Life, death, and gardening

A family funeral and a new book

I dream of a small home with an enormous garden. In fact, what I’ve been considering is purchasing a piece of land, parking a shepherd’s hut on it, and gardening around it for as far as the land is mine.

Planning permission is a real shitter, though, and so at the moment it remains a dream and there are all sorts of highly complicated, exclusive-land-use carve outs for ‘proper’ people who work in agriculture ‘professionally’. I don’t know. That’s not my aisle of the store, I worked exclusively in family law.

[ Prospect Cottage, photograph by Howard Sooley ] [ source ]

I am reading Derek Jarman’s 'Modern Nature: Journals 1989 - 1990’ (or rather Jarman’s friend, the wonderful and - tragically - the late Julian Sands is reading it to me). It is a gutting piece of writing. The stark landscape of Dungeness. The constant, unrelenting, horrifying deaths of so many of his young friends. Each death a forerunner to his own, telling of the agony to come. It is almost too much to bear listening to, let alone living. His visceral anger tears through the records of roses planted, lavenders pruned.

There are, though, roses. And lavender. And a garden. And in whatever small way these things brought respite to this young man, ailing and dying, planting and pruning. Tending so gently to these living things in the face of such savage sea winds. As far as I have read, it is a tale of tenderness and savagery. Of love, sex and Thatcherism.

I have been thinking about death this week. More than usual, I mean. My sweet uncle died, and on Wednesday we gathered to grieve his death and to celebrate his life as a family.

[ The Garden at Prospect Cottage, photograph by Howard Sooley ] [ source ]

It made me think of David. I grieve for my uncle, of course. I grieve especially for my aunt, and for his children and grandchildren, whose lives have lost a tent pole. But I thought of David so much.

And I thought about my own death, and my life. I want to live and die in a garden. I want to die in the first week of June, like Vita Sackville-West, when the garden is at its best. As Ben Dark writes in ‘The Grove’:

“Vita Sackville-West died at home at Sissinghurst on the 2nd of June 1962, with her beloved rose (‘Madame Alfred Carrière’) in full flower.”

I want to die dozing off on a cast iron bed, in a meadow, wearing a white cotton nightie. I don’t mind if I am alone. We are all alone when we die, whatever people may say. We all must face that oblivion one-on-one, mono a mono. But perhaps there will be bumblebees supping nearby, or a pair of passing Cabbage Whites dancing earth’s most elegant pas de deux. Perhaps there might be a stream nearby, for soothing sound, and banks and banks of Queen Anne’s Lace as far as the eye can see.

I imagine it like Bunny Mellon’s 90th birthday party:

“[Robert Isabell] welded a cast-iron canopy bed and set it in the middle of a field of wildflowers. A pale “Bunny blue” coverlet completed the romantic picture, with floating white curtains that fell onto the grass like wedding trains.”

(From ‘Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend’ by Meryl Gordon)

[ The Garden at Prospect Cottage, photograph by Howard Sooley ] [ source ]

I’d die and be buried right there. No box, just soil and skin. Or perhaps be cremated? I find it difficult to choose. I’d like to take flight across the field and have my ashes dance on the air and sprinkle lightly on the earth and perhaps be re-baptised in the stream.

This is how I would like to die. Ideally ancient, waif-like, with deep-creased skin earned through decades of smiles, with feather-thin grey hair down to my waist, and no beeping machines, and no grey lino, and no corridors. I’d like to be old enough to be considered ‘wizen’ and ‘wise’. Though current trajectory on the latter is not promising. And family medical history a ding on the former. But no parking structures, no information desk, no wifi password. No TV mounted on a wall bracket. No perfunctory, professional pleasantries from overworked nurses. No one sitting and waiting. Or, worse, pacing.

I would like to die feeling the sun warming my face, as a light breeze brushes my skin.

“Every flower is a triumph. I’ve had more fun from this place than I’ve had with anything else in my life. I should have been a gardener.”

Derek Jarman

[ source ]

But also, this is how I want to live. Perhaps in a shepherd’s hut parked within a field of flowers. With Leo and Bella spooning me to sleep and fidgeting me awake. With books and mugs of coffee and an itchy, woollen picnic blanket, and with friends to sit beside me. I would have a cathedral of a greenhouse - as big as the Palm House at Kew - with just a small bedroom and bathroom in a hut next door.

[ Andy Salter’s home and garden, photograph by Claire Takacs ] [ source ]

That is how I’d like to see it out, I think. Like Derek Jarman - though less immediately condemned - living out a life by creating, nurturing, and loving a garden. I think Prospect Cottage has, like, three rooms. Julian Sands did tell me earlier but I’ve already forgotten. In any event, there is barely enough space within to live, because the garden is the point.

Prospect Cottage also calls to mind Andy Slater’s home and garden in Kent, another foundation stone of my hut-and-field fantasy. A perfect, sufficient home in a sea of flowers. And really, aside from the dogs and a decent coffee machine, what else do I need?