When I lived in New York, I bought a side table on Craigslist from a woman called Debbie who lived in Queens. What was meant to be a simple transaction turned into a long chat over tea. Before I left that day, she pressed a sansevieria cutting wrapped in damp kitchen paper into my hand and told me that it was from a plant that belonged to her mother. She shared cuttings with whomever would take one to keep her mother’s memory alive. I named my plant ‘Debbie’s Mum’ and gave her to a friend when I left the city. I hope she’s still thriving somewhere in Queens.
When we moved to East Sussex, we had no idea that a pandemic was around the corner and that we’d get to know our new neighbours, a vibrant, elderly couple, through socially distanced chats over the hedge. They kept a remarkable garden. Its untidiness bothered and baffled our neater neighbours but the unruliness was intentional. They were cultivating a wild space so that – they hoped – wildlife would find a home there.
Holly berries were left on the bushes, not removed to be woven into Christmas wreathes. The oak was untamed because the acorns were for the jays and squirrels. In the midst of the second or third lockdown, I spotted an elusive bullfinch with its onyx-black head and coral chest swoop over the fence from their garden to perch on our washing line.
When these neighbours died unexpectedly (not from Covid, as it happens), we were heartbroken to suddenly be without the friends who’d helped us land in our new home during that unsettling time. Some months later, and with their family’s permission, I explored their quiet garden, secateurs and garden fork in hand, taking cuttings and dividing the rootballs of a few plants, which I then replanted on our side.
The acer cuttings didn’t make it but there’s a purple-flowered geranium that’s doing well. And as September came around, nearly two years after they died, the wayward raspberry canes that I relocated from their soil to ours produced the plumpest, sweetest raspberries I’ve ever tasted.
Now the house belongs to a new family and, faced with a wild garden left to itself for two seasons, they have called in the chainsaws. Shrubs, trees and hedges have been cut back and fed into a chipper, letting sunlight cascade in for the first time in a decade.
It’s probably necessary but I’m finding it all quite sad. Yet as I harvest my handful of later-than-expected raspberries, I feel grateful for the gift of unlikely friendships and the alchemy of propagation which means a piece of their garden will grow in mine for years to come.
