Dear Readers,
A quick note to say that this weeks’s journal entry is a little different, it is just my writing, as it has been quite the week and while some garden work has taken place, the focus has been elsewhere, as the below entry explains. There has been a great shift in our cosmos, an exciting and liberating one and we enter into a new phase of making over Moorfield.
So, in keeping with this theme, this journal, and it’s ‘In Garden News’ section, will come to you fortnightly so that I might have the time to roll out the huge amount of garden work about to begin and then form it into words and images, and video (something Hugo and I will do together) that you will find enjoyable to follow along with and importantly, useful in your own gardening journey.
The story of Little Oak and her garden, and garden visits as a part of, ‘The Garden Gadabout’, will show up sporadically and furnish any pause in my writing and sharing of Moorfield, for the doing, so you won’t get a chance to miss me, or the opportunity to escape into my love of gardening, through the written word and pix.
I am excited for what I can share with you all, going forward but as always, thank you for being here, thank you for supporting us.
Pip, Hugo, family and Moorfield xo
I rise in the dark, well before the sun, after falling asleep early, sitting up, my 4 year old breathing tranquilly beside me in our bed in the space where Hugo sleeps, were he not away in Sydney. It is a treat, a ‘sleepover’ and she loves it, we both do. I am soothed, always, perhaps why I am asleep hours before I usually would be, watching her so at peace, away in her dreams of ladybugs and dinosaurs, after a week of high fevers and out of character cantankerousness from being sick, and sad.
While Nannie moving into her brand new house built only thirty metres from the homestead here, has been a cause for celebration for the big people in her life, for her it has been hard. Thirty metres might as well be another world. As a good friend (and primary school Principal), pointed out to us over the weekend just gone, here to help us move mum’s life still in boxes and stored in sheds on the property since we left Tasmania, half her little life, the almost 2 years we’ve been in the holding pattern of relocation and building, has seen her wake each morning to Nannie across the hall.
I move like a mouse through the house, it feels huge with just the two of us left late into the week. I look out a living room window across where the young Malus forest grows, hidden in the dark, mum’s house too, no light yets. I get my love of waking with the dawn from her but the week has been a busy one and the anxiety of the last two years, now dissipated, has made way for untroubled sleep. I feel that calm too, it is awash everywhere here, like the last two years never happened and the life we’d always intended here has finally begun.
I step outside onto the back verandah between the homestead and the stone barn and am woken fully by the rush of cold air against my face and taken in deeply to my lungs. I collect an armful of wood and scamper back inside where the residual warmth from last nights fire is still locked, I light a new one with the few remaining embers and take a moment to ensure it has caught and load it up. It’ll be warm by the time we are both ready to face leaving those cosy morning cuddles in bed.
I sit by the fire, just starting to crack and rumble, and here the beginning pitapat of light rain on the tin roof. I close my eyes and listen. I have not been this collected in years. A new chapter is upon us, and it is ushered in with the spring that is but weeks away from being officially begun but greets us already in the nodding of newly opened daffodils and the arrival of brilliant red breasted robins and fat buds on the ends of branches.
I make a coffee and I creep back into bed to write this to you all. Before us, a list as long as any we’ve ever written of garden work and farmhouse renovations but I am unfazed by it all. I know this life, a decade in just gone and a year into the next, I feel nothing but peace and joy, excitement for all that lay ahead. The flowers that haven’t bloomed yet, the fruits that haven’t formed, the weeks of preserving they will bring that linger in my longing for such ritual to return to our year, it is close now. The parties not yet had around the pool, around the fire, the cool spots sat under on hot summer days within shadows not yet caste from young trees newly planted, the whirling whisper of steam from cuppa not yet poured on a brisk morning in the glasshouse not yet erected. The workshops and walkthroughs not yet here but some day soon, the welcoming of garden lovers and lovers of such a life as this.
For two years I, we, have waited, longer if you count the two it took to leave our life, and Little Oak, behind in Tasmania for the promise of the new version of the one we’d been living, with all we’d learnt, where family was closer, the summers longer and work but a drive, and not a flight over an ocean, away and at last, it is here. I am here, sitting inside the dream, now awoken into actual existence. The rain falls, my baby sleeps, my pup snores and the sun rises on a whole new life, a whole new normal.
Pip xo
Exciting times ahead and I for one can’t wait to see it all evolve and be one of those garden visitors one day 👏 enjoy your new normal Pip , Hugo Nes and nannie 😊
Lovely to hear how all is falling into place Pip.