New Year’s Day has always appealed to me much more than it’s resolution-ary, pseudo-prescient counterpart, the Eve (weirdly I feel exactly the opposite about Christmas). New Year’s Day is the day that actually lands, in all it’s reality after peeling off the layers of sparkle, debauchery and expectation of the night before. It may be viewed through bleary eyes depending on how long you stayed up – or in this year’s case, how much telly you watched or Happy New Year messages you sent or answered from the under-cover sanctuary of your bed – but nothing can take away the dawn of a new day. Days dawn, that’s their thing. Apparently today was a particularly candy-striped one, in the depths of East London that is.
I missed the psychedelic sunrise but woke thinking about being my own boss, the lucid dreaming result of going to bed thinking about how to begin the New Year. I find that words have a habit of appearing in the morning if you go to bed with just enough of a prompt or just enough gaps to fill in. Something that I’ve learned to do or simply a part of who I am… who knows.
Having freelanced as a writer and editor for 15 years it would appear that I’ve also been my own boss for the same amount of time. This, however, did not appear to be the case based how strongly I felt the urge to be boss today. The difference is, I’ve so far simply been working for myself. I’m a dab hand at working from home (wish I’d written that book before Covid made it a commonplace thing). I’ve found my niche – the natural world and the interconnectivity within the botanical world and between plants, people and planet being my passion, my happy place and also so all-encompassing that you can quite literally write about anything. I’ve produced a body of work accordingly. Several books and numerous articles and artworks; I deal in words and pictures, believing from an early age that for me, it makes no sense to choose between them. I’m fully invested in and proud of them all. But have I really taken the reins?
I turn to my garden for the answers. Night is falling but I can still make out the curve of a newly laid deck and path and the plants that surround it. These elements , along with further changes at the front and back, are the result of decisive action rather than deterministic what-will-be-will-be-ness. I’m excited by this.
A certain amount of wrangling definitely took place between the land and between my husband and I to get them to a place where we were all satisfied. Plants were then introduced or repositioned according to their suitability, seasonality and design, a definite shift on the past 12-years approach of taking in orphan plants from here there and everywhere and shoving them into the soil with a similar well-meaning lack of discernment. 2020, I conclude, was most certainly the year that I became the boss of my own garden, or at least started to become so.
Which doesn’t mean to say that it’s going to do what I want. I fully expect a constant flow of botanical and hard landscaping curve balls to be thrown in my direction: the wooden structures that might expand or warp with the elements; the plants that inexplicably refuse to flourish; the soil that says (quite literally) sod off after a heavy deluge even though I’ve tended it so well. I may curve ball my boss (me) back in exactly the same way; it’s not historically unknown. The difference is, I feel confident and emboldened enough to bat them back.
With age (nonchalantly 47), growing experience (of the increasing and horticultural kind) and the quicksand shift of uncertain times, I appear to have undergone something of a personal paradigm shift: In caring more about what I want, I care less about what others think. I am ready to opinionate.
Night has now most certainly fallen. Looking forward to bossing myself and my garden around tomorrow.