The garden
sharing things with stubborn women. something i will miss.
The garden had always been a source of contention in our relationship. We completely agreed with each other, naturally. We were terrible, lazy people. How could we be so spoiled?Resenting each other, and ourselves for not being better. Other houses on our street had outdoor dining sets, greenhouses, and toys for children. Ours had weeds. And not your average dandelions and dock weeds but violent monsters. Twisting vines and towering columns of green fur. They reached up to my chest. The air had a thick scent in that garden, heavy with pollen and moisture, like some sort of rainforest.
“We’ve created a micro-climate.” I’d say to Leo. And he would laugh. And we would both shake our heads at the other’s ambivalence. It was our shared shame. But we were twenty years old and had other things on our minds.
But it was not our garden, of course. We were a small mark on the terraced house’s great history. Our first summer that we lived in that house, three Polish men showed up at the house one sunny June morning and told us that the landlord had sent them here to fix the garden. Leo and I were overjoyed. We would have garden parties! We would sunbathe! But when I returned home from work that evening, the garden was down to its bare bones. The garden was down to its bare bones. It had the air of a fluffy dog who had been dunked in cold water: shivering, skinny. A flash of sorrow crossed my mind. An image of the apple tree that I would never get to plant. I told Leo that it looked a bit like a prison yard. It had been completely covered in concrete grey gravel. Every iota of greenery unceremoniously ripped from the earth. I reflected on the lexical significance of ‘garden’ versus ‘yard’ and found the space between them to be gaping.
“This is so much worse,” I told Leo and to my relief he nodded.
“Yeah this is worse,” he said.
If before the garden was a rainforest (wet, fertile, wild) now it was a parking lot (dry, sterile, domestic).
So we left the garden alone after that. I stopped considering it something I paid rent to be allowed to exist in and started thinking of it as a type of nature preserve I wasn’t allowed to touch. The jungle returned. Our friends and family shook their heads when they saw it, saying it was such a pity we couldn’t enjoy our garden. They told us we were so lucky to have such a large outdoor space so close to the city centre. I didn’t give a fuck. Looking out at magpies flying in between the purple thistles and seeing rats running around the thick clover was far more preferable than staring out at the yard that our landlord had spent hundreds of euros on.
The next summer, our far more reasonable friend, Emily, moved in. She is nothing if not efficient. Two weeks after we moved out, she Whatsapped us a photo, with a text saying ‘spruced up the garden a bit.’ I knew I was being ungrateful and I tried to act like I felt bad about being ungrateful but all I felt was resentment. I didn’t want Emily to change our garden. Our little failure that me and Leo had worked so little to create.
That was until I started smoking weed1 out there with Julie in the spring before we left. In February 2025 we stood on the concrete slab closest to the backdoor. Her, wearing two pairs of socks and two dressing gowns, me, wearing green velvet pyjama pants and a black leather jacket that belonged to my stepdads brother. Huddled under the leaky drainpipe during the dark evenings and cold midnights. We smoked in the pouring rain, we smoked until dawn. Never venturing further than directly below the gutter.
It was unseasonably warm the day before St. Patrick’s Day. We had some green for the Green Day and decided to enjoy the good weather and good company before our lackluster DARTY the following day. We sat on a wooden bench that Emily had installed the summer before (I can only imagine the chaos involved in lugging a five piece garden furniture set on a Dublin Bus from Ikea to Ranelagh, but that’s thing about Emily: her process is absurd but her results are exceptional). It was on March 16th, 2025, that I realised our garden didn’t look like a prison yard, and it didn't look like a rainforest either. It looked almost like an actual garden. Like, a nice garden. That someone might have intended to look like that. There were tall purple flowers all along the back wall (in May I would find that they were a massive bee magnet which promptly sent me into a state of pure ecstasy). Bulbs in the flower pot that was turned on its side, snails crawling along the bottom of the wall and slugs sleeping peacefully on bouncy leaves in the shade. The chalky grey gravel looked almost pretty next to the green stripes of vines with bright purple flowers.
I could’ve cried. I couldn’t believe that nature had managed to overcome Emily Foy. Here it was, defying the most stubborn person I know. Julie crouched down and started weeding.
“Wait!” I said. She looked up at me, confused.
“I…make sure you…there could be worms or something in there.” I said, not sure what I was trying to say. Was I telling her not to weed the garden? Even though that is objectively a good thing to do because it makes the garden more usable for parties and hanging out? Even though our good friend Emily had spent ages trying to get it in this halfway decent place?
Yes. I didn’t want the garden to be weeded.
In the end, I compromised with Julie. We left the last metre or so of the garden wild and got to work on weeding the rest. But we had a rule. We would only weed when we were stoned. The impending goodbye parties and house inspections in order to get our deposits, necessitated a lot of weed(ing). Each time we went out, it was warmer and there were more insects and flowers and bees to marvel at. We found a baby slug, we learned that snails like to nap under dried clover, we ran our fingers over the fluffy underside of the leaves and compared it to the ear of a mouse. Weeding was not a chore but an activity, something I looked forward to.
Emily, Julie and I are very different people. If the garden belonged to just one of us it wouldn’t be as magical as it is now; a combination of our three tastes and characters. Emily, who loves to look after others, provided garden furniture to create a space for us all to gather and her football led to many evenings of childish delight, playing footie in literally freezing temperatures. Julie has a love for landscaping, repetitive tasks and keeping everything neat and trimmed. She was the only one who ever suggested we actually go outside and do a bit of work on the garden, without her it would have turned back into a jungle. And I like to think my sick sentimentality added something too; snails crawling up the walls, bees filling the air with the a floral scent and seed bombs which will appear next year when I won’t have any connection to the house anymore. The garden is our a legacy, a space that we accidentally created together. Turns out it had nothing to do with Leo after all.
It’s unlikely that Julie, Emily and I will ever live together but if we did, I imagine our space would be as beautiful, multi-purposeful and fraught with compromise as our garden. It would certainly be filled with beautiful handmade crocheted items and hundreds of spices and sauces. We are three very different people but I think we all have a shared impulse to make things beautiful and cosy and liveable. I will miss spending time in our garden with them more than I can say. I will miss having something that belongs to all three of us; it is a beautiful thing, to share a space with people you love. Somewhere being not exactly how you specifically want it but rather a perfect combination of the people you love is such a rare treat in these individualistic times.
On what we all knew would be the last day we would weed together, I promised myself that I would go to the park every single week no matter what. No matter how busy I get, how far away I am from nature, I want to notice the change in seasons, I don’t want to sleepwalk through the cycles. Because there’s a million things that I’m supposed to be focusing on but only one of them really matters: time to notice things. Time to think. Time to spend in silence in the company of others. Time where conventional time does not exist and instead it is the weather and the positioning of the stars that determine change, progress and growth.
My garden was what made me realise that the future is still uncertain.
For my parents/future employers etc. Libby Marchant does not actually smoke weed. Libby Marchant plays a character online called Libby who writes a newsletter called Notes from The Gutter.