For journalist Ruth O’Connor, gardening allowed her grief to grow into hope…
My garden is a raised bed no bigger than 11’ square, but, though small in size, it represents something much bigger. It is a microcosm of my parents’ suburban garden populated by plants moved in a time of great sorrow which now brings me great solace.
I do not find my parents in the hard gravel of Mount Jerome cemetery, but in the rich soil of a little plot in my local community garden in the Ringsend & Irishtown Community Centre. I find my parents in the dancing foxgloves of white and spotted purple – receptacles for bees half the size of my thumb. I find their spirit in the sway of pale pink Japanese anemones, in the majestic trumpets of calla lilies and in the bowed heads of the understated hellebores – heralders of brighter days ahead.
As an apartment dweller with no garden of my own, my little patch with its solomon’s seal and osteospernum, its sedum and astilbe, has calmed the storms of sadness that raged through my heart after my mother’s sudden death. As her house went to market, I dug up some of her plants and hacked at others – dividing them desperately through angry tears.
I mourned the loss of the garden where we once ate salad sandwiches in the wendy house and played on Dad’s homemade orange and yellow seesaw, where we dressed Smokey the cat in our dolls clothes and wore fuschia ‘earrings’ – clipped close to our unpierced ears.
Once a bare suburban patch of grass where my newly-married mother was shocked to encounter a cow one morning (fields once occupying the site of today’s main road), over the decades my parents created a private oasis, a cottage garden of sorts, with rambling roses, clematis, camellias and peonies – their knowledge growing in tandem with the seeds they sowed through reading, trial and error and an evangelical addiction to Gardener’s World.
The plants they nurtured can now be found in others’ gardens – thrust desperately into their hands before the house sold, and in my little patch, granted just in time, in Ringsend where the wind has more salt than the suburbs, the smell of seaweed rises on the high Liffey tide and kindness grows like weeds.
They are found now at the confluence of the Dodder – in which my father once caught eels as a wayward lad – and the Grand Canal – a stone’s throw from my mother’s childhood home. There the swans beat their wings on the water ‘whumpf whumpf’ as they rise, the oil slick cormorant dives, the blackbird trills and finches undulate from tree to tree. A close encounter with a curious fox was a thrilling moment at dusk one evening as it walked right up and considered me for a moment before disappearing lightning-quick through the fence and along the narrow river wall.
I realise now that gardening is an optimistic pursuit. The very act of it forces you to look forward not back – to sow the seeds of tomorrow today. Gardeners are at one with life’s seasons – they sit easy with death and decay while they nurture life and vitality. The verdant green plants that now thrive in my little plot were planted during a harsh hot dry spell two summers ago. And just as they have survived adversity, they’ve taught me that so too can I.