The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  For Mum

  ‘And then I knew, Tom, that the garden was changing all the time, because nothing stands still, except in our memory’

  Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce

  Contents

  Prologue: A garden

  Part one: The bones, a skeleton

  Autumn

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Winter

  Spring

  Part two: A phoenix

  Spring

  Summer

  Species list

  Author acknowledgements

  If you want to learn more…

  Index

  Prologue

  A garden

  In the suburbs of Hove, on a treeless street of terraced houses, lies a square of land where magic happens. It’s where wool carder bees chase butterflies, house sparrows hang out with collared doves, red and blue damselflies catch flies while great fat bumblebees spill pollen and petals as they buzz from bloom to bloom. Where there are moths the size of your fist, where flies, aphids, caterpillars, slugs, snails, worms, centipedes and spiders reside. Where plants grow, flower and die – some of them to rise again and others to set seed before returning to the earth. Where compost is made, where birth, death and everything in between happens in a wild, unfathomable mess of struggle and pain and luck and fate. Where my heart beats.

  It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s tiny, for a start. Six metres squared – barely a garden at all. North-facing. It’s messy and wild, the grass tufty, the flowers self-sown. Some of them. There are piles of leaves and twigs and sticks and you can tell the trellis was put up with only one pair of hands. But it’s all I have and it has all I can give.

  Only I know where the sun shines. Only I know the spot where it hits the back of the fence in the last week of February, after months of darkness. The patches it lights up as it reflects across windows, the plants it streaks over in the course of the day, the year. Only I know the wet bits, the dry bits, the good soil, the bad soil. The plants, the plants, the plants. It’s not a garden you read about in magazines, not something you’d come to visit. There’s nowhere to sit, anyway. For you, that is. I hide in the deckchair squeezed between the pond and the climbing rose at the back. Gets the most sun. People aren’t really welcome anyway.

  It’s a garden made from cuttings and stolen seed, dead turf and bits of root. Broken rules and a broken heart. It’s all bird feeders and bee hotels. Things for the sparrows to eat, lure the goldfinches in. It’s noisy! The pond takes up a third of it. It’s ridiculous, really, but it’s mine and it makes me happy. And, oh, before I came along it had been under decking for thirty years.

  When I don’t have a garden, I go mad. In university halls I composted out of a window, grew herbs on communal stairwells, bought cacti at every student fair. In my second year I lived in a big shared house. Whenever the sun shone I would carry each of my sixteen house plants out of my housemate’s bedroom window onto the flat roof and we would hang out together, like a sort of leafy teddy bear’s picnic. I’d read or revise for an exam as we soaked up the sun together, while my housemate worked on the computer, just inches away from me, on the wrong side of the wall.

  After uni I travelled for a year and came back with gardening books because I missed the soil. I’m a massive gardening bore.

  It was inevitable, really, that I would end up writing about gardening for a living. That, despite degrees in politics and journalism, I would spend my evenings writing about plants, fire off articles to gardening magazines to see what happened. It wasn’t hard to get a foot in the door – I’m twenty years younger than your typical garden writer. Twenty years less weary from repeating the same advice every year, twenty years cheaper. I joke that it’s easy to be successful in a field no one else your age is interested in, that university graduates rarely take courses in horticulture and apply for jobs as garden writers, as I did fifteen years ago. But there’s no other field for me. To make my job even more niche, even less desirable to my friends and peers, I write specifically about wildlife gardening. I harp on about the birds and the bees, the butterflies, the moths, the wasps. Please be nice to wasps, I write, in any magazine that will have me, every August. I glean statistics on wildlife declines, encourage gardeners to cut holes in their fences to enable hedgehogs to pass through, to plant early and late nectar for pollinators. I bore people about native plants, the importance of the food chain: the soil that feeds the plants that feed the caterpillars that feed the birds. I lecture friends on composting and mulch, alternatives to using peat, avoiding pesticides. I spend my days gardening or writing about gardening, and I will do this for the rest of my life. My friends think it’s hilarious.

