Earth Goddess Planting Seeds

Gardening has always been a huge part of my life. My mother, as you know already, was a gardener and from a certain time in my life - sometime in my late teens - I started to become more interested in what she was doing.

She enjoyed nothing better than showing off her garden at the end of the day - showing me the little treasures that were sprouting and growing and the areas she had cleared for future sowing and planting - and I became her audience. After the 'Grand Tour' we would then pour ourselves a gimlet (Gin and Roses Lime) and sit in the garden and chat about life and gardening.

I don't know now if she went through the same performance for my sisters or brother. I think it might have been mainly during the period of time when the rest of my siblings had left home - as i was the last.

I think I would still be at home now if I had not become pregnant with my son. I was a completely unambitious and a totally unworldly sort of person. I was musical and was sort of flirting with a career in music, but I was so naive about the realities of the hard work, determination and general dangers of that world that I would definitely have been swallowed up and spat out again on the scrap heap before too long.

Becoming pregnant was obviously not the most obvious solution and certainly not one I would advocate for everyone, but it worked for me. Suddenly I had a purpose in life and something that took the focus off myself and my petty little problems. When my son was born he was the one that became the centre of my little world. I would go so far as to say that i was reborn on the same day that he was.

As I was a single mum for the first seven years of his life I had to finally start to learn about hard work and responsibility and the strange workings of the outside world.

This picture is about all of that. It is about the garden and it is about fertility. This towering Earth Goddess with her large, capable hands is planting seeds deep down in the loam. She is almost digging halfway down into the centre of the Earth. It is my mother and it is me and it is every mother that ever was. You can tell that she is bound with the earth by her large hands buried in the soil and feet that stand square on the ground. She is strong and she is is fertile, she is focussed and gentle all at the same time. She plants and she protects and nurtures her young as they grow.