There are Different Kinds of Sense

By Helen Sanderson:

Putrid mushy apples sink underfoot, orange with decay, and the smell of fermentation has become like strong cheese. We're cutting down trees like old woodsmen. I romanticise what I'm doing like that in order to feel better about it. Turn it into an image from a painting or film or something, you would probably admire the people in it, and then see yourself in a better light. Art gives dignity to the desperate and desolate. Or makes them more palatable. It's really forestry not gardening, this. That's what Derek says defensively and repeatedly, although I don’t know how it defends him or from what. He trudges slower and slower dragging branches along behind him, hood up and head down, shoulders slumped. Branches hit him in the face, his foot catches on the precarious moss-covered fabric of the ground. 

Derek may be confused about why I am there. I haven't been working there for 30 years like he has, I'm not local and have dropped into this sphere from an entirely different one. He could think that shows commitment, or, as I imagine, he could think that I may have the point of view of a tourist, choosing the novelty of this undertaking out of the blue for some unusual image I want to cultivate. I am certain a number of jokes have passed his mind about being alone together in the woods, but he must know he wouldn't enjoy my faked amusement. 

We tread on twigs and moss-covered rocks and it's a relief to be somewhere less manicured than the formal gardens of the same estate where I normally work. It's still not exactly wild though, most things have been planted deliberately. Next to the trees we are coppicing, the landscape is feels almost industrial, which is strange considering it is entirely vegetation – rows and rows of dull unidentifiable crops, presumably to feed livestock. Trees tower in the distance, and where the trunks are thickly covered in ivy, or have strangely shaped stunted branches or lumps, they appear as the forms of giant men, hanging from the tree canopy or standing awkwardly with bent knees. The kind of landscape that makes you think you can see someone or something moving out of the corner of your eye, especially in this dull weather. Like there's a presence in the air, somewhere just out of sight.

“Look, he's having a hard time putting anything on him.” It takes me a while to realise Derek is talking about a tree, and a further few seconds to conclude he was pointing out the tree isn’t growing leaves very well. I have started to find that it is easier to understand him if I listen to the words without attaching them to their meanings - to allow each word, or combination of words, pull waves of feelings and thoughts through me, and without thinking about what they meant, allow them to create dreamlike images floating in my brain like a reflection of the surface of some rippled water. Maybe I am here as some kind of tourist, enjoying colloquialisms, deciding they're very poetic.

We drive back through fields to eat in the mess room. The men, the innocent men, you can tell they're trying not to appear lecherous, avoiding coming within a few feet and moving their hands away quickly from anything near me. I should think of some kind of joke to make so we can all be more comfortable. I have the impression they're muting their own jokes for my benefit, unsure of what is acceptable.

Gardening is more sensual in a lot of ways than other jobs - roughly, physically sensual, pain from scratches and bruises and muscle aches, the smells and sounds of outdoors, birds and wind and machinery, unstifled belches, things coming out of people into the open without a second thought, less hidden. Now the sounds of eating, garbled, unintelligible words caught in throats with the unswallowed food, smells of petrol and grass cuttings, old sweat and stale damp. I imagine judgements of what’s meant to be beautiful or repulsive blur over time when dealing with sludge and decay and strange looking slimy insects alongside ethereal blooms and the freshness of plants. Either that, or perhaps sometimes more of a forced need to separate the sludge and freshness, acceptable and not. Or neither.

The small room we eat in smells of something not quite dirty or bad, but as if something small had rotted there a long time ago, or there had once been a lot of something very unpleasant there which had long ago been removed but left something of itself behind in the air. Grimy baked bean smears and distant, stale, savoury food mixed with moss. It is in the walls. This room, and times like this, could make me wonder what I'm doing here. I can come across as a pretentious snob even to my friends, but I’m just here. I didn't go into whatever was expected, I'm just sitting here in a weird smelling room with my colleagues. But I've got used to wondering what I'm doing anywhere. Might as well be here. There is that sphere of Gardener's World and the Chelsea Flower Show, people with gentle voices who will always make sure they are in beautiful places but uninterested in how enough wealth became accumulated to create them, exclaiming over the beauty of a flower, as toddlers over a new toy, without wanting to know about the colonialism associated with it being here. And then there are people with physical labour experience, hired because they can use machinery and lift things. People who own gardens and people who work in them, or on council owned grass verges or hospital car park gardens. But that's far too simplistic, I know, and some days it feels like something vital but usually unspoken unites all of us. I assume they don't know how my being out of place accentuates the assertion of my own existence, proof of the force of my will to make internal ideas become external reality, to connect the two realms as we must. But maybe they do know. 

On my way home the pavement seems to radiate humidity - that warm damp hard dusty smell after a certain kind of rain on warm day. Redundant seeds are scattered around each tree in the pattern of sparse chest hair. Seeds that will lie dormant until some kind of change in their environment triggers their germination and growth. I now know about the hormones auxin and giberellin and abscisic acid involved in the development of these seeds and their dispersal onto the ground. It's just a mechanism, it's just hormones making the plant do things, do things to attract pollinators and then sense when conditions are right to procreate. There are journeys going on all around me that I was previously unaware of, whole new worlds and systems right there next to me, which have provided relief from the ones I already knew about and lived in. 

I wanted to leave once, go back to the worlds I already knew. But I've grown used to the intentional miscommunications, grown to expect them. So much that I feel affronted by a genuine response, or expectation of one from me. It becomes more obvious that language is a manmade system of signals, not the holder of innate meaning. We build something rooted yet transient. Tucking little bedding plants into the earth, picturing myself as a child tucked between faded cotton sheets in my darkened childhood room. Teasing out the roots of larger shrubs and imagining the underground networks of roots reaching all the way to friends and family back in the city. Sometimes it seems I’ve moved my life closer to nature to find it fully inhabited by man. The inner-city community gardens felt more of an idyllic wilderness, felt more free of human hierarchies.

I’m exhausted in the evening, as every other evening, but for a second I catch the scent of decay on the cool air coming from an open window and feel a shiver of excitement. After the rain it smells like the early nineties again. Still-warm air holds only the sense of a chill, eventually to bring smoke and fog, fire and ice, and the soil will grow still and grey like a face tense and drawn. But for now the damp warmth still holds an excitement about the death of the year. It holds the memory of excitement for something, maybe for the future regardless of what it is, even if that future is death, the memory of looking forward creating a loop connecting my entire life since becoming conscious of the change in the air. It makes me picture daddy longlegs on an old school wall and I wonder why everyone had always seemed to like them but not spiders. Maybe we knew their presence was fleeting. Too bumbling to pose any threat. Spending a lifetime attempting to fly, never quite reaching their goal, learning by banging into the walls they try to follow upwards to the sky.

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Helen Sanderson studied English Literature at UEA before becoming a Gardener. Originally from Nottingham, she now lives and works in South East London. She is currently working on novels, short stories and a Garden Design PGDip alongside her gardening job.