Stuck in the garden for the long spring

By Alan Mahar

We don’t feel like prisoners, because we’re sitting on our bit of grass: a shady medium-sized garden, inner-city enclave, woodland habitat at the bottom, three strip-beds the main planted area and a patio closer to the house. One big lollipop yew, one sturdy old crinkly birch, silver-barked: those are the mainstays. The big magnolia is taking its time to finish flowering – big white petals drop slowly like white crepe-cotton gloves. They’ve snowed all over the bed below and could be left to biodegrade themselves; but I’m picking out all the long white glove fingers, one by one, (probably my mother’s hands I’m thinking of, from long ago) and collect them in a bucket and topple them into the compost bin for recycling. When the flowers have all dropped we’ll suddenly notice the magnolia’s rather disappointingly plain, rounded leaves. Beyond the fence, in amongst the ivy a blackbird is stirring.

Amelanchier are dropping old flowers too, having completed their usual star-bright early blooming. We’ve seen the best of the berberis, shiny orange gold clusters crowning a very prickly bush. The camellias have come out in stages – the sugar-pink ones have dropped petals for months, and now it’s the turn of the crimson and the scarlet to glow against their rich dark green foliage: not much frost damage this year, luckily. One rusty orange acer in a pot has been fully leafed for weeks, while the other tree standing proud in a flower bed is only just beginning to unfurl its leaves from berry-red buds; the pesky squirrels can’t resist nibbling them though. We still hope for a maroon umbrella come summer. Five kinds of tulips are in flower – only for a day or two – first crimson, then cerise, now orange, purple and yellow. The iris leaves are erect as sword blades, a couple of them already bulging near the base with slow-forming flowers. The pretty much colourless flowers on the ivy and the laurel have still managed to pull the bees in, some very big bumblebees too. There’s been dancing over all the garden flowers – especially round the Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ – a purplish wallflower: enough butterfly activity to suggest summer is here already. We’ve seen peacock, small tortoiseshell, orange-tipped, cabbage-white and brimstone.

But I mustn’t pretend to be the expert here. I’m simply the garden labourer. I poke holes in the small apron of lawn; I dig out the compost bins, recycle everything that’s cut back. I bag up the weeds and sweepings. I pressure spray the slab paths and the benches. I also hoe and turn over the beds, and cover with mulch, but only where directed, so that no dormant plant is accidentally damaged. My wife is the proper gardener, the plantswoman, who recognises all the varieties, their names and when to plant them, when to prune them; she knows what is growing and what will be coming up next; I’m lucky someone does. She remembers how it should be from previous years, when we were probably too busy to tend the garden, or else we were away on holiday, or maybe it rained for weeks on end. This year is altogether different, because of the pandemic. We’re able to appreciate the garden more – the galloping growing, the ever-changing plants - through this long spring. Such things are important to savour, we’re realising; and maybe also worth setting down in writing, while a strange time is playing out its uncertain sequence.

But the rubbish that pushes into your head while weeding or hoeing, digging or recycling green leaves, takes some unpicking: a friend from childhood all but forgotten, the silence of football, a hard-of-hearing pratfall at work, the line of an old Dylan song, all sorts, including random flashbacks of European cities - Milan (the massive starling murmuration in front of the Stazione Centrale), Paris (the iris flower beds at the Jardin des plantes),Trieste (the James Joyce/Italo Svevo museum; a jacaranda tree in purple flower near the offices of Il Piccolo, the newspaper both writers contributed to). But while I’m trying to treasure such times I’m also thinking twice about whether any revisiting is going to be possible. We were supposed to go to Murcia for Easter to watch the Easter parades, all the dressing up as Roman soldiers, priests and disciples, one man carrying a wooden cross, elaborate floral displays, decorated floats, all absurdly paraded through the narrow streets of Lorca and Mazarron. And I would have wandered over the scrubland to the dried-up river with my binoculars and spotted nightjar, golden oriole and wryneck before breakfast. And when we got back to Birmingham we would have been spending special time with the grandchildren, hugging them - instead of the current arrangement - short videos and WhatsApp photos and hilarious unintelligible Skype exchanges. Would have been.

