Welburn and Crambeck, North Yorkshire: As I pick out the stones and weeds, I think about the life you can see and the life you can’t
I’m not really up for the graft of garden maintenance. Aside from planting a few fruit trees, herbs and pollinator plants, our custodianship is better described as “ungardening”. We’ve welcomed back herb robert and red campion, dandelion and bugle, and the place heaves with birds, rabbits and voles. But in a lockdown-induced fit of horticultural zeal, I recently begged two big old raised beds from our kindly farmer neighbour. After we’d heaved them into position, a digger rumbled down the lane and deposited a half-tonne of local topsoil in one deft dump. That is my kind of gardening.
Farmer John warned that I’d have to pick out the stones and weeds, and after shovelling in most of our compost heap I set to – raking with my hands, crushing lumps, rubbing in blobs of clay and manure like butter into scone mix. But no recipe can replicate soil. After three student summers in a “mud-pie” geomechanics laboratory, I can still grade silt from sand by touch, and sort angular gravel from sub-rounded cobble at a glance.
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