Does money make the world go round?
Or is it also money trees? And why do I still compare growing green leaves to making green notes?
It was Chelsea Flower Show recently. Did you notice that? I know, we’re in June now and it’s all Hay Festival and soon will be all Wimbledon but last week it was The Flower Show. I‘ve never been myself but think about going every single year as it rolls around and then blame work commitments, childcare (though that’s adult care now) or just plain lack of money for not actually hoiking myself out my proverbial pot and well, going.
Growing and nurturing things is something I thrive on and yet it has left me feeling furious and frustrated oftentimes. By growing things I mean yes plants, herbs, vegetables and the obligatory giant and heroic sunflowers but also four human beings, a dog, friendships, business connections and lots and lots and lots of houseplants.
I seem to be incapable of ending a houseplant and sometimes feel murderous about possessing this skill. I’m also quietly cross with myself for having been so focussed on tending to things that grow rather than growing actual money which does not grow on trees. Or does it?
Chelsea Flower Show: is that how we even refer to it? Do we need to spell out the full title in actual words at this point? It’s a spectacle so firmly rooted and bedded in to the collective, national consciousness.
During the month of May, Chelsea the district simply is Chelsea The Flower Show and it’s as if everything else about the borough - the TV reality series, popular football club, the glossy buns - fades into some browning, overgrown, forgotten background. Chelsea becomes one big postcode of blooming garden.
A long time ago when the oldest was twelve, he and I built a vegetable patch and grew radishes, leeks, courgettes and potatoes with nasturtiums and marigolds popping their dayglo orange in between. It was quite Heath Robinson and fashioned from chicken wire and canes to keep the cost down and the needy dog OUT.
At the moment, I can’t grow much as it’s a rental property - if the offspring read this they’ll guffaw at the word much - but I love having plants around the home to photosynthesise around us whilst we too grow each day. A place feels sterile and clinical to me without a plant growing up towards the light on the windowsill and I have a need to see green vivid and living somewhere lurking in every room.
Getting my gnarly hands into crumbling, loamy earth too and on a regular basis, to feel the discomfort of gritty dirt under nail, that’s a must for me.
Cosmos and dahlia tubers are right now silently baking up their flamboyance in hot, sun kissed black tubs out back; I’m checking on their woody tops multiple times a day for signs of a shoot. Monastera creep their squeaky and junglelike handprint-shaped leaves across my bedroom wall casting fabulous shadows at either end of the day.
And behind me, a behemoth crassula towers up just to the right of my desk and reminds me - in shape alone - of that hideous plastic green treehouse toy from the 70’s which retails today on Etsy for two hundred quid. It surely wouldn’t be manufactured today, would it?
You’ll know crassula, even if you don’t know them by their proper name. Crassula are the waxy money tree plants - also called jade plants for yet more confusion - that you’ll often come across whilst you’re stood waiting for your chow mein in the Chinese takeaway.
Standing in twos or threes usually in the bay windows at front by the entrance door and possibly looking a little forlorn. Sorry for themselves, unkempt, dusty and grey dry around the base. Which I always feel is weirdly ironic and a shame given their symbolism in Chinese culture and you’ll see why if you read on.
There are no noodles or spring rolls on this house menu, but if you’ve a palette for succulent, plump crassulas then I’m here for you because those things positively fly out of this accidental propagation kitchen.
By Friday last week, there were four youngsters on my window ledge and, by Saturday, one was proffered to a new neighbour and one had been gifted to a builder friend. He’s a house plant kind of a guy and has just moved in with his girlfriend - young love - so I wanted to mark this big life moment for him.
Passing on these plant babies has over the years become a bit of a ritualistic practice and one which brings me quite a lot of pleasure. Especially, I think, because it’s almost free to do.
Gratis, kostenlos, gratuit with the exception of a small outlay for the terracotta pot, a bit of soil and saucer. No money is exchanged and this is very important to me and likely explains why I’ve been giving them for so long. Because for a long, ole while I had little capacity to bring so much as a bean or a seed into the household let alone an actual wage. And that has bothered me a lot over time.