  I tell people I go mad without a garden but they never believe me. It’s an outdoors thing, I think. A sunshine thing. A plants thing. A looking-after-things thing. Still, with a garden I can be tricky in late winter and early spring – try to take me to the cinema or a bar when the sun’s shining and I might cry and not be able to explain why. I might meet you for a drink and force you to sit outside in your hat and coat because there’s a wisp of light behind the clouds. I don’t mean to be difficult; it’s probably a case of SAD. Mostly I arrange to see people after dark so they don’t have to deal with me in daylight hours. See you after sunset, yeah?

  Newly single after ten years, I was uprooted from my home and garden and nearly lost my mind. My books in storage, my plants in pots, my soul buried in some patch of earth I no longer had access to. I tried being a sort of nomad gardener; I gardened in an allotment, the shared house I lived in for a while, the gardens of friends who let me stay with them for a few weeks at a time. But it wasn’t the same. You can’t form an attachment to temporary things, fall in love, be so careless with your heart. Well, you can, but it only causes you more pain. And I try to avoid pain, on the whole, these days. Why plant things you will never see flower? Feed earth that will never feed you? I mowed the lawn in a house I was staying in and I ran over a frog. I had checked the grass but must have missed it somehow. Its guts littered the just-cut grass as I stood on the half-mown lawn bawling my eyes out. It was as if the garden was telling me to go inside, telling me this was the wrong thing to do. Better to avoid it altogether now and focus on other things. Like going to the cinema or something. Go to the cinema in the daytime, when the sun is shining and the birds are singing. Go and sit in the dark and suppress a scream.

  I carried plants with me when I left: Japanese anemones, hellebores, snowdrops. They’re not even my favourite plants. I think they were just a piece of home I needed to cling on to. I moved them all from place to place, along with a couple of grow-bags of tomatoes. Here she comes, they would say, with her little bag of plants.

  The day is Saturday. The month is January. The year is 2015. The sky is grey, with that thick blanket of cloud that hugs rooftops and makes you forget the beauty that can lie beyond it. You know that beauty: when the sky is endless, forget-me-not blue, cumulus clouds dotted here and there or stretched out like cotton wool, the blue backdrop filtered, changing. Then a bird flies overhead as the sun winks and everything is Promise. That beauty. Except today the cloud is oppressive: grey, full of rain but not ready to give it. There are no birds in the sky, no filtering blues and hues, no winking sun. The streets are lifeless and littered, bins overflowing, vomit and kebab wrappers telling tales on the previous night.

  January. It should be a good month, a positive month, a month of out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new. Except it’s not ever like that, is it? It’s miserable. Everyone is miserable. I’m miserable. Hunched over on my bike, which I brought down from London on the train, I cycle these g
rey streets of grey vomit beneath grey cloud, looking at grey one-bedroomed basement flats where I can lick my wounds and start again.

  Out with the old and in with the new, the unfamiliar, the frightening. I can’t afford to stay in London. I weighed up the options in my head: Manchester? Too far away. Bristol? I don’t know enough people. Brighton? Where I went to university and still have a few scattered friends. Where I can run along the beach, where I can buy a flat with a teeny back garden and still have room for a few pots out the front. More than I’ve had before if I can just tolerate two floors of people living above me. Can I? I’m not sure I have a choice.

  I visit flats ‘done up’ for a quick sale. Flats with a hob but no oven, the bedroom looking out onto the street. Flats that smell of old dog and unwashed owner, flats with no bathroom at all, just a lean-to loo and shower tacked onto the kitchen. All of them are damp. There’s one that almost steals my heart, the garden long and south-facing, but the ceilings are low and look ready to fall in on me. It’s at the top of a hill so by the time I arrive on my bike I’m a half-dead thing heaving in lungfuls of other people’s dust and mould spores. It doesn’t feel right. Although nothing feels right. There’s just one more before I give up. One more before I meet old friends in the pub and then haul my bike back on the train to London. One more basement flat with its dirty basement secrets. I cycle down the hill as the oppressive grey cloud yields its first spots of rain. January rain. Saturday-afternoon January rain.

