Jesus’s Gardening Time
As Epiphany approaches, the devout converge on the cathedral to honour the stained glass windows in which Christ recycles his Christmas tree.
He sets out just before ten to six, ragged cloud breaking on a horizon of muddy pink, these subtle moments before sunrise the only element depicted with grisaille. He comes to a fork in the road. The more inviting left-hand branch leads to the Christmas tree plantation. Other Christological plants are illustrated in round corner panes. These include the bramble, the peace lily, the Carpenteria and the Jerusalem artichoke. But Christ is taking the right-hand fork to the Christmas tree graveyard. In his left hand he carries the corpse of his tree. He had left it by the compost bin for a bit, then used clippers to hack through the outer growth, leaving a trunk with stumps. This will be fed into a chipper and used as a mulch on the civic rose beds, as we are shown by means of a rose-shaped thought pane inset above Christ’s head.
Christ takes a shortcut through a patch of woodland. The sun is rising and he is depicted within a pattern of black branches outlined with strands of tangerine light, trailing, winding and linking infinite numbers of pathways. He is trying to compose a poem. Time is lying in shafts across his path. He can see it and so can we, thanks to Devastée’s use of Norwegian tinted glass and a compositional device that flings the eye all over the place. He pauses briefly to check in with the Virgin. She is on her way to Glory but not yet enthroned in Heaven. God is busy.
In the next window, Christ has arrived at the recycling heap but in front of it stands a hand- written sign on a post: “No more Christmas trees”. Even so, Christ adds his spent tree to the pile. He picks up the placard and sets forth like someone at a protest march.
Now Christ has arrived at the garden centre. He is holding an advice surgery for customers with gardening queries. Next to him stands a beige pot containing a bunch of oversized fabric poppies of fading scarlet with greyish leaves and an artistic floor lamp in the form of a twisting vine, the bulbs housed in two clusters of glass grapes. Either he has been to a jumble sale or he started carting this gear around in the early seventies.
The barrel in which I planted my 20-year-old camellia has now rotted away. The boughs are struggling to support a profusion of new buds and thorny stems which are growing into a network of recurring dreams. My partner reports that during these dreams I thrash around. They have sustained a number of injuries – chains of shallow perforations, each marked by a small bead of blood, identical in shade to the petals of the camellia.
Christ spends a few moments in reflection.
The camellia can be a difficult shrub – a mysterious, beautiful and seductive plant that, from the moment of its introduction into the garden catches you off balance, a master of obfuscation, adept at manipulation. Early molecular analysis divided the genus into two subgenera with seven sections and thirteen informal subsections. Cutworms and aggressive moths such as angle shades will assail your plant, intent on decimation. The form of your counter-attack will depend upon the time of year and soil conditions. The keenest gardeners venture eagerly and playfully into the unknown, secateurs gleaming in the sunlight or dripping in the rain. Problem-solving is a process of mobile information management and force diversion.
Christ extends a hand and one of the grape clusters lights up, accentuating the dust in its grooves.
The art is to hold yourself in calm readiness until the moment for remedial action arrives, at which point you must direct your power beyond the object of your attention, creating a viable channel into the future. You may experience a sense of sudden loss as your problem vanishes. We call this a negative space and regard it as a thing of great spiritual power – riches that in time you will come to value.
What shall I do with the camellia, Christ?
Prune it hard back as the first frosts bite and feed with vodka and multivitamins until cured.
Another questioner raises a hand.
My garden is small but I want it to look large, Christ. My husband has bought a parasol with cantilevered base weight and a perforated steel fire pit. What action can I take?
Gardening in a small space requires complex and unusual methods, a willingness to daringly tear apart disparate elements, to overlay and interweave textures and shades, forging lyrical abstractions from subtle atmospheric washes and brilliant or translucent hues, drawing upon a personal vocabulary of signs to achieve a specific resonance.
In my work for a well known client I made bold use of dark corridors and enigmatic Vorticist forms using a grey palette to express a profound undertow of despair and a necessary indifference. Even in a small garden there is usually space for a weeping tree. A weeping purple beech. Lighting can be used strategically. It helps you to see. Don’t be afraid of shadows – they also help you to see and illuminate the imagination. Diminutive alpine beauties sheltering under large lettuces can create an arresting display. Towers of strawberry and cactus will impress visitors.
In another small client’s garden, a rampantly prostrate creeping crabapple, a limbed structure of extraordinary horror, established an overpowering presence over the plot, recalling conflicted childhood memories and presenting a system of allusions, reflections and correspondences such that events could no longer be observed from a detached viewpoint. On close inspection it was clear that the tree spanned two generations and that no portion could be excised without irreparable damage to the whole. Thus in a short space death took away root and branch, mother and daughter. What is a small garden, anyway, apart from a value judgement?
The other grape lamp lights up, unbidden.
My vegetable plot is a disaster, Christ. Despite using ICI Liquid Growmore, my edibles only produce fleshy little flowers with clogged arteries and swollen veins which seldom rise from their beds and form scab-shaped clumps. Disappointedly short-lived, my leeks are jagged stumps with no real prospects. The layout is unsightly. Hanging baskets of wilted hay at head height are an ever present danger; elaborately moulded urns based on styles popular in the gardens of the Italian Renaissance are a humiliating embodiment of hubris. An ill-chosen chequerboard design dominates the plot. Every alternate slab is left out and the space filled with a different pest-ridden specimen, limiting progress around the garden to a halting limp. My only harvest is woe. Can you offer counsel?
