Hello, from Emma
How are you? So pleased to meet you! I’m Emma.
Once upon a time, I had an office job or two; first in science publishing and later in IT. I learned my way around running a project, and about doing analytical work, and also about when the analytical work needed to be put aside in favour of something else. Eventually, I left that behind me and moved into a phase of my life that I consider to be recovery from all those desks.
At first, I would do a woodland conservation session with Friends of Oxleas Woodlands and then hurt for a couple of days. And then I stopped hurting, and started doing more – rinse and repeat. These days it’s rare for me to have a desk day at all, let alone two in a row. I wake up at some ridiculous hour of the morning and actually feel functional before I’ve had a cuppa.
I’ve always gardened, as far as I can remember. Even when I was busiest with formal work, I still gardened (if hastily). I feel more rooted, more grounded when I get my hands in the mud; I recognise time more clearly when I see sunrises and sunsets. The slow, unceasing change in the trees I see from my kitchen is a calmness to me. There’s joy too in the small things – germinating seeds, leaf buds, eating fruit straight from the plant. Fear and hope and serenity all shaped and smoothed by the seasons.
I sometimes think of gardening as over-involved ecology. Woodlands (gardens) are competition and cooperation and challenge and acceptance all rolled up together, forming (if we are lucky and careful) a balance where there is room for all our ways of being, however active or involved we are, and for the frogs and the foxes too.
When I come to work on a garden, that’s where I’m coming from – I’m not that interested in “is it pretty” until I’ve worked out who and what inhabits the space, and how and why they do it. And once I have that, I’m afraid it’s spreadsheet time. One day I may share the Jackwood Terrace garden spreadsheet, but not today.
In the time since I stopped desk work, I’ve picked up more than a few practical skills. And once you know something, you’re more or less obligated to share it (that’s how it works, yes?). I’ve had some enormously gratifying moments, watching people do things they’d never thought to try.
Working with Katie on Wrenaissance and on The Rookery, it’s a great pleasure to me to open that door to more teaching, more gardening, more people and more ways of being.
