As I write this I sit in the living room where I watch the whistling winds bend everything sideways outside our windows. It’s derailed my plans for the day, to be spent beneath one of the huge ash, the one closest to the homestead, the one beside the herb garden. So I write indoors, instead, listening to the tin on the roof sound like it ever so slightly lifts to let the racing air pass through it.
It immediately takes me back to the cyclones of the the north where I grew up. Great sheets of corrugated tin would fly past taped windows and the landscape would be lashed for days, trees defoliated if they managed to remain upright. This is not that but as the great long limbs of the ash, wave widely in the wind, I think twice about standing beneath it for hours on end. They are a century old, if not more and they can lose large limbs on days like this, not normally anything that warrants any real mention but there are wounds, huge gaping remains, now calloused over, of the days their losses would’ve made resounding cracks across the valley and dented the earth beneath them. And anyone or anything with the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I am conscious of that.
Beneath this old tree is to be a shade garden. The first true shade garden I have ever really created. I have created gardens that are in partial shade, only receiving the soft kisses of morning sun or as trees have matured around them, beds that revel in some relief in the shadows on those long days of sunshine in summer BUT never a real shade garden. A place so protected from the giver of light, that only the very outer edges of this garden will ever experience any kind of illumination, some only mid morning and the rest, in the late afternoon.
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