A Shed of Many Things

When I was little, I had a play house at the end of the garden. Well, technically it was a shed, but my Dad converted it, adding a step and porch at the front, a stable door, and a window shutter that could be folded flat on a chain to make a serving hatch for my pretend-play cafes or shops. Endless days in the summer holidays were spent in that little green shed; reading library books on the porch in the shade of the buddleia bush, planting seeds in the window box, avoiding the spiders that lurked inside, and writing up menus of plastic food on the chalkboard. It was damp, splintery, had a few too many cobwebs for comfort, and eventually the floor gave way, but it was mine.

Now, aged 32 and 9months, I have a new shed. This one does not have a serving hatch, or a rotten floorboard. It has two rows of perspex windows that let streams of bright light in, and a door that opens beside the compost bins at the back end of the garden. From it, I can see the rookery by the old railway bridge, my slow attempts to establish a wild flower meadow in neglected lawn, the buds bursting on the apple tree, and a reflection of a hundred old ‘me’s.

I hoard things in my shed; half used bags of compost, the pruning knife my dad brought me, 1^st prize certificate from the village spring flower show for ‘daffodils, 3 stems’, the radio mum gave me when we first moved here that only works out in the shed because the flint walls of the house are too thick for reception. Germinating seeds in collections of pots and trays covered with picture frame glass, soil smears on my cord trousers, my apron hanging on its hook ignored. Musty, early-20th-century gardening books, the text of which reassures me that we’re all amateurs and is read aloud in my head by my great grandfather whose voice I never heard.

This week alone, the shed has been many things. A place to decompress after work. My morning routine. A place to sow hope and vision. Somewhere to stand and stare. A storage for tools and bits and bobs. A hook for solar fairy lights. A birdwatching hide as I waited for the barn owl with baited breath, and counted the blue tits in and out of the nest box of the house wall. A potting bench to pick out seedlings of stocks, and germinate sunflowers. A playhouse. The death of innumerable mugs of tea that cool reproachfully as I loose track of time, engrossed in the gardening tasks that cannot wait.