#ogsw17

I came home from Share’s Plant Sale with some truly unusual geraniums with different shapes and colours in their variegated leaves, colours spreading like inks and gladdening my printmaker’s eye. These flowers have been watching over me at my desk while I work on the poems that I hope to have ready to share on the Open Day at the garden. I think I need to plan for all-and-any types of weather - it may be summer but even in June the days bring heat, humidity, rain, hail, sun and cloud, as if we are running through every season, sometimes in one long afternoon. If this holds true on 17th June, I might have to take cover in one of the polytunnels and drink in the glorious scent of sweet peas.

I have around ten poems or parts of poems to take to the garden, and I have bought card and string and chalk to make my installation of words around the walkways and greenhouses and other parts of the Share Community Garden where I will be in residence on Sunday, 18th June. I still have to make the leaves and flowers for the growing words installation, but (unless I’ve forgotten something) I’m nearly there. 

Since my last visit to the garden I have been thinking about the words that I will share with the people who use and visit the garden. I have spent a little time researching the history, but I keep coming back to the act of gardening, the repetition, the routine, the time, care and attention required to help food and flowers grow. This is the busiest time of year in the vegetable plot - sowing, pricking out, potting on, planting out - and everything becomes green and lush and we start to see the promise of the harvest in the buds and shoots and first true leaves. At Share Community Garden there are many people learning this art, and even though I have been growing my own food for quite a few years, as I watch the students get the plants ready for their next Plant Sale and open day this Saturday May 20th, I realise that there is always something new to learn. I’ve already got some gardening tips and even some recipe suggestions - I feel that instruction and recipe poems may find their way into the garden for Open Garden Squares.

A second visit to Share’s garden, this time to walk and think and take some photographs to prompt my writing. I already have ideas about the themes I’d like to follow - I am interested in the shapes in the garden; there are paths and cross paths, patterns made by the beds, the structures and the plants and trees themselves. I have made lists of the things I would like to explore in my writing, but I’ve also been thinking about how I will share the work that emerges from the residency - I’m particularly keen to make interventions in the garden that fit with the ethos of the place and with Share’s work. At the moment I am leaning towards the idea of temporary and transitory installations where words are visual as much as sound-based, organic forms that can be put together by the Share students and visitors to the garden, a sharing of words to make new poems.

A few weeks ago I went along to see my Mixed Borders garden and meet the people who work there - Share’s staff, students and volunteers.  Kavita and Sarah gave me a tour of the 2.5 acre walled garden, which is tucked away in the Springfield University Hospital site - read more about it here: http://www.opensquares.org/detail/Share.html?.  There are polytunnels filled with plants and flowers and vegetables, a bee-friendly garden, a pond, and many secret places with seats and trees and beds filled with aromatic herbs.  This feels like the perfect secret garden, a wildlife garden that thrives with birds and butterflies and insects, a garden where people learn, and grow and share the produce. An edible garden is my favourite kind of garden - I have an allotment which often inspires my writing and printmaking - and collaborative working is a big part of my artistic practice, so I’ll be working on ideas to bring the garden into my writing and my writing into the garden with input from the people who care for the place. My visit has already inspired many ideas, and now I have a plan for how I will proceed.

I am delighted to taking part in this year’s Mixed Borders, a poet-in-residence scheme run by the Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust.  A couple of months ago the Poetry School brought all the poets together for a training day and to tell us about our gardens and I have been asked to partner with the rather lovely Share Community Garden in South West London. Read more about the scheme and the poets who are taking part here: https://poetryschool.com/theblog/announcing-mixed-borders-2017-poets/