I was stuck in a state of permacare and became so profoundly desperate, stuck and confused about how to best make any significant sum of money ever again within the circumstances.
How to be economically productive was something that rumbled around in my mind very often yet I spoke about this to barely a single soul as the shame of it was so deeply rooted and the immediate care needs so vast and overwhelming.
Imagine a tiny velvet mole tunnelling desperately through the earth to find an outlet. This was the thought being shunted and shovelled endlessly through my brain. And during this time, I felt as blind as this powerful, industrious little creature. I needed to make space for me yet, within our family system there didn’t seem to be any.
It all felt difficult but I am also very fond of moles - rebel gardener? - and that is largely down to these Czech animations from the 1970’s. If you’re on insta and want to see a mole, check (not Czech this time) out Chris Packham who was gleefully holding and rescuing one from imminent death in the jaws of his beloved poodles last week.
Watch Krtek the mole and the egg animation
Do you even count within society if you’re not economically productive is a theme that preoccupies my brain. Particularly as a parent to someone who is othered by this metric of belonging. And then again and some more as someone who needs to be creative - I now recognise this has been my internal battle all along - because making art of any kind to generate a living and approaching life creatively is not an easy, uncomplicated thing to chose to do. Not in any circumstances.
Before photography chose me as a job, emotions choked at my throat if I let them rise up and the day to day logistics of family life seemed to make any paid employment outside of the home nigh on impossible. I’d have been totally and completely unreliable to an employer at this time with crises of care and child health scuppering most weeks of the year, no relatives for hundreds of miles to call upon and certainly no regular week by week routine of partner care. Though the molehills kept showing up and they were a sign ...
So this fertile part of me stayed silent and dormant a while longer, the huge yearning to create and do something beyond the garden wall. It took an enormous battle - within and without - to finally rejoin the world of work / workplace / workforce (hating these terms and seeing wartime propaganda posters and Wall Street just writing those words)
To channel all the energy that wasn’t being pollinated by work in the home. I had definitely outgrown my pot. Happily, once replanted elsewhere, extra limbs began to grow on me and flourish and thrive and a bigger life was cultivated. That’s not a story for today though.
In Chinese mythology, the money tree is a cultural symbol of good fortune, prosperity, and wealth. I half knew this fact already in as much as I knew these plants are meant to be given as gifts and not bought and gifted during celebrations like Lunar New Year, birthdays, and housewarmings. I don’t know why I know this, I guess I must have absorbed it via factosynthesis somewhere along the way in life.
Doing a Google search just now taught me something else about the money tree. So, apparently it has a symbolic history in Feng Shui too; planting or displaying a money tree is a tradition thought to attract positive energy and balance, particularly in areas of the home or office related to financial matters and ideally in the south east corner. Well, where do you think mine has coincidentally landed in a stroke of random good luck? Yet another reason to retrofit my appreciation of this plant because I regularly could do with more money.
A chance decision to place my hulking great, healthy crassula here at the very place where I’m writing this and where I open up my Lightroom and Photoshop applications and generate my income editing photographs for clients, this is making me smile today. Clients who include a fair few RHS Chelsea Flower Show exhibitors amongst them.
Clients like Alison a wood carver, Kate a sculptor, Leanne a florist, Oli a furniture maker and Alitex a greenhouse company. Their calendars are punctuated by this gardening spectacle like a giant, colourful dahlia-shaped full stop. In fact, the very woman whose dahlias are pushing up out back here in our garden, I noticed on insta that she presented David Beckham on press day with some of her dahlia tubers and, David, he in turn recently bought himself one of the said client greenhouses. A little full circle moment of connectivity like the credits to the Good Life right here.
TGL was a sit-com which ran in 1970’s Britain and documents the joys and setbacks Tom and his wife Barbara experience when they attempt to escape a modern rat race lifestyle by becoming totally self-sufficient growing everything they need in their suburban London garden. Topical eh?
