When Ellen suggested writing this piece on balancing being rooted with the tension of holding things lightly, it really landed with me. I feel this friction regularly and the seeming contradiction often bubbles away in the background of any personal gardening I do. Before the current place we call home, I moved house roughly every couple of years on average in my adult life. So every place has always felt very impermanent. Of course, nothing is forever, but the notion of home to me has always felt decidedly temporary.
I often wonder about how this affects my gardening, and also my ability to become rooted, perhaps even indigenous, to place. How does this state of mind hold me back? Does it hold me back? I wonder about what it would mean to garden and to live as though I was committed to this place whilst also knowing that I am physically not.
Ellen’s article and this train of thought also made me reflect on similar themes in justice work. When it comes to climate and racial justice, we might help sow and nurture seeds and take action that we may never see the fruits of. But there are those who choose to undertake the effort and work anyway in love and hope.
What would it mean to live knowing and feeling we are deeply rooted and entangled with all of life before us, around us and that which will continue after us?
Overwintering the future, by Ellen Wilson
It is a deep grey November day, the sky darkening at 2:30pm as I cycle across a south Bristol council estate to fetch a young person I work with from school, cars with their headlights on against the gloom. By the time I drop him home it is 5pm and dark, and I am scrabbling in my coat pockets for bike lights, dragging my high vis jacket from the bottom of my pannier. 5pm and nightfall. It always takes me by surprise.
I planted the broad beans and garlic this morning under the deep grey frowning sky. Gloved hand dipping holes into the dark earth, dropping in the shrivelled brown beans and hard cloves of garlic, shoving the extra papery skins into my jacket pocket. The beans and cloves will sit under the dark earth through the autumn rains, the first frosts, the snowfalls of deep winter, the cold snaps of early spring, growing slowly, hardening themselves in the sleep of the year to emerge anew. This is the moment when the allotment turns from summer abundance to winter stillness, when the old year plants are gathered and composted, when I start sketching plans for next year.
Only this year we most likely won’t be here to see this harvest. We are moving, away from this plot I have called my own for the last three years. Maybe I will be here for when the first green bean shoots come through, putting plastic bottle cloches over them to keep away the rats that love to dig them up right at that moment. However by the time the plans are growing in earnest it will be our friends Mark and Jake, or our allotment neighbours, who tend to them. Maybe it will even be the next tenant of plot 34a, happy to take over a thriving little patch, who pick the shiny green pods and lift the swelling papery bulbs, who take them home to cook fresh summer meals in their Bristol kitchen. Some might say, what’s the point of all this work, the sweat of clearing the beds, my dirty hands, the cold seeping in through the soles of my welly boots. What’s the point when we won’t be here?
But I am still planting, leaning into the process, the thrum and rhythm of the year, the putting into the soil, investing in plants that will grow slowly overwinter, then race into spring, bursting new life and food earlier than anything else. I like the promise of the overwinter, the freshly planted rows when the rest of the plot is being covered over for the cold, tucked up in black plastic. Here I am planting hope.
I am still planting too, because I am a tenant - literally, in the case of the allotment, paying my rent every year to the council. But I am also a tenant spiritually - a steward of this patch of land for nature and for the community. So I will compost this bed and plant my organic seeds, spend hours pulling up weeds and protecting them from rats and slugs, encouraging the slow worms. I will invest in this land, for future generations of people who will tramp down here in the early mornings with their flasks of coffee, breath coming in clouds of steam, carrying a bag of kitchen scraps for the compost and an old yoghurt pot of eggshells for the slugs. It is a passing of the baton, a nod to the next folk, an acknowledgement that our time is fleeting but important.
And isn’t this, perhaps, the approach that our current crisis might need from us all? In our capitalist paradigm so many of us have been for so long too egocentric about our approach to this planet. We have attempted to claim ownership where we have none, to view the resources we have available to us personally as for our use alone, and not for a harvest that can be shared. We have not looked past our own tenancy of the land and asked what future tenants might need. We have not been humble enough to look to other models, other people, who have taken the long view for much longer.
And maybe this is the balance I have always been searching for. I have never managed to hold the tension of wanting to feel at home, settled, like I belong in a community, with the competing desire to move, to be free, to be untethered. Maybe the answer is exactly this - rooting where I am, but holding everything lightly enough to be ready for the next adventure. Plant the broad beans knowing you will not harvest them. Invest in young people knowing you will never see what impact your work might have on their future lives. Be kind to those you meet, not knowing when you will see them again. Root, aware that you may be transplanted when spring comes around.
So I will not plant all my onions and garlic this year. As ever, I have bought too many. I could fill every bed on the allotment with them if I wanted. Instead, I will plant a small bed of onions, garlic and beans. I will give away many - to friends, random queers, allotment neighbours. And some I will plant in big pots of soil, along with my strawberry runners and raspberry cane cuttings. I will plant them ready for next spring to load into a van and drive over the bridge to Wales, ready to root in new soil and start the next adventure.
Ellen Wilson is a youth worker and allotment holder in south Bristol. In her spare time she writes and campaigns about youth work, nature and social justice.
Ellen is being paid for this article.