Thread by @ELPinchbeck

When we bought our house in London, the garden had been concreted over. The soil was sterile. Over lockdown and mat leave we mulched it. I planted vegetables and wild flowers and a fruit tree. I try to be cool about the snails eating… everything.

(In an unbelievably lucky piece of planning, we firstly moved into a house with a garden a few weeks before the lockdown and had budgeted to landscape, assuming, rightly, I probably wouldn’t be able to wield a pick-axe between breast feeds. I have been grateful everyday since)

Over lockdown on zoom my green-fingered mum tried to diagnose what the one giant shrub was (it’s a rowan), my grandfather helped me choose a fruit tree for London; & after protracted negotiations my husband actively encourages the wildflowers we planted to take root on the lawn

And there’s an Energy Sisterhood angle to this thread: last year the only thing I successfully grew (apart from the lawn) was vegetables as recommended by @reawilliams_ and flowers that @ClemCowton donated. It was also the only safe baby-free space to do meetings during Mat Leave

But we’ve got really friendly neighbours(contrary to London stereotypes),and so my we kept our low fences so we can chat, which was great during April 2020. And low fences = lots of cats. How many cats? Yeah, cat was the toddler’s second word.

This little pocket of green already gives me so much joy, and offsets the sometimes overwhelming panic I feel about my little girl and her experience of nature, given the general state of things. There are moments with her in the garden that make my heart hurt.

My husband, for example, has a soft spot for the poppy invasion that turning the soil under the concrete produced because bees like them, and he’s worried about what he’s read about the decline of pollinators. But really, what he’s worried about is her.

When she was waking up at dawn last summer, and the garden was all vegetables and poppies, he’d take her to watch the bees on the poppies. This year I’m amused by a man with two degrees trying to teach a tiny human the difference between “bee” and “fly” and failing spectacularly.

After lockdown, my father in law, turned up for a visit with a bag of strawberry plants. Every night now our toddler wanders out into the garden and steals any strawberries the snails haven’t already eaten and there is no working day so bad that can’t be fixed by watching her.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I love our little pocket of green, and I see in how our little girl responds to everything from sticky snails to being tickled with grass how much humans are part of nature, not outside of it. And access to nature should be some kind of right.

So why this rambling thread? Well: back to the cats. Despite my best efforts, no birds have visited the garden & I’ve been resigned to the fact they won’t, even as it’s got more green, and the snails and worms have essentially set up their own democratic republic out there.

But, if you’ve stuck with me this far then you can now scroll back up to the top where you’ll see that along with my daughter’s drying nappies, there’s A BIRD ON THE LAWN EATING WORMS WHERE THE CONCRETE USED TO BE, AND I AM HAPPY.

So this is a very short essay about why tackling climate change matters for the little every day things that give us joy. But it is also a very long tweet about a little feathery tweeter.