plans

We visited a garden in the early Winter. It was rusting purple and brown but still upright. A garden of textures, and we popped seed pods into our palms and scrunched crisp flower heads with our fingers. They were indistinguishable but beautiful, a heaven in a wild flower. Fluffy germs and grains impregnated our pockets.



I put the seeds from the garden, saved, in small plastic bags and held them up to the white sky to look at them. At that time they were still yours and mine. I sat out winter lunchtimes in a desolate rose garden with traveller's joy laughing over my shoulder. Enduring the churned clay earth, the wet air and the rain dripping under the trees, clutching corals and fossils as treasures, just for the trust of blooms again. We are both feeling low in the depths of winter.



I remember an evening when our skin was hot with sun, driving home, up the island, winding the green of hills and then reaching the boggier parts. We had these plans to make pillows, to make bog cotton pillows, but somehow we could never get comfortable enough. And there was the downy fluff of the Greylag waiting in a carrier in the kitchen. Our skin was hot with sun and the bog cotton was flowing, 'Imagine if it all released in just one moment'.



And then standing under the willow in the golden light, it's the damp part of winter now, the strands hang waxy like long slick hairs, trailing fingers, dragging his hands and exhausted. I know I am holding too tightly.



Now, in the rose garden at the end of things, spring. I'm watching it work itself sadly backwards as a blue tit pecks at blossoms and they fall, snowy against blue sky. I send you the seeds saved and the plans for the fluff garden. I walk in the meadows where the ground, saturated with floodwater, has lost too much oxygen. The soft seed of the willow is drifting.