  It’s ‘open day’ for potential buyers and I arrive to a swinging front door and young couples drifting, unimpressed, through the rooms. The estate agent waves me in, hands me the particulars. It’s been reduced, she tells me, because of this patch of damp, here. The last sale fell through because of it, she says. The expectant couples turn their noses up. The flat is empty but light, airy almost, compared to the others, if you excuse the damp. I ask to be let outside and the agent fumbles for a key. I’m the first to have asked.

  I step out into a gully of stones and dirty water, a mass of moss and weeds. My heart sinks. I climb the steps: decking, a broken fence panel, stones, cat shit. It’s a desolate, barren wasteland – barely discernible as a garden. I pop my head over the walls on either side and there’s more of the same: paved-over gardens, out-of-control buddleias. Ignored and overgrown or tamped down, suppressed. There’s nothing for me here.

  A quarrel of house sparrows chirps in a distant tree. Theirs is a fragmented habitat, of locked-away land with the occasional oasis of buddleia to sustain them. Where do they nest, find food for their young? I wonder how long they can hold on here.

  Hope. Can you relate to a field of decking, a razed landscape? There’s something about this desert and its doomed house sparrows that draws me to it. I want to unbutton the earth, let life back in. I wonder if I could save the sparrows or at least create a stepping stone from one distant tree to the next. When did a butterfly last land here? When did hedgehogs last roam? Can I restore this corner of Earth, this patch of emptiness? Perhaps. Perhaps we can fix each other.

  Time was, this ‘garden’ was woodland. And woodland is trying to reign once more. A sycamore samara has long since landed in the stones and moss, where a sapling now grows. Ferns and buddleias have taken hold in cracks in the wall. The decking is rotting; plants are growing.

  Nature has a habit of coming back to bite us on the bum. We can pour cement over a garden. We can chop down trees, uproot hedges, pour poison on ‘weeds’. But they won’t be defeated for long. At first everything will look as we left it. Razed. Cut. Broken. But then the healing begins: a button of lichen; a cushion of moss.

  Woodlice will find the decking, and they will eat it. Spiders will find the woodlice, and they will eat them. Birds will find the spiders. Little by little, this barren, scorched earth will live again; it will defeat us. The decking will become rotten and slippery; moss will grow. The moss and rotten wood will provide a landing pad for the seed of a buddleia or ash or sycamore. Before we know it, we have a garden again. Blink and it’s a woodland. And it’s stronger and more determined than before, because only the strong and determined can survive here. Nature laughs at those who try to control it. It always, always finds a way.

  I put an offer in. It’s accepted.

  Seven long months of sofa-surfing and waiting follow. I finally move in in summer. I decorate, unpack, sleep, cry. I wash and iron my clothes. I focus on the inside; the back door remains shut. I put up shelves, I restore a fireplace. I make bread and I service my bike. And then, one day, in early autumn, I venture out with my drill and start to unscrew the decking.

  PART ONE

  The bones, a skeleton

  Autumn

  What is this garden I have gifted myself, this unloved and broken thing? I drink tea at the top of the steps and lean against the wall, looking at it. It’s like looking in the mirror: most of it lies a foot beneath decking, like the dead. It’s sunny today and I’m pleased to see the space is well lit. North-facing, but there’s nothing east or west of it – no tall buildings to block the sun. At different times of day I note where the sun meets the wall, which bit of wall, which bit of decking. I drink tea and watch it snake over the space; I have more to do than plot sun and land, but not much.

  At the back, great willowherb, brambles and bindweed grow in the dust trapped among stones laid on membrane. Relics of farmland past or woodland perhaps, these colonisers are covering new ground without there even being any. And the sycamore – how many years must the stones have accumulated enough moss and dust for a tree sapling to send down roots? I tug it and it comes away in my hand. It hasn’t penetrated the membrane, has rooted only in a few centimetres of dust and moss. There’s hope for a world in which plants can grow in so little, and I feel bad for removing it. I check the willowherb for elephant hawkmoth caterpillars, the brambles for leafminers. Nothing. The space doesn’t feel alive.

