Ahead of Marchelle Farrell’s book launch on Tuesday 5 September, we share an exclusive extract of her new book Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside.
A heavy scent drips through the open windows of the lounge, accompanied by the buzzing of bees. The pale, twisted branches that spiral around the metal support and up the front of the house have revealed themselves to be wisteria. There appear to be two plants, each rooted at either end of the house. I cannot tell which might be older from looking at them, but judging by what I know of the history of when the house was originally built, and then extended, the one which has burst into bloom and scents our living room so heavily must be the elder. The thick trunk that climbs onto the newer part of the house is in dense leaf, but no flower buds have appeared. It reaches out to its neighbour, and their leaves overlap and embrace each other. I inhale the rich scent with half-closed eyes and revel in the wonder of this, that I now live in a wisteria-covered cottage, the idyllic countryside dream.
The long racemes of heavily scented, pale lilac flowers remind me of something, but I do not place it until I am sitting in the window looking out at the blossom while texting with my mother one day, and suddenly a vivid mental image comes to mind. I am standing in a long, straight avenue of vining plants pruned and shaped to standard lollipop form, and they are in abundant bloom, covered in racemes of sweet-smelling, pale purple flowers. It is May in the petrea avenue at the Royal Botanic Gardens, and the queen’s wreath, or tropical wisteria as they are also known, are in full flower. They bloom for May, for Mother’s Day in Trinidad, for the month of Mary in my old school calendar of religious celebrations. We have already had Mothering Sunday here in the UK a couple months ago, but here I am texting my mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day back home where the Petrea volubilis will be in flower, and here is the wisteria wreathing my home in bloom for the occasion. It comforts me to see it.
The connections between my Caribbean home and this one have seemed profoundly strange, and unexpected, but as I communicate with my mother, thinking of these maternal plants, the links between them begin to fall into place in my mind. England was modern Trinidad’s colonial motherland; the Royal Botanic Gardens where the petrea avenue grows was a colonial creation, established in 1818, as was the introduction of wisteria to this country, brought in 1816 via the Inspector of Tea for the East India Company, who was acting on commission by renowned botanist (or botanic thief) Joseph Banks. The flowers travelled along Imperial trade routes, which moved plants and people around the world, so often violently against their will, like poisoned umbilical cords that bind places together to this day. And yet, despite the ambivalence that may grow as we come to know them as adults, their faults as well as their care deeply embedded in our flesh, so often we still love our mothers. Even hate not love’s opposite, but its perversion.
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The weather is still glorious, and we do everything in the garden. We are nearly two months into an ever-extending lockdown, and the sense of surreality has not abated as time has passed. The days are unfailingly hot, sunny and dry, like we have been transported from damp and dismal England to a foreign country through the unusual act of locking ourselves within our houses. The isolation is intense, and in the almost total absence of interaction with others I am being increasingly forced to confront myself.
With the schools still closed, I am mothering more intensely than ever before. As well as mother, I am cook, cleaner, gardener, teacher, teaching assistant. I am playmate, worried wife, concerned daughter, extremely distant friend. But mostly I am home. I am Mama, Mama, Mama, a thousand, a million times a day, the children at their most content when they play together what feels like right beneath my feet. In the kitchen of our life I dance, balancing a hundred boiling pans and sharp knives, doing everything I can not to trip over my little ones and stumble, raining all the danger that I precariously hold at bay upon them.
Everything feels freer in the garden, and so we spend nearly all our time there. Apart from sleeping and cooking, we abandon the house and do most of our living outdoors. This is especially because the heating engineers have returned, as the provision of essential services are slowly resumed. Armed with more sophisticated PPE than my husband has access to, they resume the task of connecting the house to the pipes drilled underground, and after wiping any surface that we might have touched overnight, we retreat outdoors and stay well out of their way.
Our feet are grass-stained, and we all have mud ingrained beneath our nails. In the morning, I frequently brush leaves and petals from all our pillows, as we shed the bits that plants have left in our curls the day before. Our skin grows browner, and the children hold their arms against mine, comparing our tones. My son the fairest, my daughter now as brown as I am in the winter months, mine the darkest. All of us glowing golden from the sun’s kisses. Should we stop moving, and lie still on the soil for long enough, I feel our feet would put down roots. We are growing into the garden.
We are living through a mass trauma, but the garden seems to have turned on something in my DNA, reactivated some deep remembering of relationship with the land. And I have found that, with a joy as deep as the pain of the moment we are living through, the land remembers me. Every morning as I step out into the garden I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for its all-encompassing grounding, to which I give myself over, to hold body and mind safe. The garden holds me on its lap, cradles me against its dark skin, gently brushes fingers of leaves and petals and twigs against my cheek and through my hair. Sometimes it feels as if the garden loves me.
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