Standing on moss soaked by rain, with barely more than a heavy mist still falling upon me, I am surrounded by nature’s unstoppable surge into hope and fulfilment.
Everything in the garden and surrounding countryside has begun the wonderful process of bursting forth into new growth, into bud and into green, into blossom and into eventual fruitfulness. This gentle fall of moisture is matched by the unseen upward flow in every plant around me, and nothing brings that home more than the constant dripping from the cut ends of small branches trimmed late from a still bare looking Birch tree. The sap is rising: awakening, rousing, moving, growing, yearning and praising: bursting forth into exuberance and a maximized potential of nature’s inbuilt compliance with God’s will. Life itself is rising from the earth, lifting itself from the solidity of the ground that spawned it to find unimagined expression in becoming what it was planned to be.
There are many general rules we all follow without thought and without question. Our health and happiness, our general wellbeing, and even life itself depends upon this automatic adherence to what we may regard as being common sense.
We need to breathe fresh air, and remaining in a sealed space will eventually deprive us of essential oxygen. Understanding this gives us the knowledge that, for example, children should not place plastic bags over their heads. We do not step off a kerb and walk across a busy road without first looking and listening; we do not leave pans of boiling water unattended on the hob, and we do not turn on gas appliances without igniting the gas.
There are general rules in everything, and whenever we use our initiative and resourcefulness to bend or steer natural processes to suit our own inclinations or appetites, we can easily fail to recognize or ignore some of them. This is not an inbuilt part of us as human beings, but it is an inherent part of the arrogance that afflicts so much of humankind.
Some rules may not be so obvious, and even when recognized are not always accepted as meaningful. They are seen more as widely repeated coincidences that have become the norm, and are thus dismissed as having no particular value in the web of interactions that have combined to make our world the way it is. Rising sea levels, deforestation, drought, overcrowding, poverty, famine, pollution, - the list goes on and on. All such things are consequences of our unthinking attitude to the world in which we live, and, even more ashamedly, our selfish disregard for our fellow human beings.
The rapidly greening trees and bushes around me are the product of some of these general rules having been left undisturbed and undisputed, but the particular tree I have been drawn outside to look at is worth the look only because I changed the circumstances in which it had been struggling to live.
Several years passed without my noticing anything particular about it, and several more during which I wondered why it did not seem to be growing much. Every year it came into leaf, looked healthy enough throughout the summer, shed its leaves in autumn and ended up looking almost the same as the previous year. It was clearly alive but was not really growing. It was going nowhere and achieving nothing. It was born of the ground upon which it stood, but all possibility of maturity and bearing fruit was in some way still buried deep in that ground. I am reminded once more that, until more recently, I have never thought of myself as a gardener; those years would not have left the tree untended had I truly been one.
I have always known that when planting or transplanting trees, they should be placed no deeper into the soil than they were when in their original position. It is one of those general but important rules. The Royal Horticultural Society advice includes the following:
‘It is often assumed that the most vulnerable part of a tree is the canopy or rootball but the stem collar is highly susceptible to damage such as physical impact damage from garden machinery and the slower, less obvious, but often terminal, effects of planting at the wrong depth.’
The tree before me had not been planted or transplanted by anything other than nature’s own progress. It grew where it had begun its life, and I suppose I had the automatic assumption that it would therefore sort things out correctly for itself.
I have also read elsewhere that, ‘If the stem collar is submerged in soil the bark is liable to rot resulting in the gradual death of the tree.’ This makes no mention, nor even hints of a person being involved in the process, and, if I had previously read and absorbed these words, perhaps I would have appreciated the situation years earlier.
I love trees. They have already come into my thoughts here more than once, including their need for help when in the stranglehold of Ivy, but here again is an example of my failure to recognize a need.
How easily we are caught up in living our own lives, and how readily our preoccupations make us blind to the needs of others, even those closest to us and whom we dearly love.
And could the world as a whole be further removed from the way our consciences tell us that it should be ?
Are we not disregarding one of this life’s general, basic but essential rules ?
