While the winter tyranny of mud afflicts Longmeadow, Monty takes advantage of the season’s down time to cultivate his mind garden
The relationship with my garden in
December cools with the weather to one of mutual mistrust and even disdain. Often only loyalty to memories of seasons past and hope in what is to come keep the relationship ticking over. If any of the shards of autumn still cling at its outset, they are all discarded by the end. The days are absurdly short with the sun sinking down exactly in line with the wooden greenhouse on 21 December so that – if it is not too cloudy – it lights up with an orange flare as though with chilly flames. Areas that are sun-filled from April to October get no light at all and if I do not set out to take the dogs for their walk by 3.30pm, I will almost certainly come home in the dark.
Longmeadow in December is not a fun place. If it is not ankle deep in a particularly sloshy brand of mud, it is frozen solid or, very occasionally, bowed under by a dollop of snow. This looks great for half an hour but breaks, crushes and smothers as well as adds yet more mud when it thaws. But most December days it is just wet and grey and uncomfortably mild, the garden cowering beneath a sullen sky. Quite often the rain fills the river at the bottom of the garden upstream in central Wales and pours down to flood the fields about us and half the garden. I quite like this actually as the raggedy, mud-pocked fields become a lake and the Lime Walk, Damp Garden, much of the Cottage Garden and Spring Garden all grow underwater, like green coral. But it is a brief pleasure, because flooding leaves yet more mud in its wake and a tide mark on the hedges like a silty skirting board.
I can, and occasionally do, manufacture jobs in a kind of gung-ho, boy-scout spirit. There are leaves to collect, last-minute tulips to plant, perhaps even trees or shrubs to plant as well, although the wet normally precludes this. But it is all a sham really. Other than the tulips, which are a good idea to get planted by Christmas – and I have nearly always finished that job by the end of November – there is nothing that will not keep until the New Year and a lot that will benefit from being left until the ground is drier.
And I write for long hours every day. My version of myself is that I am a writer who also does television rather than the other way round. In practice, telly always pulls rank and between March and November I have to fit my writing around the production di
