Monthly Musing – August 2026 – A change in the weather
It’s rained most days over the last week or so. Some days it’s been a fine misty drizzle; other days it’s been bouncing rain accompanied by rolling thunder and flashes of lightning. Mostly, it’s been a steady rain, not too heavy and not too light, the sort of rain that the garden has needed for many weeks – and our grass, previously dry, brown and looking decidedly dead, is now green again.
I didn’t do anything to the grass, I just left it alone, even through the weeks of drought. I saved what was in the water barrels for other plants and I’ve never been one to get the hosepipe out to water the lawn – I learnt many years ago in my RHS horticultural course that the short roots of grass soon take up the water and recover even after apparently being beyond help.
Gardening has taught me beyond anything else to be patient. If only I was as patient with other aspects of life as I can be with my plants! I’m a fixer by nature; I don’t like loose ends, stories untold or unfinished business but sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing and everything always works out in the end. Every day is a new start and over the years I have been learning to ignore the drama that can tie you up in knots over a situation and to step back to wait for the outcome. It’s work in progress; I don’t think I will ever be an expert at it because drama comes in all shapes and forms and it’s easy to get caught up in something before you realise that it actually is just drama and not the issue itself.
I’m not alone in this – a lot of reality TV shows are created based on the assumption that the participants will get tangled in the nets of surface drama and so will we. It can be addictive viewing as we find ourselves taking sides and making judgements, and this type of TV programme has become big business.
I can remember watching one such series with not so small daughter and one of the participants refused to become involved, instead choosing to sit back and wait to see what happened. We could see that she had made the right decision – but it certainly wasn’t as interesting to watch! A bit like waiting for the grass to grow …
Perhaps the issue isn’t so much that we are addicted to the drama itself and more that we like something to be happening all the time. Sitting back and waiting can feel like a loss of control of the situation (and indeed, I did wonder a few times if I needed to try to start saving the shower water in a bucket to water the grass) whereas the true of it was that something was happening – the grass was doing what it knew how to do and resting until the rain came. Just because I couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
This brings me back to my favourite gardening analogy, one that my Mum used to use regularly on teenage me. “Don’t keep digging it up to see if it’s got roots on it,” she would say – wise but very frustrating advice for a fixer who isn’t good at waiting. Of course, there are times when we do need to wade in but as I’ve got older, I can see that those times are often fewer than I might have believed. Sometimes, all we need is a change in the weather for a change in the circumstances.
