The contractors arrived when the baby was three weeks old. I cut all the tulips and narcissi that were in, or about to, bloom and filled the kitchen table up with vases. Then I stood at the kitchen window, newborn slung around my body, and watched as the garden I’d spent nearly three years making was unearthed into a mountain of soil.
Perhaps the timing was mad, but it made sense to me: I wanted the garden to work for this new phase of my life. I wanted somewhere to sit in dappled sunlight with the baby. I wanted flowerbeds that would look cohesive, with a limited plant palette that was straightforward to maintain. I needed a space to write in, now that the baby slept where my desk used to sit. I admitted that having a lawn was probably a good idea. The baby was tiny. My body was still healing. My garden was having its own kind of rebirth.
The most I’ve learned about gardening with a baby is that it must happen in snatches
We didn’t have the kind of balmy, laid-back summer I envisaged when I thought I’d be sitting outside with him, but I am writing this in the garden studio – and he’s still slung around my body, asleep if considerably heavier. Five months in and the most I’ve learned about gardening with a baby is that it must happen in snatches.
I’d weed with one hand, his body curled against my other arm, a few square centimetres at a time
He was small and conveniently immobile when the heatwave struck, and as he lay on a playmat or sat in a bouncer on the lawn, I’d manage 40 blissful minutes nearby – perhaps cutting back the ivy I should have attended to weeks earlier, or planting up the bare new beds. Deadheading was done after bedtime, and I enjoyed the meditative pause of it as I shook off another day of jiggling and feeding and playing and singing. I’d weed with one hand, his body curled against my other arm, a few square centimetres at a time.
People told me the baby would eat the gravel, the lawn will soon become a football pitch.
I feel naive writing about motherhood and gardening – I’m pretty new at this whole thing, and I know from others that it soon becomes more challenging, when there are determined toddlers and, later, when ball games are involved. When I shared snippets of the new garden design on social media people were swift to point out all the challenges I had ahead of me: the baby would eat the gravel, the lawn will soon become a football pitch.
But what they didn’t tell me was how my garden would change in meaning. I had some expectations of this – I spent months interviewing women, some of them mothers, in and about their gardens for my book Why Women Grow – but the reality has, as with so many things to do with this whole parenting lark, surprised me. I now undertake my morning inspections of the garden with him in tow; his body stills in wonder as he takes in the sounds and smells of the outside and encourages me to notice more, too. My garden has become a baby sensory playground; I clock the sky through the slats in the arbour, the dance of a hollyhock stem in the wind, the tickle of long grass in his tight little fists. Slugs are no longer just irritants, but something else to teach him about.
Babies don’t particularly need gardens but I’ve never craved mine more
And yet, the garden is somehow still my space, for all that we must share it. It is out here that I claw back minutes to work, let the frustrated tears out and – one day, I hope – enjoy the steam from a cup of tea on a crisp, cool morning, alone. Babies don’t particularly need gardens – they can have as much stimulation in a park – but I’ve never craved mine more.
I suspect the years to come will see only more of this uneasy balance: how to enable curiosity and play at the expense of beloved flowers, how to impart my love of the outdoors without dictating his, how to sit back and release yet more control in a space I’ve created. But gardens hold things well, and grow into the new challenges we offer them. I hope I can do the same.