Lisa writes: The Scavenger project relies on the acrostic form to record my regular walks around the Darlands Nature Reserve near where I live in north London. The garden centre I pass on the two-hour circuit occasionally fills a crate with unwanted plants to ‘take for free’ – what I find, I plant. Sometimes there is something to plant; sometimes, nothing; and sometimes some weird things that wouldn’t do well in the earth, but I take them home if I can carry them and see how they might be put to use in my rather rough-and-ready back garden. Other observations about how the reserve responds to the seasons and a record of the times we live in, inevitably weave their way into the nine-line poems as walking goes hand-in-hand with rumination. I plan to continue diarising until the end of August to complete the cycle, and possibly beyond.
12/08/24
Saturdays and Sundays, the garden centre is normally
crowded. Gardeners, families, dogs and day-outers
advancing on plants as a weekend tonic, a welcome
variation from stuffy homes or a fake-fern office
environment, and their energy and enthusiasm to spend
normally means Monday morning is a good time to
garner some unsold, cleared out, knocked-about plants.
Evidently, this Monday morning, I’m wrong. The crate
reveals nothing except that it’s lined with plastic grass.
4/09/24
September’s not a fruitful month – nothing in the
crate again, except a label for a tomato plant, called
‘Ailsa Craig’ – identifier detached from what it identified:
vegetable by nutritionists; flower by botanists. It boasts
‘exceptional flavour and classic tomato aroma’ – only
notionally, there’s no evidence of this ‘TRIED and TESTED
garden favourite’. Home, I plant the label in a sunny spot,
enacting instructions. I can imagine the tomato growing –
removing leaves for circulation: tending to an ‘airy nothing’.
23/09/24
Saw a plastic tray of begonias going for ‘just £3’ and
consciously decided not to ask the garden centre’s manager
about what time roughly they might decide to de-
value them to worthless and dump them in the crate. Despite the
expedition being fruitless, there are rules to follow –
not knowing keeps the project alive and where’s the
gratification in turning up for blighted begonias with no
expectation of disappointment? Perhaps I have
reduced Fortune’s Wheel to this – to prevent riskier punts.
28/10/24
So, with the end of British Summer Time,
clocks going back and a tractor ploughing
arable land while a TEREX digger tries to
vroom up the narrow hedge-lined path –
everything seems intent on going
north or south, forwards or backwards,
getting ahead or behind some marker but I’m
enlivened by the pot of bronze sedge grass
resisting time: not quite dying, not quite living.
2/12/24
after John Burnside
Scores of fir trees cut down and waiting to be one of the chosen.
Christmas is upon us with the drive to buy something festive – since
August almost. You could accuse me of exaggeration, but the deep
veneration for Father Capitalism keeps us in mind of our duties,
especially when we are least receptive or liable to play truant in the fields.
Nocturnes. Why do I think of endings when it’s a celebration of birth?
Guests at a gathering are just guests. Even kings walk into the dark,
exchanging pleasantries before leave-taking, getting on with their lives
regal or otherwise. The trees remain like sentinels, stoic and watching.
8/01/2025
Sideways sign for Christmas opening times
collapsed on the crate and partly hidden by an
array of bins ready for collection – grimy black,
vulgar orange and dull green. No plants to
entice my scavenging fingers and any
New Year hope for a little something like
green shoots to get the sap rising is dangerously
ersatz emotion – a substitute for offering
restitution to the earth: digging down and dirty.