Is it really just me?

Wondering whether I’m alone in loving weather.

I was talking to Jo and Louisa, two of our Iford volunteers about weather, outside of the auditorium at Bath university where we’d just listened to a talk by Charlotte Molesworth. It was a couple of days after a storm had passed through the country toppling trees, bringing flooding and power cuts and I was speaking about the lack of serious damage in the garden, and about my love of weather of all kinds, for which, it seems, I’m a bit unusual!

Now I love weather, I don’t really mind what weather, so long as it’s changeable and unpredictable. We are lucky here in the South West of England to be blessed with a fairly benign climate. Our summers are never too hot, nor our winters too cold, the one constant however, is change.

A month or so back, when autumn should have been in full swing we had a period of about two weeks where the weather seemed to stand entirely still; every day was exactly the same, it was mild but not warm, overcast with leaden skies and completely still, hardly a breath of wind stirred. I hated it, it made me feel uneasy, as if the earth had ceased to spin. Talking to my excellent colleagues at Iford I was genuinely astonished to find that my feelings were not shared by any means. This strange dearth of weather had come off the back of a very wet spell and the general feeling seemed to be relief that a calm spell of weather made gardening easier.

I think part of what I enjoy about gardening is the utter, mind boggling futility of an endeavour where you set yourself up to battle against the apparent chaos of nature. Gardening is an act of hope, a act of devotion to the creation of a moment of designed artistry in the most dynamic of settings. It’s an act that must be constantly repeated until injury, infirmity or death, there is no battle to be won, only toil, but what an office! What a view!

The rain, the wind, the snow, the burning sunshine, it reminds you that you are alive, and insignificant. I find that so reassuring. It’s not that what we do doesn’t matter, it’s that it’s very impermanence means that it must be appreciated now, there is no tomorrow, not in any real sense, we have to find the joy in the moment.

For me, getting buffeted around by the wind is like the gentle hand of a parent steering a child towards their destination. The lashing cold rain that stings your face in winter are like the stinging tears of frustration. The gentle warm sun of spring is the embrace of love itself. When the sun breaks through the clouds to cast long elegant shadows across the garden, to light the flowers it sends my heart soaring, sometimes I could weep with joy at it, it’s magnificent.

When the wind ceases to blow, the sun refuses to shine and the rain fails to fall, I feel bereft, I feel left behind, abandoned. I don’t particularly care about good gardening weather, I think I just want to feel like a part; however tiny, and insignificant, of this vast, dynamic, unfathomably complicated, beautiful world.