How unlike the early Christian community ...
Everything in the garden and surrounding countryside has begun the wonderful process of bursting forth into new growth, into bud and into green, into blossom and into eventual fruitfulness. This gentle fall of moisture is matched by the unseen upward flow in every plant around me, and nothing brings that home more than the constant dripping from the cut ends of small branches trimmed late from a still bare looking Birch tree. The sap is rising: awakening, rousing, moving, growing, yearning and praising: bursting forth into exuberance and a maximized potential of nature’s inbuilt compliance with God’s will. Life itself is rising from the earth, lifting itself from the solidity of the ground that spawned it to find unimagined expression in becoming what it was planned to be.
There are many general rules we all follow without thought and without question. Our health and happiness, our general wellbeing, and even life itself depends upon this automatic adherence to what we may regard as being common sense.
We need to breathe fresh air, and remaining in a sealed space will eventually deprive us of essential oxygen. Understanding this gives us the knowledge that, for example, children should not place plastic bags over their heads. We do not step off a kerb and walk across a busy road without first looking and listening; we do not leave pans of boiling water unattended on the hob, and we do not turn on gas appliances without igniting the gas.
There are general rules in everything, and whenever we use our initiative and resourcefulness to bend or steer natural processes to suit our own inclinations or appetites, we can easily fail to recognize or ignore some of them. This is not an inbuilt part of us as human beings, but it is an inherent part of the arrogance that afflicts so much of humankind.
Some rules may not be so obvious, and even when recognized are not always accepted as meaningful. They are seen more as widely repeated coincidences that have become the norm, and are thus dismissed as having no particular value in the web of interactions that have combined to make our world the way it is. Rising sea levels, deforestation, drought, overcrowding, poverty, famine, pollution, - the list goes on and on. All such things are consequences of our unthinking attitude to the world in which we live, and, even more ashamedly, our selfish disregard for our fellow human beings.
The rapidly greening trees and bushes around me are the product of some of these general rules having been left undisturbed and undisputed, but the particular tree I have been drawn outside to look at is worth the look only because I changed the circumstances in which it had been struggling to live.
Several years passed without my noticing anything particular about it, and several more during which I wondered why it did not seem to be growing much. Every year it came into leaf, looked healthy enough throughout the summer, shed its leaves in autumn and ended up looking almost the same as the previous year. It was clearly alive but was not really growing. It was going nowhere and achieving nothing. It was born of the ground upon which it stood, but all possibility of maturity and bearing fruit was in some way still buried deep in that ground. I am reminded once more that, until more recently, I have never thought of myself as a gardener; those years would not have left the tree untended had I truly been one.
I have always known that when planting or transplanting trees, they should be placed no deeper into the soil than they were when in their original position. It is one of those general but important rules. The Royal Horticultural Society advice includes the following:
‘It is often assumed that the most vulnerable part of a tree is the canopy or rootball but the stem collar is highly susceptible to damage such as physical impact damage from garden machinery and the slower, less obvious, but often terminal, effects of planting at the wrong depth.’
The tree before me had not been planted or transplanted by anything other than nature’s own progress. It grew where it had begun its life, and I suppose I had the automatic assumption that it would therefore sort things out correctly for itself.
I have also read elsewhere that, ‘If the stem collar is submerged in soil the bark is liable to rot resulting in the gradual death of the tree.’ This makes no mention, nor even hints of a person being involved in the process, and, if I had previously read and absorbed these words, perhaps I would have appreciated the situation years earlier.
I love trees. They have already come into my thoughts here more than once, including their need for help when in the stranglehold of Ivy, but here again is an example of my failure to recognize a need.
How easily we are caught up in living our own lives, and how readily our preoccupations make us blind to the needs of others, even those closest to us and whom we dearly love.
And could the world as a whole be further removed from the way our consciences tell us that it should be ?
Are we not disregarding one of this life’s general, basic but essential rules ?
How unlike the early Christian community ...
‘None of their members was ever in want ...’ (Acts 4:34)
