Many moons ago, in another life, my son’s Father built a huge raised bed outside our living room French doors, for vegetables. I was tipsy with the excitement of youth that evening, for the beginning of our homestead, in awe of this great wooden beauty. We called it “the big bed”. Since then I have gained a polytunnel and built many smaller vegetable beds myself, in the more appropriate South facing part of the garden. The big bed sat dormant for many years after he was gone. Stagnant with me, until the Autumn before last when I decided to fill it with Lavender.
I had completed two years study to become a Master Herbalist at this point and Lavender had become my closest friend. I made my first infused oil with the Lavender I had grown from seed, my first salve from that oil. She filled my kitchen in bundles of purple and green that erupted in perfume every time I walked past. I filled my baths with her and she held me naked as I grieved my old life. I doused my pillows with her to incite sleep and felt her scent strengthen, as if to comfort me, each time she mixed with midnight tears. I was told by many gardeners of great knowledge that technically she shouldn’t grow well in that bed but she flourishes and waves into the living room each time a breeze passes through.
My home is surrounded by fields and so the blow in of grasses and ragwort, dandelions and all sorts of wilderness is strong. Each Spring the big bed goes from tidy rows of Lavender to a jungle of overgrowth in the space of a few weeks and this year was no different. I took my little boy away for a few days and returned to the Irish Amazon! Winter always disconnects us slightly, as the last of the Lavender bundles is dried, potted and put away but when I saw her strangled by others, competing for growth, I felt a longing, no a must, to help her. The desire to protect was akin to that we feel with another human we love. Rushing out to be with her and clear her space we reconnected and I realised how far we have come on this journey, together. For a long time she was saving me but finally, this Spring, I was affording my new found strength to her.
Pausing, to look up at a clear blue sky the realisation shone down upon me that I now live in the homestead I once dreamt of. I was catapulted to a memory of reading WB Yeats’ “Innisfree” in school and recognising then his longing, having also spent days on grey pavements in London yearning, for exactly this. That tipsy excitement has become a peaceful reality and I have created my own Innisfree. I was even lucky enough to have documented the process in the accompanying video from the garden. This is not the first poem I have written about her but it is the one birthed by that moment. <3
Lady Lavender
my beloved
there's a reason
they're all besotted
I need not vogue
nor the most exotic
just cottage garden
with you as narcotic
A small holding-
growing remedies and feed
Yeats recommends bees and beans
You are my purple glow
I work the soil
around your base
clearing overgrowth
to give you space
While your wisdom aroma
Melts the ice of my unconscious
to breath in sublimation
enveloping me in coma
and calling me to recant
Our Earth forms fuse
Human and plant
as oneness
chants it’s chant
Lady Lavender