Snowdrop In

Tripping on nature

I’ve been looking at the snowdrops this week — in a short space of time they’ve come up everywhere in this part of England, including our garden. It’s only February and back in our old part of the world, the Hudson Valley, there’s actual snow.

When we moved into this house in August, i said hi to our new neighbors over the fence. “You must be a keen gardener!” said Emily, the pretty blonde. She and Rob are a sweet young couple with a daughter, they should be twinned with our dear neighbors in Catskill who also had a kid and filled me with a misty joy of remembering being the parent of a young child: the toys in the yard, winter coats, Christmas lights and outings.

“Umm…” was all I could say to Emily, about me being a keen gardener. I’m more a slacker gardener (forget the idea of me starting a site or podcast or YouTube channel or whatever the hell people do these days called The Slacker Gardener - I’ve already checked and there’s dozens of them started and left untended, leading to broken links and Page Not Found). Slacker Gardening with the intention of learning more and doing more as time goes by.

I can see Emily’s point as this garden is really something and these things don’t just create themselves. All the houses along this section of our road have them. They’re the width of the house and go back a long ways, and then a little further. With one more bit after that. The first time we saw the house I stood in the garden looking up at the house and said “Do I deserve something this beautiful?” The second time we looked, it felt like they’d put in an extra part at the back I didn’t remember seeing before. It was all the result of someone else’s years of work, a life’s project according to other, older neighbors down the street who knew the woman who grew up in this house who’d created all the pathways and tiers and little areas of shrubs and fruit trees and flowers and at one time a vegetable patch.

It’s a lot to take on and still try to work: to write, record and tour, we missed all of October and a lot of November coming and going to do gigs. So we found a nice young gardener who’s been coming over every week or two or whenever and helping us clear the beds and show us what’s what back there, how to cut- what to leave as is. Yes he’s tall and gentle with gorgeous long hair like something out of DH Lawrence. He also knows his stuff and through his help the bulbs of whatever is already here are already poking through the soil, we see stone and brick and tile borders that were buried under leaves and earth, small statues emerging from overgrown foliage. I feel almost embarrassed to say we have a gardener, but I see him as our garden guru like a teacher because we don’t have a lifetime or even a decade or five years to learn this stuff, it has to be dealt with now. He makes it all feel possible to get a grip on things back there, and maybe we’ll get it all in hand and say goodbye when we have it figured out. Or not. It’s different situation than back in NY where lawn mowing is such serious business if you miss one week pushing your mower it gets on top of you. It was so intense during the months of May-July that I would chase guys with lawn mowers on the backs of their trucks down the street to find someone, anyone who could help hack down the fourteen inch high grass explosion in the back of the house (if you want to go back in time and suggest No Mow May, see this woman’s battle with our old village’s old guard re her attempt to turn her yard into a meadow:

https://cbs6albany.com/news/local/catskill-woman-defends-her-natural-garden-in-court-after-town-demands-a-trim-lawn-dispute-ny-new-york-wrgb )

But, no matter now —we have a fenced garden here and could do whatever we want. Knowing the woman who made the garden what it is and her husband are interred back there is a kind of responsibility (just their ashes! Though when our neighbor said “He’s back there, and she’s on top of him” I nearly fainted.) Plus it is just a gorgeous place- I will happily do the grunt work of raking and clearing and bagging as I find my way to one of my callings…a keen gardener.

But back to the snowdrops. Now Rafe (yes the gentle gardener has a Lawrence-worthy name) has been pointing out the bulbs that will emerge at different points as February turns to March turns to damn we’re supposed to go play gigs in the US in April) and the first would be the snowdrops. We came back from a week away and there they were, these soft white dots sprinkled throughout the garden. Eric and I took a walk down the path and they were popping up everywhere, almost before our eyes. Most everything else was looking pretty dead back there, or just bubbling under, but the snowdrops were glorious.

I saw a poster for a Snowdrop Sunday at a church in a nearby small village and a little sheepishly asked Eric if we could go. There was mention of an art exhibit and tea and cake and I was afraid of a vicar looming over us with mugs of tea, backing us up against a baptism font (do they do that kind of thing—baptisms—over here?) to welcome us to join them every Sunday in a freezing cold stone church, but the lure of the snowdrops was too strong. Eric was game, maybe even pleased that I was so eager to join in with English country life.

And I’m so glad we did. The churchyard was quaint and charming, graceful but not too well tended. The snowdrops were just coming on, especially in a wild part of the grounds called Hazel Grove. My daughter is Hazel and so I’m predisposed to anything involving the name, it referred to both the trees sprinkled around the yard as well as a well-missed lady named Hazel, friend of the church, and it had been decreed no gravestones/monuments, only ashes could be put there which gave it a poignancy. These days, with friends and heroines/heroes dropping left and right it’s impossible not to think “where do I want to end up when I go?” Not being morbid, just realistic. I thought Hazel Grove was a fine place for some, though I also felt “not for me—I’m a visitor here, still and maybe always will be and I DON’T know where my special most meaningful place is anymore, there was a time I might’ve said somewhere in New York City and then maybe the Catskill Creek or Hudson River or hell the spot where the Civic Arena once stood in Pittsburgh - the place I saw Elton John in 1973” but, sorry I digress! We were alive and looking at the snowdrops peeping out along the grass and dead leaves.

Apparently St. Margaret’s Church at Thorpe Market (the place where our local Snowdrop Sunday is held) is of historic value for being a rare church built in Norfolk in the late 1700’s, on a site where there’s evidence of much earlier structures, and its Gothic style predated that movement in church architecture by a good half century. This is what I’ve gleaned from a quick glance at some histories of the area. My mind kind of glazes over with too much of this stuff but I do like the detail that the architect is known simply as a “Mr. Wood.” I also enjoyed this quote from a guy I’ve never heard of: “It is perhaps the best specimen in England of the well-known Churchwardens’ Gothic,’ and is certainly the ugliest place of worship I have ever entered: description of it would be painful.” – Walter Rye 1883

But we couldn’t come all this way (four miles from our house, by car on a cold dreary day) without at least venturing into the church. I wish we’d had space to admire some of the cool features but there were too many people admiring the seaside paintings and greeting cards and the nice display of cakes and snowdrops in pots for sale. We found ourselves talking gardens with a nice woman who was quite suntanned, having just been to Key West, and who offered us a small packet of sunflower seeds for £2. She said the flowers would come up huge and make our garden the envy of the neighbors. Sold! She seemed so pleased when I forked over the £2 I wanted to cry, I think it all goes to keep the church running. She’d helped with my conversion in a way.

I felt so happy we’d gone to the festival. When we got home the snowdrops in our garden looked even more plentiful, as if they were thanking us for paying attention. Later that evening we went to see the amazing new Led Zeppelin film in IMAX, maybe to balance things out. We do have a reputation as rockers to maintain. Though there’s a quote from Olivia Harrison saying her husband George most wanted to be remembered as a gardener who wrote one or two good tunes.

And I had just bought seeds from a stranger: “The first taste is…two pounds.” I think I’m beginning to trip out on nature. Looking at the snowdrops —with all that’s going on in the world—gives me hope. I wish you snowdrops.