Despite my internal protestations and denial, as the rest of the garden springs into life, I’ve been forced to face reality. The honeysuckle is dead.
I don’t know why it has died, whether it has anything to do with my brutal cutting back of the wayward jasmine that grows alongside. Perhaps it caught a disease or just became fed up. What I do know is that I blame myself and that the related feelings of impotence, failure and loss of control are all too familiar.
My daughter bought me the honeysuckle ten years ago, which only adds to my pain. I messaged her to break the news.
“That’s sad. We can go to the garden centre and pick out a new one.”
I had another go at conveying the depth of my distress.
“Yeah, that’s really sad, but it’s given you a lot of joy.”
She’s right. It has.
I love to watch the bees bobbing in and out amongst its little trumpet flowers, and the sweet wafts of its perfume as I’m swinging in the hammock on a warm summer’s afternoon. I have photos of the dogs beneath its branches when the heat tips into the red, or lying in wait for a tennis ball to be hurled past its hanging foliage.
Writing that isn’t making things better.
When I planted it, knowing nothing about gardening, I placed a geranium “Blue Cloud” alongside. Starved of light after a year or so the poor geranium died leaving me similarly if not so powerfully bereft. My daughter had gifted me that too.
In 1987, my girlfriend had just broken up with me, preferring, quite reasonably, to date a man who would not in years to come allow shrubs to die through his negligence.
I was bereft, and the morning after the great storm I went walking the streets which resembled a scene from a low-budget apocalypse movie with fallen trees, the odd garage roof sitting at a jaunty angle, and wheelie bins upturned, if indeed we had wheelie bins in those days.
Walking past the house where my ex lived the small apple tree that sat in the middle of the front lawn was down and her mother was wrangling a huge saw to tidy it away.
I offered to help, imagining, I am sure, that Catherine would see me through the window and realise what a terrible mistake she’d made.
As it turned out, she wasn’t even home so I gradually dismantled the fallen tree piece by piece in what at the time felt like a metaphorical representation of my happiness.
When the children were young we had a Staghorn Sumac growing in the garden with its dark red buds pointing up like thick candles in a makeshift Christmas tree.
My father-in-law hung a swing in its branches and while my baby daughter swung gently to and fro my son and I sat in the shade next to her painting whatever came into our heads on vast rolls of paper, me in one of those moments of pure contentment and joy, my son with his tongue poking from the side of his mouth in utter concentration.
A few years later we woke to find that the tree had just collapsed in the night. No storm, no sign of any problem, but that was that. It felt as if another valuable part of the past had slipped away, and that whether or not a tree falling in the night with nobody to bear witness makes a sound, the sadness remains unaffected.
I don’t remember if the willow grew up in the space vacated by the Staghorn but I fell in love with it too.
Despite its unarguable beauty it dropped a lot of leaves in the autumn and blocked so much sunlight that all of the grass in its shadow gave up and died.
A suggestion was made to cut some of the most offending branches down and, feeling my chest tighten, I made what I considered to be a convincing argument for leaving the tree as it was and accepting a patch of dead grass as a reasonable trade-off.
A little later, as I looked out into the garden through the kitchen window, I could see my wife talking to my son underneath the tree and pointing out which of the branches were to be sacrificed.
The death of anything or anyone is perhaps the ultimate reminder of how futile the desire for control is, but something in the demise of trees, shrubs and plants brings it home to me like nothing else. Perhaps it’s because I feel such a sense of responsibility for keeping them alive, and probably also because some of my most in-depth and regular conversations are held with them.
I hesitate to make this admission, but the death of my plants appears to stay with me and resonates more deeply than the death of my parents.
The fig tree was a recent casualty I could do nothing to save and barely a day passes when I don’t think about it.
As a small and rather self-destructive rebellion, I have allowed a wild fig to grow rather too close to the back doors which almost certainly means it will be compromising the foundations of the house and may result in my living beneath its branches in a half-collapsed dining room which, if nothing else, will test my resolve for plant conservation.
In my clinic, I have a couple of houseplants that I’ve never identified. All I can tell you is that they have little shiny green leaves, like succulents, and lovely pink flowers that appear from time to time.
During the pandemic, I couldn’t go into the clinic and so my plants were left to die. It was torturous.
When we were allowed back in one of them was still alive and is in bloom again as I write. The other had perished and was nothing but a small sculpture of dry sticks.
It seemed like a fitting acknowledgement of the horror of the pandemic that I should keep both on my windowsill. A vibrant survivor and a fallen hero having done her best to push through intolerable circumstances. As a therapist, there was also something fitting about how this little pair of cheap plants represented the life cycle.
But one day when I went to work the dead plant was gone.
“Do you know what’s happened to my dead plant?” I asked at reception.
“I think it was thrown away. It was dead.”
I didn’t make a scene. After all, who was going to understand my attachment to a dead plant let alone appreciate the deep and enduring meaning I had invested in it?
I still miss that little dead plant on the now lopsided-looking windowsill.
The death of a plant makes me feel like a failure, or perhaps my feeling like a failure is channelled most easily through the death of a plant. Whatever the truth, nothing reminds me of my smallness, insignificance and the hopelessness of trying to keep life where I want it like the loss of of a shrub or small tree.
So, I’m going to buy a new geranium “Blue Cloud”, and I’m going to plant it where the honeysuckle was because I didn’t give it a chance the first time.
Then, to remind me that we never know what’s going to happen and couldn’t do much about it if we did, I’m going to cut and dispose of the corpse of the honeysuckle, but I’ll be saving a part of it, and I won’t be telling anyone where it is.
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