Garden
by Nancy Graham
(This is a work in progress and will be regularly updated)
This photograph, of a weed pushing up through the space where a drainpipe descends into concrete, was taken in the back garden of the house that I grew up in, and in which my dad still lives. There is no other plant life visible, except maybe the small collection of rotting leaves behind the pipe and the green mossy/lichen growing on the surface of the concrete. I came back to this picture recently as I’ve been thinking about when I will get to visit this garden, and my dad, again.
The photo above is of the framed print on my living room wall (hence, the reflection). The print has given the green an iridescence. Some of the leaves are almost bleached out with overexposure, which makes the plant stand out even more.
“Weeds”, we are always told are just unwanted plants; they are anything but.
The weed in the photograph is a vivid green collection of delicate and beautifully shaped leaves. The vividness stands out against the grey of the pipe and the concrete, asserting its will to live even in a hostile and seemingly infertile environment. Why, how, is it daring to grow here?
The answer doesn’t matter, it only matters that it is there, existing as a beautiful thing, in and of itself, against the drab background.
As a jumping off point at the start of the lockdown, this photograph made me think about my dad and his garden. But there’s also something about the plant’s vibrancy (so incongruent with the background) that’s so in keeping with how I see the world. That life is often about adapting to new and imperfect realities, and the ability to retain an essence of something beyond the quotidian, the necessary.
A recurring discussion at the moment is that life as we knew it will not return. And that change isn’t just inevitable but necessary. What gives me comfort is the reminder that we are all adaptable and will redesign our lives to be whatever they need to be.
I see that capacity for change in the photograph. That bright little plant sprouted up in the most unexpected place, and is thriving. We can find beauty even at the bottom of a drainpipe.
This was all brought to mind when watching Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.
The latter part of the film shows the Austrian protagonist, Franz Jägerstätter, being held prisoner by the Nazis in Berlin. During one scene, very late on, when he has been sentenced to death, Franz wonders around a small prison yard, and as he approaches a wall, he looks down and sees a plant in a similar setting to the one in my dad’s garden. It’s a nondescript weed, poking out of the stone and concrete. Franz lightly and tenderly touches the plant with his foot, the camera pans up to him looking down, and then we cut away to another shot.
This, in keeping with the final film, is from the original script:
[171 EXT. YARD, TEGEL]
The inmates are allowed half an hour on the yard. They must keep a distance from each other and speak not a word.
When he walks in the yard he gets pleasure from watching the ants on a small ant-hill, from the bees in the linden trees, from the swifts and swallows that dart between the buildings, chattering gaily.
It strikes him that nature carries on its simple, open life without interruption. It makes him feel sentimental towards the world, though not toward the flies that flit about his cell; they only seem eager for him to die, so they can carry on their business unopposed.
He stops to look at the remains of a barn swallow nest that some wretch has knocked down and left on the ground.]
We take nothing for granted in this shot being included. Franz is a farmer and devout Catholic and the early scenes of the film show him and his wife tilling the soil, planting, weeding, hoeing, scything grass and tending to living things. There is at least one shot with them hands in the soil, fully present and communing with God’s earth. There are many other shots in the film with characters physically connecting with (playing with, holding in their hands, picking) plants, vegetation, trees, flowers.
Franz’s passing connection with the plant in the prison ground holds weight for the viewer. This isn’t just an establishing shot, a prisoner kicking around the yard, it is someone whom we have learnt feels a spiritual connection to the earth and here we project onto him that connection. He touches that tiny plant and we know he sees beauty, order and vitality, despite the horror and chaos that surrounds him.
The capacity for us (and in Franz’s case this is due to his faith and his life as a farmer) to recognise and commune with natural beauty, however fleeting and seemingly incongruous, is more important than ever at this time, when opportunities to be outside (whether in private gardens or in wide open communal spaces) have a new resonance.
Another source of comfort during lockdown has been in poetry, and I reached first for two female American poets, Mary Oliver (whose writing about nature feels essential at a time like this) and Emily Dickinson. Dickinson spent a lot of her life living and writing in her room and so she seemed particularly relevant as I adapted my own room for working at home.
Her poem ‘There is another sky’, dated 1851, imagines the natural world as a garden, and gives us concise but vivid images of forests, fields, flowers, bees and green leaves as part of an invitation home to her brother, Austin.
I read these lines and they instantly coalesced with the little plant “Whose leaf is ever green;” in my photograph, and Franz in the prison yard reflecting on nature. They now form reassuring companions with whom I am navigating and settling into this new, imperfect reality.
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields –
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
Copyright Harvard University Press