Rediscovered

I went over to mum's last night and we were looking at instruction videos on putting up a polytunnel. I am researching them at the moment - tempted by the best, but aware longevity might not be the most important box to tick. There's a difference of about £200 between the best and the first I looked at.  It reminded me of a poem I had published years ago in The Frogmore Papers, based in Lewes, that I never included in a collection but which now feels like a forerunner to a more recent, and yet to be published poem about Mum's new garden. This older one is about the garden she left behind in Tunbridge Wells, with its bouncy lawn and views over a valley, where we fell asleep in summer and ate under an umbrella. Where Mum had a writing shed with wallpaper.

My mother’s garden

She’s trying to decide where to put an eyeless male head,

so it won’t scare her. Maybe in the wygelia

or among the delphiniums? She grows colour, patches of light

and shade, hiding places. She has benches to follow the sun.

She offers sanctuary to the wind from Greenland, carrying

strands of silk, rustling leaves and snow, stocking wilder beds

with hellebores, succulents. Her garden overlooks a valley

decorated with country houses. It’s calmed by poppies,

white clematis flowers big as side plates. The fence is heavy

with roses and honeysuckle. Sparrows wash in their own stone bath,

squirrels steal peanuts from the feeder. Listen to the steam train

hoot. A gardener needs to sing to her seedlings.

She’s accompanied by the robin, millipedes and flint spearheads. 

She likes the rain on her neck, percussion of a rake on stones.

My mother’s garden takes time. It flows from her fingers
and she digs time into the borders, sows it in her smallest pots.