Alys Fowler: I fell in love with a woman, and everything changed

I have buried myself in my garden at times. Lost myself in the depths of rich loam, renewed myself in new growth, scattered parts of me like self-sown seeds. I am my garden.

So every time I come here to write about my garden, I am writing about myself. Between the beetroot seedlings and the apple prunings, there’s a little bit of me here and there.

I’d like to hope this doesn’t get in the way of any growth, but recently I’ve felt more and more at odds with this column and the place I call home, my garden. It turns out you can hide quite successfully under leaf mould, but the page isn’t quite such an easy place. If I’m rambling a little, it’s because I’m still trying to make sense of why I need to write this down, here of all places.

The good thing about the garden is that it doesn’t give a fig for my existential crises – it just gets on with being. While I was pondering the meaning of things, it filled all the blank spaces. It speaks its truth very plainly: “You’re not tending to this place, so we grew you some wild strawberries.” That’s pretty honest.

Here’s another truth: last year I came out. I fell in love with a woman. I went from whispering, “I am a lesbian”, to saying it out loud. Everything shifted, everything changed, yet the world stayed the same. The garden grew more wild strawberries.

I guess this has little to do with gardening or my passion for it. So why do I need to tell you this? Well, one thing passion has taught me is that it matters: when you find that thing you can be passionate about, that you can enthuse about, your world grows a little wider. It teaches you respect, because it helps you connect to people, to other things. It matters to me that who I am in this column is as honest and passionate as who I am out there in the soil.

Coming out later in life left me racked by guilt and slumps of shame, and there’s a kind of grief, too. My marriage had ended. But there’s also an internal peace I could barely have dreamed about before. Those are quite rolling emotions to run with – so extreme at times.

It took me a long time to come right back to the garden, to tend to all those wild strawberries. There have been moments when I’ve looked out on the garden and its wild, seemingly chaotic state felt like a metaphor for the inside of my head. But in kinder moments, when I wandered down into this storm of seedheads and tendrils, I found unexpected joys. A plant I was quite sure I’d killed a number of years ago was not only flourishing, but in flower. A vine that I was convinced would never do well was now upwardly marching and declaring its health. When I was ready to come back to all of this and I pulled up a blanket of strawberries, there it was, my good earth, rich, welcoming and ready to go again.