1 July 2024
My enigmatic friend is a one-off – at once a provocateur, an impresario, a blue collar craftsman, a local celebrity, a friend to anyone in need, a folk filmmaker, and a free-spirited mover and shaker. He’s all these things and more, but above all he’s a tireless Gardener.
His garden and its requisite gatherings were already the stuff of legend when I crashed into Hastings. “There must have been 700 people there…” they’d say. Stories shared with a wink about music nights, parties, mischief, etc. Suffice to say the trees overlooking this ever-evolving eco-zone have seen some things.
After a couple years in town, I finally got an invite to his yearly doo. There was live music and more beer than you’d have thought we could drink. Memory is a bit hazy, but I might have seen you there, because indeed everyone was there.
I attended one or two more garden parties and then COVID…..
We’d talk periodically on the phone, making plans to meet after lockdown, and that’s when he began starting every call with “Mike Baby! You’re never gonna believe the garden man!!!” Then he’d laugh and trail off into something else entirely.
Lockdown ended, and I finally made it up to see what my friend had been banging on about all these months.
This Garden beggars belief. I will try to describe it briefly to you here but will surely under-deliver.
As you enter, you’re swallowed whole by the colour – the greens, purples, oranges, yellows. The concrete jungle behind you seems somehow and suddenly miles away.
My friend’s Garden is an escape from the fractured world around us. A small patch of earth that remains heavenly.
He’s got a green thumb indeed. And it’s not just for the flowers, and trees, and grasses and hedgehogs and badgers and budgies he’s growing in this space. With the live music and community gatherings, he’s nurturing our entire town.
It’s not a blanket approach, he’s no farmer – working the land for profit. He moves among us watering here, adding soil there, strengthening this, and cutting that back. Each move he makes is thoughtful, careful, and springs from a deep desire to see us bloom. The Gardener never seems to ask what’s in it for him.
I think what’s in it for him is… us. You and I. It’s the conversations we have when we sit in one of his rooftop sun-traps. It’s the moment when Siddy Bennett seemingly levitates onto the stage to sing one of her groovy classics with Blair and whatever shit-hot band he’s assembled, it’s the audience in lockstep singing along and moving – up and down, side to side.
In the Garden, we are not only WITNESSING a unique kind of natural beauty, we BECOME part of it, a field full of wildflowers swaying in the breeze, drinking up yesterday’s rain, and soaking up today’s sun.
The memory of this unique experience is fresh today. With another chaotic, inspired and fulfilling event behind us, the town is buzzing. “How lucky are we?” I’ve been asked more times than I can count. “Such talent in this town!!” is a common refrain from most every person who was there.
It’s all true.
The greatest of these may be the talent of The Gardener to cultivate a space for us to learn to love and appreciate each other again.
And that job is never done.
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