Heroes Not Zombies

Some time last year, I don’t remember exactly when, while visiting family back in Scotland, I went to one of my most favourite places in the world … The Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. At one stage in my life, during my student years, I lived only a few minutes walk from “the Botanics”, and went there at least once a week. Occasionally I took along a book to sit and study in the quiet surrounded by trees and shrubs.

When I visited this time, we had a little browse of the shop at the entrance gate and I spied a little packet of about twenty bluebell bulbs. Well, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for bluebell woods and so I thought, I’ll plant these back in France and start my own bluebell wood.

Part of the long neglected garden which came with the house we bought here in the Charente Maritime just over a year ago was so wild it was a dense thicket of thorns, creepers and saplings. I made some inroads into it over the year, and when it came to bulb planting time I popped the little bluebell bulbs into an area at the edge of the trees.

Well, Spring came, and up came a flourish of daffodils and tulips, but no sign of any bluebells. I hadn’t been organised enough to put labels next to where I’d planted the bulbs and only had a rough idea of the area I’d planted them in. But, nope, no sign of a single one.

I’ve learned by now that gardening is a bit like that. You can prepare the ground, plant bulbs, sow seeds, put in some actual plants, but which will survive, which will thrive, and which will disappear? You don’t know. Nobody does.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll get some more next time and try again.

However, a couple of months on and, surprise, surprise, looks what’s popped up! Some bluebells! And they’re looking pretty healthy! What a delight!

Gardening teaches you to accept uncertainty and to learn that nature isn’t under your control, but with attention, care and patience, you can create an immediate, present environment to live in which will delight and surprise you.

Many years ago I was a GP in Edinburgh at the outset of AIDS. We didn’t know what it was at first, but it spread pretty quickly in Edinburgh. There weren’t any good treatments at first and I remember one particular patient who’d just received his diagnosis. I asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life (knowing we were talking months, probably not years) and one of the things he said was “I’m going to create a garden”. We talked about it for a while. There was a garden where he lived but he hadn’t touched it since moving in, and now, he said, he’d create a garden which was an expression of his preferences and values, and the people who he knew and loved would see it as a continuation of his existence after he had gone.

I’ve always remembered that conversation and I think lots of people have a similar idea. We have the opportunity to plant, encourage, care for and nurture, a small patch of this Earth, and often it can indeed become part of our legacy as well as our way of living the little life we have.

As I look at these first bluebells I think of “the Botanics”, the many memories from there. I think of Scotland and of woods and forests. Just a few little flowers reinforce my sense of a life lived, and give me a vision of a future which will stretch far beyond my single lifetime.