Everything's coming up violets- Change resistance and gardening

If you've come looking for something deep and meaningful today, sorry I'm all out! I have frivolous and opinionated and probably wildly wrong instead... this post is going to ramble... sometimes I just have to.

My room/view sometime in the early noughties!

I feel deeply connected to certain places... I loved the house I grew up in. In particular I loved two things. I loved the view from my window and I loved the garden. My room was a shrine to flora! The 1990s had brought me a fabric with ribbons and bows and imagined flowers set on a yellow and white stripe. When IKEA had that advert where they encouraged Britons to chuck out their chintz I believed they had my fabric in mind!

My room looked out over a large back garden. The fortuitous plot which the natural incline of the hill had provided gave me a view straight into the trees from my bed. And when I stood by the window I could really only see greenery unless I was compelled to open the window wide, crane my neck and snatch an almost hidden view of Dudley Castle!

Now my parents had created from scratch pretty much everything I could see below my window. The garden, when they had moved into the house in 1983, was just a post construction muddy slope with no topsoil and more importantly NO WORMS! I was born in the spring of 1984 and my parents had set about planning a garden which tried to bend the strange and unusual shaped plot to their will. As that garden grew so did I... parts flourished, some things over grew, they changed, they adapted. It once accommodated an entire playset- swing, slide, see-saw, climbing frame. One hot summer my grandfather built us a never completed brick Wendy House in one corner. I learnt from my father about soil composition and how to dig, hoe, edge lawns, and plant seeds. I learnt about the various creepy crawlies that dwell beneath our feet and even now I have the most beautiful and vivid memory of, as a small child, singing gently to the butterflies as they rested on flowers and truly believing they heard me. 

18 months ago my parents moved from my childhood home forever, a place I loved and I'll never see that view again. That which was once my haven will never be again... and for many reasons lately this has made me feel a deep sense of loss.

I am as resistant to change as the next person. We fear the unknown, it is what makes us prejudiced, it is what makes us wary of others. And in the 21st Century in particular I believe it is often the reason we don't know our neighbours. I moved from my parents home in 2007 and I live on an estate... I'm surrounded by other houses. I once made a rough calculation of how many households lived within a 100m radius of my front door. I got to about 90 households and then sort of gave up with the scale of it all... That could easily be 300 to 500 people living right on top of where I am and I have no idea about who most of them are! Most of the time I try not to think about it, doing so might make me go a bit bananas, but every so often it bothers me. Occasionally an ambulance will stop on our block and someone might be in trouble, or I'll hear a child crying or some other reminder, that behind our closed doors we're all living our separate lives.

And so I come to my garden at the front of my house.  British households tend to garden their back yards

and leave the front of the house to itself... unlike many of our American cousins who have porches and sit out front in a neighbourly way. If you started occupying a seat in a suburban front garden in the UK people would comment, it's just not the done thing! And this is why I love my front garden so much, I intend one day to put a seat out front, just to be subversive. Because when I garden the quite frankly meager patch of earth between my kitchen window and the pavement something magical happens. I see children playing, people stop and comment on how pretty things are looking. Dogs leap up to say hello and their owners stand and talk a while if they wish. I want to see a tiny revolution take place where I live... I want to see more people out in front of their houses. I want to be able to walk through my neighborhood and stop and chat with them about their flowers and their planting.

I've been out there today trimming the lavender and starting to sweep up leaves and put the place to bed for the winter. I've noticed something quite interesting in the past few weeks, considering we've reached December... my garden is resistant too. It's been resisting autumn... a couple of spring and summer flowering plants have had another go at waking up again before the winter... and very soon we'll get a hard frost one morning or some snow and all thought of them staying up all through the cold will fall quickly away. I am always deeply amazed by the skill of plants... from the tiniest origins they form into so much... stuff! The sweetly scented cuttings of lavender filling my green waste bin every December are testament that fact.

This winter everything is coming up violets for me. I planted some violets the summer before last and there doesn't seem to be part of the garden... pot or flowerbed which they don't seem to have infiltrated via their tiny light weight seed spreading! I love this, it feels like nature is helping me garden, adjusting my vision for the space, bending my will slightly. And so as I grow to love a new place and it grows for me I find myself settling season on season to find joy in the small changes I can make to my surroundings. And I attempt to become less resistant to the changes which are enacted upon me.

If you want to see pictures from my garden check out my Pinterest for some captured close ups of how I see my garden. http://www.pinterest.com/alezed/my-urban-paradise/