One year, my carver friend Alison Crowther, she had two enormous round orb oak seats in the winning garden. I got to try sitting on them at her studio before they were shipped and they were smooth, super comfortable and pleasing to touch. I didn’t sit on them in the garden of course because, you know, I still haven’t been to bloody Chelsea.
Alison’s new book Conversations with Wood has just published and with lots of pictures taken by me and other photographers over the years featuring within the pages. The book is a delight to hold in the hands with gloriously textured paper and hardbound in a paper reminiscent of wood grain. There are even little inserts of pages from her sketchbooks which are pieces of art in their own right detailing beautiful line drawings of all of the designs.
Alison is an artist who has studied and exemplifies her art over a lifetime of dedication to it. A Yorkshire lass to the core and with such a steady and calm disposition, which, let’s be clear you absolutely need to chisel away so fastidiously for hours on end to reveal such pattern in the wood.
This shot of her with her sculpture Scale Tree is the cover image and I feel quite proud of this picture. I had to be levered up nine feet in the air and balance on a wobbly forklift palette to get the above view. A test of balance and nerve not only camera skills.
Uovo is my absolute favourite of all her sculptures and I can’t not include a couple of shots of this one here because she carved it during the Great Pause aka the pandemic and I visited it often during it’s various iterations. It’s so impressive isn’t it? Enormous and wonderful and imposing.
Back when married, we moved our large and on certain levels complex family to live in the US for two years which, in hindsight, now seems a ludicrously ill-thought out leap of blind faith. Remember the financial crash of 2008? There’s why for one. Anyway, that experience was rich in many ways but one of the notable things about that time for me was how much I missed the muck and the mire of this shire (Hampshire) and also how weird it felt to not be allowed to have plants in the house which we rented?! We were in Washington DC where the writer
is living now (watching her adventures is a bit like time travel for me) and the rules around living in that particular house and neighbourhood were extreme and quite restrictive though nowhere near as hostile as conditions have become over there of late.When we left the UK and packed up six lives into boxes to transfer via a giant shipping container - reader, it was an emotional shit show and a half, don’t enter into moving overseas lightly, even with the lure of no language barrier because there so is one, always - I remember feeling such a sadness at giving away all the well tended crassula plants from our home.
It felt quite conflicting because though they were going to a good home and would be cared for, they were like my living wealth, those zingy plants. Metaphors for my love and labour and attention. A loss to me and yet I also trusted the teacher from their primary school as absolutely the right custodian for them all; she would continue to nurture them just as beautifully as she’d cared for my eldest two kids’ young hearts and minds in the classroom.
Money can be such an awkward, scratchy difficult, thorny and confronting subject to navigate as a woman. I frequently have to remind myself that little Sarah was already four years old when a woman in this country could for the first time secure a mortgage on her own without needing an actual man as a guarantor. Which to now me sounds completely bonkers.
And whilst laws around property and finance and workplace rights may have changed, the social hangover from this time is very much still hurting our heads and paracetamol doesn’t much touch that pain.
The past is certainly a rich but confusing place and I regret some of the financial choices within mine. And money is absolutely vital to my existence; securing financial currency at a time when my only transactional currency seemed realistically to be care, this was a gnarly and tangled forest to find myself in and it was never part of my plan to go there.
But I love trees and now see ever more clearly that becoming a turbo-charged titan *1carer, a great Mother Oak, was not ever going to get me out of that particular forest. And how good it now feels to look back and know that I’ve made some of my money taking photographs of the great oaks which fell naturally and were creatively and imaginatively repurposed and sculpted and carved into new intriguing shapes.
And whilst I understand the value of money and earning it, I will always, always give away my money trees. Goodbye from me and from Krtek too.
carer should really have a Capital C and a string of £££££ both before it and afterwards. So why haven’t I done exactly that? I’m wondering why myself now because the cost is real and the price is high ...