Next idea up: garden helpers.
I realised that some of what I’ve written about on the blog before might be turned into a story – from a child’s perspective.
This one happened to me. It was everyday and exciting, all rolled into one, and I’d like to hope that my garden helpers’ experiences were a little like how I imagine it in my head.
—
Two girls are playing in the garden. It is autumn, and a bit chilly out. One girl has her new waistcoat on – the fluffy one she talked her mum into buying.
They are playing with Barbies and pretend food items. They are in that in-between stage: they think of themselves as big girls, but they still like to get their earlier toys out again.
As they lay everything out on the table, make the Barbies talk, they see a woman in the garden next door. She is scooping, moving things with her hands.
They are bored now. They lean over the fence and ask the woman what she is doing.
The woman has seen them playing. She kept doing her thing, they did theirs. Now she shows them what she has in her hands: what looks like a big black binliner that is starting to fall apart.
Inside, she says, is something special. The girls lean in for a closer look – and pull back, fanning their noses from the smell. It doesn’t smell like the plastic toys they’ve been handling. It’s a rich, rotting smell, a bit too much, and good at the same time.
‘This is for the flower beds,’ she says. ‘It keeps the weeds down. It’s called mulch. It’s really just old leaves that have got wet and started to rot. It’s good for the soil, too.’
The girls are intrigued. This is messy, smelly, everything that Barbies are not. In a moment they are round, looking at the stuff in the bags, still put off by the smell. Still intrigued.
The woman goes to the shed, and hunts around for some gardening gloves. They are too big for the girls, really, but the girls are insistent – they want to try.
They all put the mulch into a wheelbarrow and bring it up to the flowerbed. They fork some of it out onto the bed. But the girls are already diving in, using their hands in the too-big gloves, ignoring the soil and muck that are flying up around the new waistcoat.
They put the mulch around the flowers. There’s not much to see. The woman explains that she should have done this earlier in the autumn, but still, it might help the plants now.
The girls get bored of the mulch after a bit. They start to find other things – snail shells that birds have dropped and discarded. Baby slugs hiding in the bottom of a plant pot. They ‘ugh’ and ‘uh’ and see how they can use the edge of a hand-fork to move them out the way.
‘What about planting?’ says the one with the waistcoat. Hard stuff done, yes. Now they want the good stuff.
The woman looks in the shed, and finds some smallish plantpots. She shows them some dark earth that doesn’t smell as much as the mulch. It’s in a bag. They fork it out into their pots.
Waistcoat Girl’s pot is overflowing. No room for the seed. They tip some compost out and bury the seed, then cover it over again.
The woman tells them to put something under the pot, so the soil doesn’t come out when you water it. She suggests they keep their pots on the window sill to get light and help the plant grow.
‘They are summer seeds, really,’ she say. ‘I don’t know if they will come up yet. But it’s worth a try.’
A window goes up, and the girls are called in to tea. Clutching their pots, they wave, and rush up to show what they’ve brought home.
The Barbies, the pink plastic ham and clumps of plastic peas, they stay on the table. The pots make it inside.
The woman looks up, puts away the gardening gloves, and smiles.
—–
I am a bit unsure if this can be a picture book – the girls are older than they might be in a regular picture book. But they need to be – they need the dexterity to do the work, and to be at that in-between age.
What I like about this idea is that it’s really a chance encounter. The girls might just have stayed on their side of the fence. But curiosity brings them over, and helps them try something new.
It’s not about creating lifelong gardeners. But it is about trying something new – and about the natural world having its own fascinations. Just as Barbies have theirs. (Or so I’m told.)