Ground Control

on getting to grips with the garden

Some time in mid-May, construction begins in my garden. With the help of several family members, we are building my long-wished-for polytunnel. Tubs of nuts and bolts, along with various components of its metal frame, are laid out on a tarp that will bleach the grass beneath it a temporary yellow. Its hard-plastic walls are bound in a cylindrical package and will be a challenge for another day. It is the first properly warm spell after a very long winter. The ground, no longer frozen, yields to our shovels and accepts the concrete plinths we drop into it at evenly spaced intervals. It is a pit of half-dug-up turf and lost screws but I imagine plump strawberries dangling from hanging baskets, dewy seedlings springing up out of the darkness.

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Our garden is the largest room in our home and the one which has required the most renovation. We have watched the front lawn disappear into a gaping hole following building works more than once, always bouncing back. We have pulled thick networks of lupin roots out of the ground for the sake and survival of other flowers. We’ve waited with baited breath for hedges cut down to stumps to show signs of new life come spring. So many branches have been pruned from overgrown bushes that they now form three separate piles at the edge of the forest, waiting to be fed through the grinder and returned to the earth via the make-shift compost pile (a future project in its own right). I am a child of bricked communal courtyards and have never been taught how to tend to a garden, so there’s been much googling and YouTubing and trying and hoping; mercifully, a lot of our experiments have worked out for the best. It is our fourth summer in this place and the garden is just starting to feel –

‘Under our control’ I went to type, but there’s an imbalance to that dynamic that doesn’t quite ring true. Yes, rehabilitating our outdoor space has often felt like wrangling a wild animal into submission, but it has mostly been an exercise in compromise; in learning what the garden wanted from us, even when its needs don’t completely align with what we think we might want from it. It is a process of relinquishing control, of letting ourselves be led by the land.

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S tells me that there is a company here that carves the epidermis of the forest away from the ground and transplants it into people’s gardens. Apparently, people will pay good money to have this specific biosphere in their immediate reach. You can plant blueberry bushes in most gardens but bilberries – their smaller counterparts – grow wild and widespread here in most forests, replaced by lingonberries at the end of the summer. You can pay for just about anything that the human mind can imagine these days but I am still rendered speechless by this particular offering.

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The forest behind our garden is owned by a forest company and, earlier this year, came under the threat of removal. The logging industry in this country seems to have an insatiable appetite for felling trees and we’d known they might eventually come for ‘ours’. Towards the tail end of winter, snow still thick on the ground, we congregate at a neighbours’ and follow a rep from the forest company out into the woods behind both our houses. She shows us where they plan to cut and what they plan to leave. We tell her about the kestrels that nest here and I show her a photo on my phone of such a bird on our porch last August. Birds of prey create a large radius wherein companies are not allowed to cut. We trail her through the forest until I am thigh-deep in the snow and have to turn back on account of poor clothes.

It is scary, really, the truth that, ultimately, we have no bearing over what the forest company might one day decide to do with the land they own. We discuss, desperately and hypothetically, what it might take to buy the forest from them; even though in my heart of hearts I don’t believe wild spaces should be owned as a prerequisite of their protection. Besides, of course we can’t afford it. It’s just another thing we can’t control.

A few weeks later, we’re informed that the area directly around our house is considered of too high ecological value to be cut down.

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It takes all six of us working four full days to get the polytunnel standing. I am moved beyond words by the time and energy my family give to this project and vow to repay them one day in home-grown fruit and veg. I buy planks and paint them in the same red paint that clads the house and so many others in this part of the world. S helps me build the beds and I fill them with the spoils of the garden: ground branches, grass clippings and the good dirt we pull out from the centre of the compost heap. I court offers of surplus tomatoes and cucumbers from neighbours and already this unaesthetic hot-house is beckoning a shift in things, a growing community spirit and a world of knowledge for me to tap into.

Midsummer week arrives and it is still not quite finished – one bed is just planks, and I’ve run out of money for soil – but I am closer to what I have imagined. I pilfer an old stool from the basement and set it down on the dirt floor. Everything always feels so fraught and unknown but I am certain that next season will be a good one, that things will grow inside these plastic walls.

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My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is out now.

‘In a transporting, original collection, Nadia Henderson examines the lines between nature and the human world through stories set in landscapes both brutal and beautiful.’

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I’m Nadia, a London-born writer living and working in rural Sweden. I write short stories, creative non-fiction and, of course, newsletters. If you like, you can find out more about me and my work on my website. Thank you for reading Home Comforts!