As gardeners throughout time have found, tending your own piece of land not only nourishes the body, but it also feeds the soul. [2] Artists have found the garden to be full of symbolic potential, a palette to play with, it can be a rich and varied source of inspiration. I also believe that to feel able to quite literally 'put down roots’' is essential to a grounded creative practice. I have rented the various rooms, apartments and houses I’v e lived in for many years. I’ve enjoyed the flexibility of being able to move with a month’'s notice. Having now owned our first home for a month, knowing we cannot be moved on so easily by a landlord whose plans change – there's a real sense of nesting in that. Space to grow, collect and transform within the space. Suddenly my many plant pots have permission to be planted in the ground, I can look at this garden with the eyes of both an amateur gardener and an artist, a lover of the wild and someone who appreciates the story behind this garden and how I may add to it.
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes [3]
Our home was originally built in 1910 and unlike many modernised properties in the area, it still retains many of its original features. The owners before us kindly left behind an old map, which shows that this house was once surrounded by fields and trees before the land was gradually sold off. Some of the original trees still exist here, and we have several mature plants and trees in our garden that support an abundance of wildlife. It is a wild garden supporting birds such as goldfinches and many sparrows, the Holly Blue butterfly, squirrels and the occasional bird of prey. I only intend to add to that wildness as best I can. I have sat looking out of the window, wondering what may have happened if someone who didn’t appreciate the creatures in the garden had bought it, had paved it and not noticed all the nests. I can’t really think about it!
My work both as an artist and a writer, is inspired by the wild, folkore and the magic in the everyday. It has taken me a while to realise that these are the core themes in my work that I cannot live without and that for so long the call to create in and about the wild was so strong that without that regular connection to nature and natural materials, I and my work would often wilt like a flower without water. My ‘well’ as Julia Margaret Cameron so perfectly describes in her writings about the creative process was running on empty without it. Sometimes there's a lot of pressure in the creative industries to feel you must live near the hub of it all, perhaps a fear of disconnection from the latest everything. For several years I think that anxiety distracted me from following what I knew about myself and my work all along. I am to be in the wild, I need a green space of my own to be reliably inspired – that fuels my work. I often need to place my bare feet on the grass and watch the birds, I need to be able to work outside sometimes, I need to be able to look out of the window and see green. When I followed my intuition towards that, that was when the magic reignited in my work in a way it hadn't since I had the space to dream freely at art school, because it was my truth. I followed where I felt called, there is a huge amount of peace in that. It is perhaps why I have felt so connected to the work of artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Kiki Smith, and more recently the work of Vanessa Bell. Three artists for whom the garden has been an essential part of their creative practice.
(2) Debra N. Mancoff, The Garden in Art, Merrell, 2011 (3) Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Ballantine, 1992 36
