A Druid's Garden by Julie White

Most houses have a garden around them. My house sits in the middle of the garden. But then it's no ordinary garden, for this garden grows itself, including dictating what plants, shrubs and trees grow there. Even the house is part of the garden.

All this came about some years ago when I moved to the 1930s house built in the South Downs of Sussex. The garden was laid with many mature trees, but very little else. It was neat, well kept and more or less lifeless. The first couple of years I spent returning it back to a countryside garden - not quite Capability Brown, more a green belt Findhorn. I dug beds, planted hundreds of herbs, bulbs, shrubs and other plants, until the garden took on the style of a large cottage garden.

The front is small, with a path leading from a picket gate. The path follows the side of the house until it finds the back garden which climbs in three layers up onto the Downs. Surrounding the area is a small wooded piece with a huge ash tree that lowers over the house (a romantic way of saying it's far too close), masses of lilacs, chaste berry, spirea and lots of glossy, deep green ivy. The top is surrounded by a blackthorn copse which in early Spring is covered in a swathe of white blossoms - to me one of the first signs of the Goddess. Myths have made this a negative plant, but I always see it as a plant of protection. It also flowers around Imbolc, after all those dark weeks of Winter. At the top of the garden is my stone circle and fire pit. The circle came to be built around the time the garden started to grow itself.

One day whilst sitting under the ash (another tree of protection) I had a feeling that all I had to do (if I wanted to) was cut the lawn in keeping with the downland turf, and let the rest just grow. I could potter and prune if I wished, but there really was no need. And by the way, as I'm a Druid I should have a stone circle!

Now this was quite a shock, the sort of excuse people make on Sundays for not wanting to clip the hedge, or mow the lawn. I tackled the stone circle first. I already had a fire pit at the very top which I used twice yearly at Samhuinn and Beltane, so I thought the best place for the circle was nearby.

Living on chalk bedrock does not make it easy to find granite, so I'm afraid I had to use some large rockery stones. Once in position at the quarters with a small rowan tree in the middle, it felt like it had always been there. Inside, I placed rocks and holey stones collected from beneath Beachy Head - no reason why. After a few days the place took on an atmosphere that felt like I was at some glamorous site in Wiltshire. So I did as I was told, I let it grow and it flourished. I still plant the odd shrub, but on the whole a large amount of the species in the garden I didn't plant. Annual flowers came, love-in-the-mist, wild thyme, cowslips, primroses, hundreds and hundreds of bluebells, hawthorns, blackberries crept in from the Downs, stinging nettles, bindweeds, St. John's wort, ragweed, poppies (field and opium), mints that later in the year spring amazing purple pyramids of flowers, sorrel, yarrow and many, many more. All these plants are medicinal, they all have a magic of their own to impart.

These days I have many visitors to the garden. Not many of them human, although there are only two types of responses. Love or hate. The real visitors love it. There's a lady fox that sits in the sun, kestrels fly over head, sparrows, greenfinches, blue tits all build their nests in it, and there are the local hoods - the badgers. They all live in the hundred year old Set just outside the back fence, but feel that it is their duty to behave like a panza division and destroy everything in their wake. I despaired as they broke down fences, dug huge trenches in the lawns before leaving the confines of my wild garden to invade my neighbour's neat and very suburban garden. They did this every night, around the time of the Equinoxes, until I stopped trying to stop them.

Now, I once read that the badger is our version of the North American bear (totem animal speaking, that is) and as the bear is one of my guides between the worlds, I decided to live and let live. Mind you there wasn't an awful lot I else Icould do. My neighbour did not share this view I hasten to add! The garden has two sheds, both pretty ordinary, both made of cedar. One is for tools and mowers, the other is the insect shed.

Inside live millions of woodlice families, wasps, beetles and spiders. I live in hope that the spiders will stay in their nice shed, but no, come Lughnasadh they all troop into the warmth of the house, to scare us in our bare feet as they scuttle across the lounge. They are caught and put outside, where no doubt they promptly come straight back again. The shed also houses my sacks of maturing leaf mould which has millions of organisms (too small to actually see) working away so I can give something back to the soil. The problem is I don't have soil anymore. Every space is taken up with plants. I don't have weeds, other people have weeds. The daises, dandelions, grasses, goosefoots, that are all in flower at the time of the Summer Solstice, to me are magnificent, and I never planted any of them. They mix wonderfully with the flora I did plant, it would be terrible to destroy them. They attract the butterflies and dragonflies. I cut the lawns for the last time before the Winter solstice. The leaves have been cleared to enable the grass to breathe. The garden starts to really die back into the ground, except for the proud Holly King, who stands and forms a gateway with the ash. The tall grasses in the borders are all yellow and the wind has long ago blown their seeds to far off places. Small cairns of stones can be seen at certain places. These are the burial mounds of beloved pets that let us become part of their lives. Sometimes the snow comes. The garden is then transformed into a sparkling, gossamer picture. A fairy garden, where I haven't pruned every bush to ground level, but left the branches and dead heads for the birds. Everything is still, and I sit at the window and wonder if the creatures are alright. This has me rushing out to feed them and soon the snowy blanket is covered in tracks making magical spiral patterns all over the lawns. At night the Moon Goddess shines down. I stand outside and look up at the Pole Star, and all the other stars and wonder at the thought of stars being above me and beneath me. It's cold.

Will the Sun be born again at the Solstice? The snows melt and the yearly cycle turns towards Imbolc again, shoots of green start to rise out of the icy soil. I thank the Goddess and I thank the garden.