“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

From the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Spring and summer are busy, busy times in the garden. Seeds to be sown, seedlings to be potted on, young plants to be transplanted, endless weeds and watering. It can be so easy to rush through it all without noticing it. Before you know it it's mid summer and you wonder how you got here. Where did the year go? How everything has grown!

This little piece is a call to stop occasionally, put down the secateurs or the trowel, look around you and take notice. Put the to-do list on hold just for a moment, and look at the space you’ve created. Breath it in, feel the sunshine, or perhaps the breeze, or even a gentle sprinkle of rain, on your face. Hear the sound of the birds or the buzz of the bees, pick an edible leaf of something nearby if you can, taste it, enjoy it, savour it all. Stop doing and just … exhale … be.

Be at one with nature. Whether you have a tiny garden yard, a balcony with some pots, or a vast walled kitchen garden, you can take a little while to just enjoy the beauty of nature. We are a part of it, we feel a connection to it, it’s somewhere deep in our DNA. Tune into that for a moment, because after all, what have you created this garden for, if not to relish it?

Notice the way that leaf curls around, the way the wind plays with those frilly petals, the way a butterfly dances around deciding which flower to settle on. Notice how the sunlight glimmers through the dappled leaves of a tree, or plays on the surface of water. Notice how the clouds slowly shift and change shape as they gently drift across the sky. See how the flower turns its head towards the sun, and do the same. Observe how a plant stays strong and stable at the roots, and yet flexible up above, moving with the wind or bowing under the weight of a bumblebee, so that these things do not break them. Such wise plants.

If you can, let your eyes settle on an area of green. The colour is relaxing to us because it’s mid spectrum, meaning your eyes don’t need to adjust either way to take it in. To be honest, I don’t entirely get the science behind it, but I do know that gazing at green foliage is very calming. I’m lucky to have an office at the bottom of my garden. It is a small and narrow strip of garden, situated behind a Victorian terraced house, but it is (right now in late spring) filled with green, a wide spectrum from yellowish lime-green through to deepest forest green. Even if I include the backs of the houses facing me, and the fence and sky, I can still see more shades of green than any other colour. I have large glass sliding doors on the front of my office, so my frame is a large one, and when contemplating something in my job, I gaze over this green vastness and it helps to calm my brain. Even better is when I watch a bird hopping down the lawn or a bee making its way from flower to flower. I have to be careful not to fall into a daydream and forget about the work I should be doing, but I find looking away from the computer screen, and into the garden really does help me conjure my best ideas, like a mini meditation. 

When I’m at my allotment, I’m often so busy with the jobs that need doing in the limited time I have, but occasionally I stop what I’m doing for a brief moment and look around me at the beauty of the whole site, especially in late spring and summer when it’s lush with growth, and I have a sense of being fully present in the moment. It’s such a good feeling. A sudden rush of gratitude that I have that space, and that I’m a small part of that community, all of us working individually to grow our own food, but also together contributing to a thriving and dynamic ecosystem that benefits wildlife and the planet as much as it does us, and collectively we have created a burgeoning oasis in the middle of a city, and what a beautiful thing that is. It occurs to me in these moments, that all of us gardeners are part of a similar community, albeit a little more scattered across the globe, but no less important.

I know most gardeners would probably agree with my late mum, who always said she would sit for 5 minutes to look at her garden before she spotted more jobs that needed doing, and she would be compelled to get up and start working again. I know, I get that, and it’s okay to observe what needs doing, but I also try and take the time for some gratitude and pride and just sheer enjoyment of being in the garden.

I hope you can find a little bit of that in yours.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this publication you can buy me a coffee here which will be very much appreciated. I also have a shop on Etsy called Zoe’s Garden Prints that you might like to mooch through, or you can share this post.