I spent the last days of August in the garden with an orchestra of bees. They were gathering the dregs of pollen from wild roses beside the shed. The roses were a gift on my 60th birthday, nine years ago. A bundle of saplings arrived in a black plastic bag, and I was astonished to learn that such prickly things could be delivered through the post. But the twigs lay in the bag for weeks, and I didn’t know when I should plant them.
I convinced myself that it might be better to wait until the frost of November had broken down the soil, a theory that demonstrated I knew as much about science as the child who thought the moon was made of cheese. In fact I was just being lazy; I didn’t want to spend a wet afternoon on the ground with a trowel.
By Christmas I was embarrassed by the plastic bag in the corner of the shed, and the tiny yellow shoots trying to nudge their way out, like fingers in a Gothic story, emerging from under the lid of a coffin.
I stuck the dead twigs one by one into the freshly turned soil. It was easy but not very joyful. I saw no prospect for growth, and the twigs standing in the black mound of earth reminded me of Calvary
“What’s in the bag?” the beloved wondered as we poked around in the shed, looking for Christmas lights.
“Roses,” I declared, “but it’s best to wait until spring to plant them.” She said nothing; I suppose she’s used to me by now.
But the roses continued to worry me, like dead bodies demanding burial, and after New Year I made an attempt to plant them, but couldn’t break the ground with a spade. So I finally abandoned them in the long grass, where I expected they would dissolve into the earth and be forgotten.
That April a neighbour arrived with a JCB to dig out a foundation for my new studio, scooping up the shale-ladened clay in his mechanical bucket and dumping it in a heap beside where the building would eventually stand.
When he was finished I stuck the dead twigs one by one into the freshly turned soil. It was easy but not very joyful. I saw no prospect for growth, and the twigs standing in the black mound of earth reminded me of Calvary.
Years ago there was an artist living on the far side of the lake, making ceramic pots. After a few years he moved away, but I saw him recently on Facebook, standing beside some of his pots at an art exhibition in New York
But then the first leaf appeared.
I could hardly believe my eyes. The resilience of the roses amazed me. They grew like weeds. And after a few years they became a mighty ditch of white petal and dazzling yellow centres, with blackbirds foraging underneath. Their endurance was even a balm for my own melancholy on many a dark winter day.
In autumn the rose hips grow as fat as chestnuts while the flowers fade slowly, but even then a few bees persist in sucking the last drops of nectar while gathering the pollen.
And on the final day of August I had the studio door open, and I sat listening to them for a long while as I stared at the blue of Lough Allen. The lake is three miles wide, and years ago, when the twigs were dying in the plastic bag, there was an artist living on the far side in a cottage, making ceramic pots. After a few years he moved away, but I saw him recently on Facebook, standing beside some of his pots at an art exhibition in New York.
There’s another artist now in the cottage across the lake, probably mixing paints in the early morning and brushing oil on her canvas beneath the same sky that stretches over me
When I look across the lake I think of him as a kind of absence. When I hear a digger in the quarry below me I know it is not the same neighbour who once worked on my studio, but the fact is that all diggers make the same coughing sound as the bucket hits the ground. The blackbirds too appear timeless as they perch on a long wobbling branch of the ash tree, although I doubt they are the same pair that sang to me a decade ago.
Certainly the bees are new. They swim into the pollen bed at the heart of the flower like excited children. But they too make the same sound as all other bees. And there’s another artist now in the cottage across the lake, probably mixing paints in the early morning and brushing oil on her canvas beneath the same sky that stretches over me.
It’s as if everything exists in the never-ending present — the man on the digger, the artist in the cottage, and the bees on the flower. Only I, being old, can sense the shadow of time, the absence of other bees, other neighbours and other long-departed friends.