Little Fish Studio: Nearer God's Heart

'All gardeners live in beautiful places

Because they make them so '

An innula in bloom in my garden last year

It's really cold again today so for the first time in a long time I'm not spending time in the garden. My garden has been my sanctuary for a long time. When life was stressful, (and my life was very, very stressful at times!) being in the garden helped. I found it meditative, relaxing, recalibrating. After a few hours spent in the garden I always felt better. But I never thought of it as being part of my art, part of my creative life, until reading this blog, by artist Vicky Stonebridge. The article is well worth reading because Vicky writes passionately about her garden and what it means to her, and her words inspired me to think again about my own garden and what it truly means to me.

When I stopped painting several people asked me how I coped, how I as a self-proclaimed creative person, managed without being creative and I thought I knew the answer. I still made things, with my children, or when working with other children both through work and voluntarily. At Rag Tag, I got a great deal of satisfaction from working with creative people and helping people discover their own creativity. But thanks to Vicky's article I realised that all along I was being creative without really realising it. Vicky says, "Growing things, or encouraging things to grow and rearranging them is a wonderful artwork, a meditation, a communication." and those are the words which had such an impact on me and made me look at my passion differently. I have been thinking about it, meditating on it, whilst I've been building an alpine bed, and reclaiming a large part of the garden that was left to grow wild when the children were small

This entry is the story of my garden.

The garden before - May 2000

When we moved into our house in 2000 it was a wreck. It was cold and dirty and pretty horrible, but it was all that we could afford at the time. My husband had just lost his job, it had all been pretty nasty and very upsetting and we had two small children who were also struggling with the experience and who needed somewhere to play. So we moved in, camped out in a shabby house and the first thing that we did was work on the garden.

adventures

At that point it was a muddy slope full of broken glass and stones, without even any grass - not that we could lay grass as my husband is allergic to grass cuttings. So we had to think again. We hired a garden designer (Colin Johnstone of Skye) and sat down and discussed our needs and our very limited budget and then we built a garden.

We needed somewhere safe, that the children could play in, filled with tough plants that could with-stand a bit of punishment. We needed somewhere that we could sit in and escape the world.

Colin and his men did the landscaping and we bought a few plants and begged a few more and learned that our neighbours were kind and willing to share cuttings and advice and slowly but surely our garden became magical. We learned it is very fertile, faces south and is hidden from the road. It gets plenty of rain and just enough sun. It is a perfect place for a garden.

imagination

My children played in the garden when they were small. My daughter pretended that she was Mary Lennox and learnt to skip, my son hunted dinosaurs and they both played pirates. We sat in the sunshine and told stories.

and stories

The garden was a place for adventure and it became very overgrown, in a very short time. Untamed, a beautiful wilderness that the children and their friends and our animals explored.

2003

Occasionally I would spend time reclaiming the paths and trying to tame at least some of the weeds, but, nevertheless, for much of the year it was a riot of colour. As my children grew I got to spend more time in the garden and now that they are young adults I have more time than ever. These last few months have been somewhat back-breaking as I dug over soil and got rid of deeply entrenched perennial weeds, but it has been a voyage of discovery too.

I found toys that my children used to play with, each discovery brings back a memory.

dinosaurs

and teddies

I repurposed their old fort, listened to the birds and watched the bees and butterflies (of which there an abundance right now). I listen to the noises from the street and yet I'm removed from them in my own secret garden.

The fort is now a compost heap

Every day there are surprises, things that I have forgotten become uncovered or something flowers when there weren't even buds the day before. In the evenings I often leaf through my well-thumbed gardening books and take inspiration from the pictures and spend far too much time on Pinterest planning and being creative. My garden brings me joy.

If a garden is like art then to me it's like a watercolour painting, because you can decide the effect you would like to achieve, put together all the components and imagine how it will look and then your creation surprises you. But once a piece of art is completed the artist has no more input, however, a garden is ever changing ever evolving as these pictures show. I get just as excited when a much cherished plant flowers, or when the sun shines and I get to sit outside as I did yesterday for a couple of hours as I do when I finish a painting. And if it goes wrong, if something doesn't work, then it doesn't matter because there is always next year.

I love painting, I love my studio, but an artist is always striving to make things better, nothing ever looks as good on paper, or canvas as it did in my head. In the garden things often look far better, more beautiful than I ever dreamed they would