GreygirlGarden: Feed your Head

I'm not talking mushrooms of the magic variety or a synthesised bunch of chemicals to bring on hours of hallucinations, but I am interested in an altered state of being.
I am convinced that my immersion in gardening, which began last year and evolved gradually, without a plan or purpose, has altered me.

It began simply as a safe place, just somewhere I would go and be, even with nothing in my head and over time it has become my way back.
I am not alone in finding a road to recovery through growing things. Coming back to the world, finding a new connection, being taken out of yourself.

It's a hell of a thing to discover that while your head is black your fingers are green.

Despite the fact that I have a compromised attention span that stops me from curling up with a book and going 'elsewhere', I can browse seed catalogues and garden in my head, in the bath, in my dreams.

I still collect books like talismans, to be reassured by their presence and the knowledge they contain. It's a hard habit to break, and I guess it's also a small act of hope that even if I can't get into them now, I will one day.
For me it's books, not shoes or handbags or expensive lippy.

But my butterfly brain is straying from the subject...

The process of reading for me now is like pond-dipping; sometimes I catch things, sometimes it's too muddy and murky, but I persist.

On my to-read list currently is 'A Very Short Introduction To Sleep' by OUP, because those of us who find sleep elusive get a tad obsessed by the subject.

I have a copy of Carl Jung's 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' because he is the man. I keep it on the cupboard by my bed as a kind of psychological night-light.

Penguin books publish a brilliant series called English Journeys, boasting such titles as 'Through England on a Side-Saddle' and 'English Folk Songs' by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I will have to buy more of these but at the moment I have Vita Sackville-West's 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens' which is brilliant. I liked Vita whan I first saw a photo of her in old-school jodphurs. She writes in a total no-nonsense way in the form of newspaper articles, which my mind can manage.
To be honest, a muse to Virginia Woolf has got to be worth checking out, surely.

Vita Sackville-West poet, novelist, muse, gardener

I love that she was not afraid to have a go and experiment with plants and where to put them, not following an orthodox route. Deciding to plant a garden purely of grey, green and white to magical effect at Sissinghurst -

By chance I found a book by Mirabel Osler called 'A Gentle Plea For Chaos' which, it promises on the front cover, "...captures the pure enchantment of gardening." That hooked me, before I read this on the back:

" A mania for neatness, a lust for conformity - and away go atmosphere and sensuality. This book is an appeal for a return to a little 'amiable disorder', to the sense of enchantment and vitality that comes with a more random and intuitive approach to gardening, to an awareness of the dynamics of a garden where plants are allowed to scatter as they please."

The first chapter is called 'A Compulsion for Trees.' Sounds promising.