a real struggle for them, and they are looking leaner and stragglier every day. Likewise the spinach, though it huddles closer together and closer to the ground than the kale, as though it is trying to keep warm. There is still quite a lot of rocket (arugula) that had not quite gotten around to bolting when the cold weather came and is still hanging in there, its leaves more peppery now than they were back in the summer.
Elsewhere, I see the bare stalks of plants long dead, some half fallen bean poles with the brown and withered remnants of stems still wound around them and the early signs of a new weed invasion. A shrivelled bean pod lies, black and mummified, in the middle of a patch of bare earth. The only colour in this garden besides green and brown and black is a bright splash of orange where a lone calendula plant is flowering, happily defiant against the frosty nights and the cold, drab days.
But the other garden – well I wish you could see it. It is a glorious, multicoloured slice of heaven, bright with flowers, rich with vegetables and fruit, neat and tidy and yet natural-looking and abundant, a veritable cornucopia of delight.
In that other garden, the roses don’t have black spot, there are virtually no weeds (except a few dendelions, which I like to put in salads) and of course there is no slug or snail within miles.This garden, unfortunately, only exists for a short time each year. And no-one else but me can see it. It comes into being on this special day in January, as I pore over the illustrations in the seed catalogues and carefully, with much thought, place my order. It lasts until about July, when reality finally sets in and I admit, once again, that reality can never match the vision.
This year, I say to myself, it will be different. This year, I will pull the weeds before they are big enough to strangle anything. This year, nothing will get out of hand. This year, all my seed will germinate, the slugs won’t destroy the bok choy, the mice won’t eat those precious and expensive (only four in a packet) cucumber seedlings, no containers or hanging baskets will dry out, the Brussells sprouts will actually have proper sprouts on them instead of miserable little things the size of peas and there will be flowers blooming absolutely everywhere. You wait. This year, I really will create that other garden. The one I dream about every January.