Anchors

28 May Anchors

It was on my weekly walk with my closest friend last weekend that the word ‘anchor’ popped into my head. 

We’d decided to forsake our usual circuit of Bushy and Home Parks and meet instead at Richmond Park aiming to check out the annual explosion of azaleas in the Isabella Plantation. If you catch them at the right moment, the mass of intense colour, the next more ludicrously vibrant than the last, lights up a dull day and might even squeeze a smile from the most determinedly miserable grump. I took these photos last year and was hoping for a repeat performance. 

I’d walked there three weeks ago and convinced myself then that they were a week short of peak condition.  So, I assumed they’d still have some oomph left. Mid May was always the time to catch them, wasn’t it? Alas, I was wrong. They had passed their glorious climax and only a few latecomers were left – tantalising traces of what we’d missed. Cramming all their pollinating potential into just two or three weeks, these extraordinary plants seem so confident of how irresistible and memorable they are that they’re content to spend the rest of the year looking pretty dowdy – they’ve given their all and now they’ll sulk in their lacklustre foliage for the rest of the year! I felt quietly annoyed at them. More annoyed at my misjudgement. The rhododendrons that tower and sprawl around and about, waiting in the wings for their chance to shine, hadn’t quite stepped onstage yet to show off their big, blousy finery. Frustrating.

Never mind, as the early morning light fell gracefully on a vast palette of greens we fell into step across to the western perimeter to embrace the many other splendours this park has to offer. Really, May is the best time of year in England, the moment for the trees, their canopies flush with the freshest green. Too early for the summer’s dust to settle on the leaves and dull their shine. Everything looking joyful and exuberant and you could almost believe there was nothing bad going on in the world. Horse chestnuts rooted firmly in the ground holding their massive blossom aloft like fluffy candles, willows shuffling in the breeze and gently stroking the ground, fragile blue-lilac blossom cascading from sturdy branches on the wisteria at Pembroke Lodge. Maybe all these were the unconscious prompts that landed the word ‘anchor’ in the front of my mind. 

On our weekly walks, we never know where the conversations will go. Sometimes there’s an ‘agenda’ of things we feel desperate to discuss before we meet then somehow let slip because, while our step is purposeful, our thoughts and ideas meander. There was an urgency this time. I had just returned from visiting a friend up north, someone whose depression is so deep she sees no point to life. I wanted to offload. I spoke of the overwhelming perpetual tiredness and capacity to weep this friend had tried to describe to me and that I’d observed in her; I spoke of my sense of powerlessness and inability to put myself there, in her shoes, to fathom what ‘depression’ really means. I found myself talking about anchors, not just tangible ones like people and place but an inner one that she seems to have lost. A sort of self-anchor – the one I sense stops me sinking when I feel down, keeps me moored. My walking companion spoke of her partner’s grief at the imminent loss of an old friend, old in age as well as in the chronology of their friendship, in the depth of their ‘knowing’ one of the other. Mutual reference points in life. Anchors.  

This week I was back in Bushy Park one early evening after a warm day. The sky completely cloudless, the soft meadow grass long and wispy, the trees anchored to the ground by firm trunks encircled by wooden fences to protect them from being damaged by the deer that roam here – a group of them was hunkered down in the distance their heads breaking the horizon between grass and sky. I’ve no idea why I look at trees so much more now than I used to, why feel a kind of awe I never used to feel. Are they more beautiful than ever or is it that I’m more attuned to looking, taking the time to let my gaze rest on them as they go through their seasonal paces to reach this moment when they heave their load of leaves and branches up as if to say: ‘Look at me!’ Nature’s weight-lifters. Maybe, ironically, I’m more conscious of their strength because of their fragility now they face the pressure of climate change, more aware of the need to enjoy them now while I can.