See the lichen growing on my scars. See my tunic trimmed with white flowers, their red eyes crimson portals into my phantasmagorical interior. I have a hard time when people criticise me, some whispering, some shouting, some stroking their beards. You are at one and the same time an exile from your own garden and a prisoner within it, your latent wishes dying with your withered crops, exposing you as a useless scarecrow in a vast desert, an anonymous stranger standing at the corner of a murder scene, the spectral twin of your slain self.
The customer is holding their head in their hands but now Christ rises and picks up one of the old fake poppies from the jar. Suddenly it blazes into life, sap like elixir spreading up the stem and painting it the colours of paradise. Christ hands it to the despairing gardener along with a business card emblazoned with his website address.
He finishes his latte and looks for the next questioner.
Christ, my garden seems to want me to leave it alone but I have ideas I would like to try out. What would you do?
Buddhists and scientists agree that we are unconsciously always looking for an enemy; imaginary sabre-toothed bacteria biting into our parasympathetic nervous systems; genuine small, dark flea beetles jumping up and down relentlessly on our cabbage and fuchsia.
Making inroads is a game of tactics. Winning your garden over can start with a small gesture. Try presenting a bunch of words to your favourite flower. You are small and nervous, so beware of hot colours. Approach the garden after nightfall, when white insects will be pollinating the nighttime plants.
At dawn, notice how the colour varies between internal and external petals. Is there an emotional conflict? Are the anthers and stigma held high in isolation? Is the flower nodding in agreement or shaking its head? If you are lucky, your garden will help you change your mindset. You may think that you do not like delphiniums but if you fix your eyes on a point a few feet behind them, they will go blurry and you can start to see beyond your prejudice. Listen intently as the seasons edge from one to the next, whispering I’ll be back.
Think about the effect you are trying to achieve. The politically complacent plants of the eighties provide an amusing diversion from the socio-economic catastrophes of right now, which even so will rightly find expression in the creaking and thumping of damaged fencing. Rebellious plants like marijuana may also make their way on to your plot. Pull them out angrily and crush their foliage. See the flash of your trowel tearing through the fibrous mat of roots. Death is something to embrace.
Christ, give me the power to turn pink hydrangeas blue.
When you return home they will already be blue.
What about Christ’s garden? Of course everyone wanted to know what it was like but no one dared to ask. Countless different access points led into it, which seemed egalitarian. Returning throughout the seasons revealed its restless and ever-changing spirit. Christ was quite clumsy around the garden. Even during periods of quiet reflection he would often spill scalding coffee on his hand as the differing impulses of the Active and the Contemplative life clashed.
Some of his unsuccessful planting schemes brought him to tears. Anemones had been springing up in his wake ever since Golgotha, undaunted by shade, drought or weedkiller and he basically ignored them, but his agapanthus had taken seven centuries to flower. The blissful scent of bubblegum led visitors to the more successful sensory borders which teemed with excitable mauve blooms wearing happy yellow hats. Christ was a great advocate of gravel. The more he used it the more he appreciated its merits. Gravel can look superb on its own or as part of a bigger plan. By contrast, another area of the garden was set aside as wilderness – a microcosm of a corrupt world in which the rule of law is meaningless – but the area was too small to effectively illustrate the implications of a moral void.
Christ brought an ageless knowledge both universal and particular to the place and believed that the oldest life forms could inspire the newest forms of creativity. One of the focal points was a water feature made out of a dustbin lid in less than an hour. It provided endless twinkling interest and pleasure. But some of summer’s deadliest sights are to be seen at the bottom of the pond. These include disguised scorpions breathing poisonous marsh gas and angry water beetles tearing tadpoles to shreds. Weird mushroom circles appeared in dark corners of the garden and if you squinted they looked like seven little women dressed in white performing a traditional clog dance. They were easy to propagate. Christ simply washed the flesh from the bones, ground onto blotting paper and transferred into loam. Eventually they would escape.
Christ, a relative has given me an acid yellow dwarf conifer. Through no fault of theirs, it has awakened a rage in me that cannot be vanquished. It dominates my thoughts and I can still see it when I close my eyes. May I destroy it?
You must first establish whether or not the shrub is real. Place it in a sheltered spot where no observers are posted. Wear an abstract garment to blend your texture, colour and feelings into a stealthy aesthetic consensus. Slowly retreat from the pine. As you move, gravity will tug at the fleshier parts of your body, prompting you to reflect on the spoiled medlar and the spore-crazed plum. As you reflect and withdraw, the laws of perspective will guarantee that the shrub becomes smaller and smaller. Look deeply into the moment and understand it as a temporal stratum banded with boredom, delight and gaps which may accommodate troubling impulses.
Spend time cultivating an empty space. A lush green sward can be a formidable weapon if mowed mindfully.
What about the conifer, Christ?
Whether real or imaginary, the conifer is evergreen and the emotional response it elicits will over time prove its value as a litmus test of your progress towards self-mastery.
Christ has not had time to answer every questioner; many are anxious and restless as he rises to leave. Some have brought photographs or samples of their garden. One man wishes to present a non-hearting lettuce which has miraculously grown a heart and a woman nearby is holding out a jet brooch inset with a ladybird that escaped her Venus fly trap, convincing her to take up yoga. But Christ is dematerialising before them. He has a lot on his mind.
God is breeding experimental shrubs whose sludge coloured petals mimic the rubbery features of famous venture capitalists. They emit a weak electric current and work well as insectocutors. God’s motives are not always clear to Christ and he wonders how God intends to anchor this new species epistemologically or if he is just arsing around. It’s often hard to tell.
Cover image: small doll in garden, courtesy of writer.