The view from the kitchen window

The snow is starting to thaw, although more is promised for tonight. The kids have been dispatched off to school, reluctantly ending the enforced holiday that stretched through the whole of last week. And although real, proper spring is still ages away, it hasn’t stopped me dreaming…

To be honest, it’s one of my favorite times of year. To be curled up on the leather sofa in front of a blazing fire, leafing through seed catalogs and fantasizing about how this year, finally, my garden will be perfect. This year I will float down the garden path in a flowered dress – definitely Laura Ashley, doubly odd because I don’t own such a garment, never have and probably never will – with a wide-brimmed hat, flat- bottomed trug and pair of secateurs in my hand. Oh, and the hat has a ribbon. Dressed thus, I will drift through my gorgeous kitchen garden. which is a beautiful as it is productive. I will gather into my antique basket only enough of the succulent organic vegetables there to make a fantastic supper for my appreciative, admiring family. 

Yeah, right. 

At the moment, the reality is the soggy field right below the kitchen window, which used to be called “the pig field.” I have begged for a change of term, and due to my insistence, we now call it (optimistically) the garden.

It is a garden that only a garden-creator with a great deal of imagination could love, much as only a brand-new mother really thinks that a brand-new baby is beautiful. It’s the eyes of love that make all the difference.

the garden - the "before" version

But this muddy, nettle-infested, pig-trodden piece of ground has a view of the sea. And I am bound and determined that we’re going to make it into something that we can use and enjoy. We bought a trampoline, swing set and picnic table in the January sales – all of which are still sitting sadly roped to the trailer, in the shed. 

But never mind – Rich actually broke earth on the garden the other day! It was before the snow came – the earth was frozen hard and the sky was clear, and he offered to dig it for me. With the digger attached to the tractor, of course. 

“What do you want dug?” he said, swinging up into the high seat of the digger.

Rich digs the first shovel-full of the garden. 1 down, 1 million to go..

That stumped me. The truth was, I hadn’t a clue. My dreamy garden sketchings in front of the fire seemed to have very little relationship to this tough, stubbly field with the big pile of bonfire ashes in the middle. But I wasn’t going to admit that. No, sir.

“A pond?” I hazarded.

“Where do you want it?”

“Over there,” I said firmly, pointing at a low spot right at the end.

“How big?” 

“Ten paces this way, and six the other way,” I said wildly, hoping that he would stop asking me questions to which that I didn’t know the answer.

He started digging, and we all watched, hypnotized. We even had a go – I had a turn, and Joli, and even Benjamin, who was in hog heaven over the whole event. 

Benjamin has a go on the digger

Rich dug out a lovely hole, and it even started to look like a pond. So much so, that I started to surprise myself and have actual ideas about how I wanted it shaped. Wider at one point, so it wouldn’t look like a box, with a sloped shelf so that wildlife could get in for a drink and get back out again without drowning….

And then one thing followed on another, and I asked Rich to dig a flat spot for the table and swing set, and then a long path connecting this bit to the pond. I’d like another path across, in a cruciform shape, and four raised beds in the four squares. I’m fantasizing, too, about a hazel tunnel planted with apple trees leading from the picnic part into the garden part, and a rose arbor by the pond…but we’ll take it one bit at a time. 

Buoyed by the physical real-ness of the pond-shaped hole, we got on the Internet and ordered pond liner and the special fiber underlay that goes underneath it to keep rocks from working up and piercing the liner. But by the time it arrived, the yard was so snowy and icy that the delivery van got stuck and Taid had to tow him out. 

So the pond languishes at the moment underneath a blanket of snow, half-filled with melted water. But I did see a cat treading lightly down to it, circling it and scanning it carefully. There were other prints around it, that must have been a fox.

And the other night, Rich announced that he was going out to have a look at the pond. That’s something different – he never would have taken a walk just to look at the old pig field. I jumped up and offered to come with him, and the two of us put on coats and wellies and crunched down through the snow. We walked along the newly-dug pathway, barely visible under the slush, down to the pond-shaped hole that is not yet a pond. It is, like my garden, teetering on the edge of becoming, and dreaming of spring…

the future pond