The Hopeful Month

You have to take the bright moments when you can find them. It has been an especially dark start to 2025, and I for one am ready for a dose of sunshine.

Warmth, though, that’s still a big ask. Even though the skies have cleared to a shining, sapphire blue, it’s still scrape-the-windshield weather in the morning. I have never been happier to embrace one of car technology’s greatest innovations— heated front seats. One button push and a toasty tush is yours in a minute flat. After twelve years of shivering while the old Note’s AC coughed out lukewarm air on a frosty morning, Harvette’s little trick on the morning commute feels like sorcery.

That half-hour drive into work has its own quiet magic now I’m on the road at sunrise. The bridge at Sonning, cloaked in mist from the Thames, has an otherworldly feel. The treeline flattens into two-dimensional planes, hovering like ghost-giants in the soft luminescence. Crossing the bridge feels like slipping into another realm, a place of fog and mystery.

As I hit the M4 the light changes again. The horizon is washed in rose gold, peach and tangerine, while the sky brightens to the clean denim blue of a country singer’s jeans. There’s still a diffusion to the light. The morning traffic is haloed, glimmering, sparks striking the chrome. In another week or so the sun will be in my eyeline, and I’ll need to wear shades to get into work.

TLC and I have been spending every weekend in the garden, making the most of the lighter days to get some heavy lifting done. This is the latest episode in our ongoing struggle with the bottom section of our property, Copse End. Over the years it has been home to raised beds, a lawn and summerhouse, and always, always the unstoppable infiltration on three sides from ivy, bramble, nettles and bindweed. In the summer of 2020 the situation reached a low point, as the spiny invaders almost took over. I spent a lot of lockdown in pitched battle with Copse End, a bruising, slashing conflict which helped take my mind off other more pressing issues, even if it did leave thorn-scars behind.

Anyhow. Copse End Mk. 3 is a complete restart. Last November we had the ground rotorvated, tearing up the last of the lawn and long-standing weeds. The ensuing swamp overwintered under cardboard and plastic while TLC made drawings and began to portion out the ground plan. We’re opening up the whole area, moving away from the notion of a two-thirds split down the long runway of the garden, revealing the full 130m airstrip right down to Gwen’s Den, the huge pergola that marks the far boundary of our property.

It’s hard work, don’t get me wrong. We didn’t need to waste money on a gym membership in January—swinging a lump hammer and digging up heavy clay soil is all the exercise we need, thank you very much. It feels like a very long haul, and at times, aching and frozen, we fervently wished we’d left well alone.

But no. Copse End is where the sun lands in the afternoon. It’s where we want to be come 5pm on a weekday evening, soaking up rays alongside a well-deserved glass of boozy. It’s where we want to eat as the sun hits the tree line, with the smoky tang of barbecue drifting up from the kamado. It’s our escape plan, our refuge. In Copse End, you hear nothing but birdsong and the drone of an occasional plane. Traffic noise is over there somewhere, out of earshot. If we put the work in now, the rewards come June could be magnificent.

Filling C’s planned beds with plants is going to be a big job too, and could prove expensive, so we’re indulging with another of the gardener’s winter pleasures—getting seed trays on the go. The window sills are crowded with propagators, dewy with condensation, warm beds for our new potential haul. I’ve started thinking about veg as well—there is a raised bed planned for me to grow squashes, chard and fennel. I have a couple of types of cucumber under glass, and garlic is already poking out questing green shoots from the buckets I split two heads into a couple of weeks back. There will be tomatoes and chilis too, herbs by the armful, and salad for days. I may not be the gardener that C has become, but I have my moments.

Sure, we spend our weekend evenings in a woozed-out blur as the endorphins of exercise wear off and our joints and muscles noisily remind us we are in our fifties. Ordinarily, any reminder of my mortality would give me a bad case of sads. But we pack away the tools at the end of the day with a glow.  Every week we’re a little further along, a little closer to the goal. There’s no real deadline as such—after all, a garden is never finished. But that’s part of the fun of it. We do this because we choose to, because it’s good for us to put in the work (mostly) by ourselves. Because come the summer we will have a place of peace and comfort carved out of cold earth and old stone and warm seedlings.

I can’t think of anything more hopeful than that.