Dancing Barefoot
On gardening and Patti Smith
On the 21st of June, my friend
and I replanted my flat’s shared garden as a surprise for Andy for our 7th anniversary. Grace designed the concept, made the mood board, sourced the plants with her mum’s industry discount, and arrived around 8:30 to dig up all the weeds, turn the soil, and plant everything in.
We usually don’t stop talking when we’re together, but it was hot, we had dirt on our faces, and all you could hear was grunting. By 4:30, we were pretty much done, ready to reveal it to Andy when he got home.
It was a day of hard labour that paid off immediately with Andy’s reaction, and for the fact that our garden was now a nice spot to sit and spend time. The author Olivia Laing said in a podcast that I listened to yesterday that wherever you live, whether it’s rented or bought, whether you will be there for a short time or a long time, you should always plant a garden because it makes you feel rooted.
This could mean a garden outside, as you would traditionally imagine it, or it could be a balcony garden, a windowsill box, a tray of herbs. Anything that you plant, tend and watch grow. We have been in this flat for two and a half years now, and aside from some tulips bulbs, which brought us a lot of joy in spring, and some potted plants from my mum, the beds have mostly been filled with weeds. Since Planting Day though, everything has grown in, flowered, and started spreading.
My feet and fingernails are pretty much always dirty, but it feels so good to get down in the dirt every day and watch things move through their cycles of life and death and life again. We get more birds and butterflies and big fat bumble bees, and my new favourite pastimes are watering the beds, checking for new growth, pruning dead heads, finding flowers, and weeding.
In fact, on Sunday morning, I was sitting in a garden bed pulling the Creeping Jenny out from between the foxgloves and the white lavender when my friend Laura messaged me:
Like many 21-year-olds on their years abroad, I read Just Kids while I was living in Paris. I probably read it sitting in the Jardin du Palais Royal, on terraces, and in the metro looking deeply earnest and extremely intellectual. I loved that book and I love Patti too, so this very spontaneous invitation to see her in concert felt like some kind of gift from the universe for doing such a good job at weeding.
I met Laura around 7:30 near the front of the very long queue outside Somerset House. It was warm, which was kind of shocking given the weather we’ve had this summer, and there were so many different types of people waiting to go inside. Old people, young people, balding men, middle-aged lesbians, Brat Summer Girlies. As the purple-haired 72-year-old woman in front of us said, “
is one of the only artists who can draw a crowd of three generations.”
At age 77, in her black blazer and matching waistcoat, with her long grey hair, she came out on the stage with such a presence that it was impossible to take your eyes off her, really. She sang some Bob Dylan, dedicated Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness to her late husband Fred Sonic Smith, Kurt Cobain got a tribute with Smells Like Teen Spirit. But my favourites were her own songs — Because the Night, Dancing Barefoot, and Redondo Beach, which I listened to through my headphones as I walked over Waterloo Bridge afterwards, watching the red full moon come up over the National Theatre.
Between songs, she would talk a little and — going back to that idea of rootedness that was so literal a few paragraphs ago — her most powerful messages were always about the people in the world who are displaced from their homes, seeking refuge, and trying to find a new place for themselves in the face of hardship. It felt warming to know that someone with such a voice and such a presence was advocating for people’s roots, for their right to place, and their right to feel at home somewhere.
As I write this, I’m sitting in my garden, there’s a second bloom of flowers coming up, and although the roots I have set down here can’t get too deep — this is a rental, after all, and we will have to move at some point — I’m feeling grateful to have them at all.
Some other bits, garden-related and not.
Kinfolk Magazine’s Directory section: I recently bought a bunch of issues of Kinfolk after years of not reading it and have been really delighted by the whole thing, but particularly by the back section which they call the Directory. It’s all short little articles and interviews (and a crossword), and one piece that sticks out to me from Issue 51, The Design Special, is with the Zen monk and garden designer Shunmyō Masuno. I loved this part:
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