Dreaming of the Garden by Jess Henshall – Part I
I dreamt of the garden.
Connected to hospital wires and surrounded by machines sounding my heart rate, I dreamt of the garden, and when I was home I dreamt of it still. I thought of how much it must be changing without me. The ferns would be coming up now, their disfigured coils unfurling into the gaps winter left. I used to watch them day by day growing outwards until the edges of the garden were softened by their green, but I could not watch them from inside the house. Whilst I lay confined to my bed, in the bottom terrace the hawthorn would be wearing its first leaves, and as I cried at the pain of learning to walk again, the goldfinches would be returning to nest and raise their brood in the safety of the granite retaining wall. I envied them for being in my garden when I could not.
Last year, diagnosed with a rare hip condition and increasingly restricted by my body, the garden became my connection to the natural world. It was my refuge from pain and windowless rooms, but surgery and its months of recovery took it from me.
I dreamt the smell of honeysuckle. Of bay, rosemary, and thyme. Essential oil could never replace crushing sun-baked lavender between fingertips, and vases of drooping blooms only made me long more for my garden in spring, its season of reawakening and abundance.
I thought the garden was leaving me behind.
Suffocated by the brown-beige walls of my bedroom, I read books written by other people about other landscapes, and then resented them for being able to walk paths I never will. On glaring screens I watched someone else’s garden take shape as mine lay out of reach on the other side of a window I couldn’t stand close enough to see out of.
The world had always made more sense to me amongst nature, my thoughts quieter in the presence of bird song and the changing shades of green. I could lose myself for a while watching the miniature happenings of ants climbing up the branches of the hawthorn in search of aphids, or the bees drunkenly straying between flower heads in their pursuit of pollen. All I could do now was imagine it. I thought it would be a consolation knowing that these things were still happening, that life carries on, but I felt so confined inside that knowing it was happening without me brought frustration and a kind of loneliness that had nothing to do with an absence of people.
Being trapped in my body was kindling to my overactive mind and tendency towards depression. Reality swayed like I knew the fennel would in a small breeze. I was fixated on everything I thought I was missing in the garden. The foxgloves opening; the hawthorn’s blossom and the great tits in its branches; the honeysuckle’s sweet nectar; the Japanese anemones flowering; the sea pinks disrupting the green.
I dreamt of the garden.
I dreamt, and as I dreamt I forgot that as I was lying dormant, so was the world. Late winter had stalled the growth of spring, so when I finally took my first careful steps down the sloping granite and into the terraced garden, it was all there as I remembered.
My garden had waited for me.
IN MY GARDEN: TREES
Bay / Laurus nobilis
Fig / Ficus carica
Hawthorn / Crataegus persimilis 'Prunifolia'
Olive / Olea europaea
Rowan / Sorbus hupehensis
by Jess Henshall