About
After my year as Leverhulme Poet in Residence at Moorbank, Newcastle University’s Botanic Garden (from October 2010), I’ve decided to make this a space to share garden-related thoughts. I’m hoping to post past work as well as new things as they happen along. It would be very fine indeed if anyone else wanted to pick up a spade and chip in.
‘Everywhere was Eden’ is a quote from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, woven into one of the entry banners.
I was also intrigued to read Homer’s description of his orchard at Alcinous (around 1000 BCE) where the ‘fruit never fails or runs short, winter and summer alike, it comes at all seasons of the year, and there is never a time when the soft West Wind’s breath is not assisting, here the bud, and here the ripening fruit; so that pear after pear, apple after apple, cluster on cluster of grapes and fig upon fig are always coming to perfection’.
The garden as paradise, as Eden, is a powerful myth and an increasingly important one as we try to negotiate the challenges of a changing climate and growing population. Tending our gardens, and making new ones, is one simple thing we can all do to help.
