On my way home from school, I used to pass a front garden with a collection of little statues alongside the flowers. Right in the middle was a stone plaque bearing the following message:
The kiss of the sun for pardon The joy of the birds for mirth One is closer to God in the garden Than any place on earth.
I used to smirk as I walked past, since this was definitely not my view either of God or of the garden!
The schoolboy grew up, got married, had children, and lived in one, two and three manses. In each, the garden was a space reluctantly kept under control, but nothing more. I hacked at the worst of the weeds, kept the lawn cut, and in the last of the three manses, dug up the lawn and planted it again. The latter enterprise was an unmitigated disaster. By the time I had dug up all the old turf, I was too tired to level it off properly. With customary impatience, I gave it a desultory scrape with the rake, scattered on the new seed, and landed up weeks later with a lawn every bit as bumpy and messy as its predecessor.
How times change! Gardening has now become a major source of solace to me, as well as a rich seam of theological understanding and sermon illustration. Last autumn, my book Tales from an Under-Gardener was published, and I based a Sunday Worship programme on BBC Radio 4 around it. This change of heart all stems back to a profound change in circumstances. In November 2017, I lost my wife and best friend to cancer. I got through the first year of bereavement in a kind of miasma, but in the second, the reality of this new future really came home to roost. In the winter evenings, I could hunker down and find comfort in a familiar home, but the summer evenings, with their long hours of light, were acutely lonely. With some reluctance, I turned to the garden, only to be confronted by the ‘dreaded bench’:
