The laburnum - lessons in loss and healing

It’s been the best year for our front garden laburnum tree. I planted it not long after we moved into our current home and despite its deserved reputation for being beautiful but poisonous, it was a deliberate choice.

Full disclosure: this was the house I never wanted to move into. There is a particular grief in moving to a house you didn't want. Not the grief of loss exactly; more a persistent ache of resignation, of accepting that life will be different from the one you had planned. There is nothing wrong with our house in purely practical terms. It is absolutely fine. The rooms are fine. The street is fine and not too busy. The neighbours are friendly. It’s a short walk into town and to school when the children were little. Everything is fine. But fineness, when you had wanted something else entirely, can feel gently suffocating. Like living in a a world of pastel shades when you want jewel colours.

We moved here in May, which didn't help. The growing season was well underway and the modest front garden was a rectangle of tired lawn edged with an overgrown hedge and the obligatory worn concrete path at the side. There was nothing to love. I looked out of the front window on our first morning and felt precisely nothing. If I couldn't love the house, I could at least make something of the garden, I thought. It started slowly (out of necessity as we were cash poor but time rich) and taught me a lot about living with loss.

People think of laburnum as a cottage-garden cliché, all golden chains and quaint beauty. They are not wrong in that it is beautiful. But what drew me to it in the local plant nursery the following February, after we’d dug over the grass and created parking for the car was something darker. Laburnum is poisonous. Every part of it: the bark, the leaves, the seeds in their silky hanging pods. And yet every May, for two to three weeks, it produces cascades of brilliant yellow flowers that hang like something a painter might have put onto canvas. Extravagant, luminous, dropping in racemes of twenty or thirty centimetres, impossible to ignore. Bees love it. The whole front of the house is transformed. It’s a spot of sunshine and then it is over, and the tree goes back to being a rather ordinary-looking thing with no particular decorative merit. That felt right to me. A tree that has a transient, bittersweet beauty; a tree that has a bit of drama and danger to sharpen the senses; a tree that reminds me that there is joy as well as pain, that life is cyclical, to appreciate what you have and create joy when and where you can.

I chose to plant it in the front garden inside the hedge that separates us from the pavement. This matters more than you might think. Laburnum likes sun, or at least partial sun, and full exposure to the street would mean the flowers were visible from the road. Visible to people walking past or stopping at the bus stop nearby who had nothing to do with us, who would see this brief annual spectacle without knowing anything of the reasoning behind it. That anonymity pleased me. It is also a place where children, pets and passers-by don’t go, so there was no risk of accidentally eating the seedpods. My mother had a cottage garden ‘recipe book’ which suggested that good combinations to plant with laburnum to create the wow factor are wisteria and lilac. Alas wisteria would not have bloomed against the north facing wall that was my only available space but happily one neighbour has a particularly fine example in their garden and another has a mature lilac. Together they make quite the picture and there is something healing about adapting to the environment in which you find yourself. Now I can look out of the window in May and feel something other than fine and I helped to create it.

The house still isn't the house I would have chosen. The layout is impractical in ways I have stopped trying to explain. But in the second week of May, when the laburnum drops its chains of yellow, when the wisteria has opened along the lintel and the lilac is releasing its perfume into the evening air, something happens. People on the bus smile and passers by take photographs on their phones. I have helped to create the place for that.

I have stopped trying to make peace with the house in any permanent sense. What I do instead is tend the garden and try to find joy in what every season has to offer.