Who are your garden?

1 - Where is your garden?
2 - What is your garden?
3 - How is your garden?
4 - Who are your garden?

1 - Does your garden simply exist at ground level, a sea of horizontal green or does it extend its abundant dynamism above your house? Does it reach down into the soil, working wonders with the world of hyphae and unseeable kin, or reach out as rambling runners under the fence and into the wild world?

Does your garden stretch up high to feed the swifts, to float with spiders and spores who spawned within the transitory boundaries of what you call garden.  Does it twine and wind itself around and across ad-hoc water bodies of hibernating creatures, exploring the mysterious soggy underworlds.

Does your garden dive down deep underground – under the road and hard surfaces, deep down then up again to converse with the roots of the plants in the verge across the road? Does it spill into the street, topple out of window boxes, scramble up the drain pipe and dance in the wind?

Maybe you corral your garden into neat edges or cultivate its frothy bounty till it frothy stops?

2 - Is your garden as flat and neat and square and co-ordinated as your living room, does it have sofas and tables and chairs and rugs – is it your living room? Is your garden a series of garden rooms – again, is it your living room? Or is your garden full of creature noise, full of death and life and all the bites and bumps and broken leaves in between? Is it distinctly outside, with outside feels – with worm casts and spider webs, leaf litter and senescing solidago, birch bark and compost piles? Is your garden something unknown and somehow collaborative. Have you planned it down to the last pebble, the last blade of grass and grain of sand? Does it match this and that, light up at night…..give the birds a fright?

3 - Is your garden ok? Can it help itself, can it organise itself to help itself? Is there enough of it to oil the wheels of its ecology? Maybe there is only the tree, the fence and the astroturf. Is your garden ok? Does it smell of jasmin or plastic, roses or roundup, creosote or pine needles? Do passing bees on borrowed time -all bee time is borrowed - stop because it’s worth their while, do butterflies hang around before they’ve earnt their wings?

Is there honeysuckle to sip

or yew berries

to roll in your mouth

for your tongue to eject the pip

4 – Lastly, I have to ask you – who are your garden?

Lucky as you are, to be gifted such an exquisite seedbank – have you, like us all, wrenched open this living matter to insert some synthetic body with a very fine name, classified and organised down to its cultivator - drenched in who knows what from who knows where.

Who are your garden? Who are that border? Who are that hedge?