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Boredom Feel Better Hedonic Adaptation Mindfulness Mood Nature Things My Garden Has Taught Me

Green unseen

The other white in the garden, if white often registers for us as achromatic, or a no-thing, is green. Green is the the frame which supports and surrounds the star attraction. Seed packets pay scant pictorial attention to a flowering plant’s foliage, even though it’s the foliage we see as we wait for the culminating bloom. It is also foliage that remains after the flowers have died away. For when we buy a packet of seeds, we’re generally getting much more foliage than flower, and yet this is never acknowledged or accounted for.

Equally our lives are made up of foliage: eating, drinking, sleeping, grooming, defecating, going to the supermarket, listening to the radio, drinking cups of tea.

Categories
Boredom FOMO Mindfulness Nature Things My Garden Has Taught Me

Happiness Grows White

It’s about ten to ten in the evening and I’m standing in semi-darkness beating out the rhythm to a Jose Gonzalez song on the stone path with a piece of bamboo, eyes transfixed by a white spray of tiny flowers glinting out of the darkness like sequins on a velvety black evening dress.

Achillea ptarmica, I whisper, ‘The Pearl’”, AKA sneezewort, a moniker that doesn’t fit this moment or this plant, blearing all associations of jewellery to images of runny noses and slow-mo videos made by the Department of Health showing fluey folk shpritzing and spouting gobs and splashes of light-refracting mucous out of their mouths and noses.