I sat in the garden yesterday and read back issues of Birdwatching magazine – monthly pin-ups of godwits and grebes, ID hints, around the reserves, rare sightings, ways of improving your annual bird list. Frustrating: mine has been a bad year so far for birds. I watch a few clouds skid over. Nothing much flying, apart from gulls letting out the occasional shriek on their way to or back from Swanshurst Lake, feral pigeons ferrying, wood pigeons flapping and moaning; no sparrowhawks out marauding yet, no Canada Geese honking their way over to Cannon Hill Park. No planes, but one NHS emergency ambulance in a noisy hurry. No swifts yet – it’s not summer; they’ll come soon enough and they’ll find those eaves they nest in every year without fail on Stoney Lane. Greats, coal and blue tits twitter round the birch tree. We have swarming visits from a friendly gang of long-tailed tits. I heard the tinkly twittering of a goldfinch on top of next door’s tv aerial. Our resident wren is a noisy chatterer, irritated by everything. Low-flying and hyperactive, he outcalls all the other birds, ending his tirade with a furious trill at the end: his exclamation mark. He’s Peter Finch in Network: he’s mad as hell, and he’s not wrong. The crows in the morning call to their mates for mucking about all day. I’m trying to do my counting, as birders always do, but it’s no use, I’m not even past ten yet.

I thought about those English prisoners of war in Germany who recorded all the avian visitors to their POW camp in Warburg, near Hanover. They meticulously dated and numbered the passerines, migrants, the residents, not forgetting all the flyovers in silhouette, every winged visitor to the camp, right from the time of the soldiers’ unfortunate capture in 1941 to their release at the end of the war. Some of the German guards threatened the birders, some assisted them; it can’t have been easy birdwatching. But captivity must have focused their observations, because they produced pages and pages of sightings, records, statistics. After the war those men were instrumental in advancing British ornithology: Peter Conder became director of RSPB, George Waterston pioneered the Osprey conservation project in Scotland and Edward Buxton wrote the definitive book on the Redstart – much of his research gathered during his time behind barbed wire in Germany. They certainly knew the best way to spend their captivity.

Then our blackbird interrupted me. He was bubbling into declarative speech. It’s not always song or melody, but more a lively sequence of sounds full of spring purpose, as well as defiance directed at any other males, any other birds, robins, magpies even; he’s all pumped up enough to chase any intruders back to their tree perches. I read an advertisement in a literary journal for the Seamus Heaney Centre, a peaceful place for poets to hang out and write, in Ireland, and the logo alongside governmental arts organisations was a blackbird silhouette. Now Heaney wasn’t the best ornithological N.I. poet because Michael Longley still is. But ‘famous Seamus’ was an heroic talent and wrote beautifully about so many more important things in life. He caught the bird’s wariness and unstoppable vocal defiance just right in The Blackbird of Glanmore (it’s on the last page of his District and Circle collection (Faber, 2006). There the poet calls him ‘Hedge-hop’ and observes his ‘picky, nervy goldbeak’. He’s attentive to his ‘ready talkback’ and ‘each stand-offish soundtrack.’ Finally Heaney claims the bird for himself and for his house: ‘I’m absolute for you.’ His blackbird’s on the grass when he arrives at Glanmore, ‘filling the stillness with life’ - and in the ivy when he leaves.

No doubt there are, as Wallace Stevens maintains, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, but I have to suspect that his American bird isn’t our homely, perky garden bird, because the commonest North American species is the Red-Winged Blackbird, a marsh and prairie bird, and he goes kon-ka-reeeee; unless Stevens means a Brewers Blackbird, which has a thin whistle and no yellow beak. But it was definitely turdus merula that Paul McCartney heard when he wrote his delicate ditty (silly lyrics, though), recorded on the so-called White Album, which Brad Mehldau memorably re-worked a few decades later for jazz piano (have a listen to his versions of Nick Drake and Radiohead too). Blackbird always sings for me: Mehldau is something like a cross between Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, capable of dancing and partying like the former and just a little less reflective and intense than the sublime genius-monster, Keith.

So I’ll stick with Heaney’s soundtrack; I’m absolute too. I can’t see my blackbird, he’s in the ivy, no doubt, but hearing his singing is thrilling enough. He’s just repeated the car-alarm riff for me, and the old wolf-whistle too, all mixed in with his pipes and whistles, his trills and chuck-chucks, all linked together in an almost liquid song sequence. And I’m just lucky I’ve had the chance to give him such attention, stuck in the garden for this long spring.

Alan Mahar has lived on the borderlands of Moseley and Sparkhill since 1980. Several of his short stories have been published nationally, as well as two novels - Flight Patterns (1999) and After The Man Before (2002). He founded Tindal Street Fiction Group in 1983 and was Publishing Director of the prize-winning Birmingham publisher Tindal Street Press between 1997 and 2012. He has recently completed a third novel; and an essay called 'Rivers and Libraries' has been included in the recent Dostoevsky Wannabe City Series: Birmingham anthology.

Photograph: By Si Griffiths