Gardening with Bob Dylan

The wonderful thing about this song is not how vicious and heartfelt the words are, nor how compelling that is in itself.  Nor is it the way those words are set against a friendly but ordinary ...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2017/06/ranking-positively-fourth-street.html

The act of letting go, abandoning and relaxing the grip on something we thought we desired seems contrary to our modern world, where energy and achievement have greater purchase on our imagi...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2016/07/learning-to-relinquish-if-you-see-her.html

Cancer removed my sister from the world on the second day of the year.  With this post I honour her, hoping not to be misled into a vulgar display, longing rather, to do her and the "distin...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2016/02/missing-nettie-moore.html

I arrived in Italy for a necessarily brief break and some fast weeding, only to be met by smashed trees and a series of landslips.  I have been startled, first by the dazzling sunshine, then by...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2015/05/scylla-and-charybdis-idiot-wind.html

Tough Mama is the first song on the album Planet Waves.  I've never liked it, it seems objectionable to me and I object to it.  But it puzzles me too, I don't have to think it's a great so...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2015/03/jagged-edges-tough-mama.html

  Oh the innocence of this song, the longing to live, to feel, to be. We all know it so well, indeed we can barely hear it any more. Familiarity kills our darlings, even if we don't.  But...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2015/01/trickle-down-mr-tambourine-man.html

"Better to strangle a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires".  If we followed that idea to the letter we'd be slaughtering our nearest and dearest, and throwing ourselves from high le...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/10/losing-will-aint-talkin.html

Here's a picture of Sido, mother of the French writer Colette.  She was immortalised in the latter's books as the archetypal mother-gardener, coaxing blossoms from dead twigs, growth and abunda...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/06/places-for-people-brownsville-girl.html

All the months of May of our lives, they must count as some kind of bonus.  We should  perhaps be parsimonious with them, carefully calculating how best and where best to spend them, for  ever...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/05/attacking-cheerfully-when-ship-comes-in.html

I can barely speak for pride and happiness.  I have achieved what I wished for: a garden that fits the space, my needs, some of my desires and the limits of my budget.  It even incorporates ...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/04/my-own-pet-lamb-soon-after-midnight.html

There are a few things in life where you can almost guarantee that getting what you're pursuing, what you yearn for, will result, not in disappointment, not in satisfaction, but in the simple e...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/02/pursuing-pursuit-i-want-you.html

So the year tips, over into the next one.  We're in transition, out of the winter tinsel, forging through the wasting months, then beyond, into the beyond.  Shedding the past, lurching forwa...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2014/01/trepidation-its-all-over-now-baby-blue.html

  So you've never felt middle-aged enough to try actual gardening.  But recently, you've started thinking it might be nice to plant something  between the bins and the car parking space ...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/12/step-inside-if-you-gotta-go-go-now.html

Well it's been a tough couple of weeks, for reasons too difficult to explain, and I look back to a month ago with an aching wistfulness for when everything seemed more or less alright. Wish I'd...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-moment-in-summertime.html

I will sadly admit that sometimes I need saving from myself.  I thought I knew what to do and how to do it.  It seems not.  There I was, bravely intent upon disaster,  unstoppably headin...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/09/rigor-mortis-tin-angel.html

We've all had that nightmare vision of our own lonely deaths, our neglected corpses gnawed by domestic pets. Part of that scenario would perhaps include the invasion of the garden into the hous...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-losing-garden-cold-irons-bound.html

  Sometimes I’m sickened by the idea of the ornamental garden.  Especially big lonely ones where no-one is interested enough to go, apart from a man with a machine.  Huge, immaculate lawns...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-struggle-working-mans-blues.html

A rumour went round amongst our neighbours before we moved into our Italian house.  We were professional hot-air balloonists, set on running a hot-air ballooning school.  The lovely Itali...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-lie-of-land-cross-green-mountain.html

  I feel such a heel sometimes.  Like a grumpy kill-joy, smashing illusions and fantasies.  When people (sorry, I mean women) confide in me that they love wisteria I get this uncontr...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-consequences-of-wisteria-lay-lady.html

I've squandered the last two weeks of my life on a pointless, hopeless quest.  My expectations and confidence were high.  I truly believed a little effort, a little concentration, and I would b...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/03/stripped-bare-long-and-wasted-years.html

Let's elbow our way through the folds and try to get to the heart of the matter.  Try not to get lost or trapped.  Get in, as they seem to say nowadays, in tones of marvelling enthusiasm. ...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/02/rose-diving-beyond-here-lies-nothing.html

You know how children like to fling themselves about?  Bright-eyed toddler aliens running around, penned in for safety, banging about in a box. Sometimes I can tap right into that bubble of ...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/01/banging-about-grooms-still-waiting-at.html

Readers may recall an attempt I made to prepare a plan for the land around the Italian house, an area I laughingly and ambitiously describe as a garden.    Well, I can report no progre...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2013/01/moving-on-narrow-way.html

    Here's a rather December picture.  It's a plant of rue, ruta graveolens, not the tighter,  brighter kind called Jackman's Blue - it's the rarely seen species, glimmering away in a wild...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2012/12/rue-day.html

I don't really mean the song is brutal, far from it.  But death and evolution are infinitely brutal and infinitely elegant, endlessly turning and resolving.  The individual seems to be everyt...

http://gardenleafing.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-brutal-elegance-every-grain-of-sand.html