  The decking is ancient, covered in moss and little clumps of purple toadflax which have seeded in the cracks; it’s rotting in places. It also makes the garden higher, so when I stand on it I’m visible to neighbours three doors down. It sticks out like a sore thumb and sticks me out with it. I want to hunker down and hide, not be watched by a thousand neighbouring eyes. The design is mad: a square of foot-high decking laid on top of membrane. If you’re going to put decking down, why make it so tall? Why not cover the whole space, rather than lay a margin of stones around the edge? This tiny space. Walled, and therefore closed to hedgehogs and amphibians. Without shrubs for birds to fly into, few flowers for bees to visit. My ‘garden’ is nothing more than a wooden box placed on top of something – earth, I hope. A box that, somehow, needs to be opened.

  I lie in bed sifting through photos. There’s a packet I keep in my bedside table and always have, wherever I’ve lived. It’s an old 1980s Max Spielmann packet, containing a hodge-podge of photos old and less so – little windows into my first fifteen years. There are photos of me as a child: forced into a dress and placed in front of the hydrangea; a few years later in shorts in front of the holly; in the high chair; holding my new-born baby sister. There are rare photos of me with Mum and Dad, one of Great-aunt Gertie’s ninetieth birthday, pictures of cousins, uncles, aunts, Grandad, random photos taken by me of a donkey and some cows. Mum with an acid perm (1980s); Mum in turquoise silk shirt, matching turquoise earrings and turquoise-rimmed glasses (1990s). And my most precious of all, the one I keep returning to and which is hard-wired into my brain, of the garden.

  I was two when my parents bought a house around the corner from where my mum grew up. A four-bedroomed, semi-detached Edwardian ‘cottage’ in Solihull, it had servants’ bells, beams in the ceiling and enormous wooden doors with a latch rather than a handle. It cost £2,000. It was a ‘doer-upper’, hadn’t been touched for years. Spiders reigned and, whenever my parents’ backs were turned, I would escape next door through the broken fence panel for a milkshake and a spider-free chat with the neighbours.

  B
acking onto the sports club that separated my house from the one Mum grew up in, the garden was a wilderness. I spent my earliest years looking out of the living-room window onto a 1950s patio with a hydrangea and a scrappy bit of cotoneaster, under-planted with lily of the valley. There was a long, thin lawn, a path that snaked between two ornamental borders and an old driveway leading to a concrete garage. A brick-built air-raid shelter, possibly one of the communal ones built by the government in the 1940s, served as a dark, ivy-covered shed. Beyond this was the vegetable patch, where foxes lived.

  I don’t really know how it started. There are photos of me aged two sitting in mud, planting and digging up things. I wasn’t really encouraged, no one ever spotted the passion and tried to engage. I was left to my own devices, thrown out in all weathers while Dad checked the football fixtures and Mum cleaned the house. I made friends with the worm and the robin, the moth cocoon, the pigeon feather, and then at some point my rabbit, Mistletoe, who would roam alongside me, exploring. Two little fairies in the wilderness. Stigs of the Dump.

  Now when I look at gooseberries I’m taken back to a time when I was the same height as the squat, spiky bushes, when I would watch, in detail, the veiny green fruit grow plump and ripen to wine red. Pick only the red ones, said Dad, the green ones are too sharp. The red ones were still always too sharp for me. Runner beans, raspberries, grapes. Fruit from a forgotten time, a 1980s childhood, the beginning of something.

  The back of the photo says ‘Summer ’83’, making it a year after we moved in. It was before my parents really worked on it but the vegetable patch is up and running. Dad usually took photos of the garden from the window of the room that was the dump and then my sister’s bedroom and then his study and then simply ‘the study’. But this one appears to be taken from a different room, the room that, at the time, was my bedroom.