“Written in tradition as old as storytelling itself…time is contracted and the sun shines in the imagination where in reality there was only shade.”—Marc Hamer
While the garden sleeps winter is a time to read. My favorite location is the couch, lying back with a cat perched atop me and the wood stove warming us. I read many kinds of books, quite a few about gardens. The big glossy photo books are like candy, while words can capture so much more. Writing about the garden can convey the atmosphere, the sounds and smells and tastes, textures, and emotions. Words can take us off on tangents into reminiscences, associations, and fantasies. Let the winter winds bluster outside; a book can transport us elsewhere.
This past month I have spent hours slowly living a year with Marc Hamer in his book “Seed to Dust”(2021), a quiet masterpiece. His experiences maintaining a twelve acre private garden in Wales owned by an elderly Miss Cashmere provide him with a vehicle for meditations on his life, labor, beauty, poetry, philosophy, his aging body, and the “constant chatter of the world”. His troubled childhood and vagrant youth are always with him. “I was a wild patch of thistles and nettles and butterflies and I did what I wanted.” Yet he is a man at peace, working in solitude, close to the earth.
He takes us back and forth, from garden to home. We meet his wife, his cat, and learn of his children. But mostly it is his long hours alone, working the soil that elicit his musings. Miss Cashmere, his employer, makes cameo appearances, tottering to her summerhouse, always with her newspaper and cigarettes and Marc is struck by the colors of her clothing. He is an observer of the details of the world around him.
While hoeing a bed of tulips he is reminded of Sylvia Plath’s poem and her statement that they are “too excitable” and he imagines visiting her in her hospital room. Then he recounts the Turkish origins of tulips and how they “drop their petals to the ground” which leads to reminiscing “in my wandering years ago I met a Dutch girl called Tulpen, who spoke very little English; I spoke no Dutch. Not speaking much was good. We just held hands and smiled and dropped our petals to the ground.” The writing superbly captures and ties together his meandering thoughts creating a poetic narrative.
Marc is truly a down-to-earth man, chronicling his hours on his knees with “rough, grubby fingers”. He knows the earth that he works. “I have learned how to be dirty; the dirty dirt stinks of shit and disease and decay and gets washed off. Clean dirt has finished its rotting process and has become wonderful, wild living earth.” He luxuriates in the proximity to nature. At one point he even convinces the quite proper and reserved Miss Cashmere to remove her shoes and feel the coolness of the newly mown lawn on her naked feet. The relationship between the two is at a distance but a mutual understated appreciation comes through.
There is a mystical quality to the telling of his prosaic life. His fantasies take on the power of myths. “I am wearing my tweed jacket, as I always do. There will be seeds of all varieties of things trapped in the lining of this jacket that go back years…I fantasise that one day, when I am too old for this labour, I will lay my tweed jacket on the ground and, as the wool rots and turns back to soil, all the seeds trapped in the seams and lining will start to grow in the shape of the wool jacket as it is consumed.”
“Seed to Dust” captures so much of the garden and beyond. His words lifted me off the couch, into the dirt of Miss Cashmere’s garden, back into my garden, and into Marc Hamer’s shared world.
February 2023