Home. It is a word heavy with meaning. One definition refers to the place of your belonging, the place that you are from. I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, a former British colony whose peoples have come to or been forcibly brought from many places to mix more or less uneasily on these two small land masses joined together for political expediency. I grew up in my grandmother’s and my mother’s gardens, lush spaces filled with plants brought from many places, with the backdrop of the hills of the Northern Range rising green beyond them both.
As a child, I did not know many of the stories of the people I came from. I still don’t know as much as I would like, but I have learned that, like the plants, they came from many places, places such as Portugal, China, Africa (but where in Africa is still unclear), Scotland, and Ireland, explaining my last name. The stories seemed to come from everywhere except the actual place of my birth, making the notions of home and belonging difficult to take root.
We all suspected that my maternal grandmother had native blood. She strongly carried the features of the small remaining population of the First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago, but she denied any such association with a dismissal so full of shame that even as a small child I knew not to question her further. I did not understand then about the transmission of intergenerational trauma, about repression and denial as defence mechanisms of the mind to cope with unprocessed pain, or about identification with the aggressor as an unconscious means to rise above victimhood. But though I could neither name nor make sense of any of those things that played out in the minds of those who loved me, I felt them.
Instead, my grandmother taught me about roses, which she struggled to grow in the earliest garden of my childhood, ant nests constantly forming at their roots. She took huge pride in her front garden, a mix of neatly maintained lawn edged by borders filled with the brightly coloured flowers of petunia and periwinkle, dotted with specimen shrubs, perpetually blooming bougainvillaea arching over the fence. Her beloved roses rubbed shoulders with flaming chaconia, hibiscus and poinsettia, sickly and overshadowed by their better-adapted tropical bedfellows. As she tended her garden, she lovingly watered me with her anglophilia, which I soaked up like rain as I played in my dens in the ixora bushes. My grandmother taught me about herbs for common ailments, but I dismissed her knowledge as mere old wives’ tales as I was taught to revere the white coats of science.
I secretly clung to my imagined nativity, despite my grandmother’s denial, feeling somewhere in my bones the weight of an ancestor who I dreamed must have fully belonged to the place I grew up. That clinging comforted me when I was confronted by thoughts of the likely violent and non-consensual couplings through the generations that preceded mine, between bodies unnaturally labelled as Black and White in order to justify the oppression of one by the other. I made up stories about my imagined indigenous ancestor as I helped my parents plant our own garden of our forever-family-home they saved up to buy in my early teens. I was fascinated by plants, loved the trips to nurseries seeking out the most exotic flowers that could not be found in every other garden.
I helped them dig our lime hedge, rein in the bamboo spreading on the steep slope above the house, and plant and shape what grew into a lush tropical garden. The garden’s evening scent was remarkable, from the musk of the calabash tree that drew the bats, to the heavy perfume of the poisonous datura, to the sweetness of the jasmine and the lime, blooming always to herald the rain.
But the inexorable pull of the ley lines of Empire, which had brought so many of my ancestors from all across the world to that tiny island, pushed me away from it. I was bright and ambitious. I was encouraged to seek better opportunities than I was told the island of my birth could offer me. Like generations before me, I came to England, our hostile motherland, in search of betterment.
I never intended to make a home here, planning only to gain my medical degree before taking flight yet again. At all levels, England made it difficult to belong: from the racist jibes from fellow students and patients who insisted that a young Black Caribbean woman claiming to be their doctor was surely the nurse, to the unexpected changes to professional visa requirements bringing the sudden threat of deportation – a xenophobic Home Office decision contentious enough to be overthrown when challenged by the medical union.
But despite what felt like repeated attempts at my eradication, love grounded me here. My children in particular rooted me in place, invisible umbilical cords stretching to bind me to this soil of their making. They birthed in me an urgent desire to understand how to make a home for them in this land that had been so unwelcoming to me. I could not understand how to do that in the fraught human realm of my past and my present, so instinctively I turned to the plants around me.
I had trained as a doctor but, to my embarrassment, I realised that my dismissal of my grandmother’s teachings meant I had little knowledge of the plants from which so many of our medicines originated. I became curious about the common herbs around me here in England – at first dandelion, plantain, cleavers and nettles. All possessed considerable healing properties and all were considered weeds, an unwanted scourge to be eliminated from gardens. Yet they were all native here; they belonged completely. I felt a kinship with their persecution and began to see that I might learn from their resilience in making a home for themselves among the cracks.
This desire to root with the plants led my husband and me to take a leap of faith into the Somerset countryside, moving at short notice to a house with a colony of bats in the loft and a steeply terraced garden covered in bamboo leaf litter, with a shrub that smelled like night-blooming jasmine next to the front door. I fell in love immediately, only recognising the similarity to my parents’ beloved garden much later.
We landed in midwinter, just before the pandemic hit UK shores. As our English country garden began to wake with the spring and flowers were coaxed bit by bit from our barren, compacted clay soil by my dedicated mulching – cosmos and starflowers, foxgloves, sweet peas and poppies – I began to realise that our new home had unexpected but powerful resonances with the home of my childhood.
Weigela densely covered in pink and white flowers arched over the path like my grandmother’s froth of bougainvillaea, clumps of Mexican hydrangea looked eerily like the ixora under which I had once played. I planted a daphne prominently next to the front gate – and later learned that my grandmother’s middle name was Daphne. And as the roses hidden and overgrown in our hedge came into astonishing bloom, the links of understanding grew in my mind between the gardens of my childhood and this one into which my young children were taking root. I realised that their uncanny familiarity was unsurprising – all my homes were in colonial gardens.
We were all seeking meaning during that difficult time. A cousin researching our family tree messaged me one day while I was out in the garden (in those days I was always out in the garden) to say that she had found our shared ancestor, my grandmother’s grandmother who had indeed been native to the Caribbean isles. My great-great-grandmother had married a Scottish missionary and her daughter’s account of her childhood, as told to my cousin, was that it had been a marriage very much forged out of love. The telling of that long-lost memory profoundly upended the violent narrative of my own making in which the half-truths of a suppressed history had trapped me.
There is so much more to unearth of these stories, much truth still to bring to the light of healing. But I know now that love is my birthright, as it has been my grounding. Love, libido in psychoanalytic terms, is the source of all creativity, the generative energy that powers all life. Rooted in this Somerset garden that we have come to love, we have grown deep connections with the community that holds us. Connections of friendship, mutual support and working together on projects to strengthen and sustain this shared place of ours.
Tending the garden through its cycles of death and renewal has reminded me that the earth is where I am from. Witnessing the garden’s generosity in return has taught me that while I am held in the earth’s loving cradle, I will always be at home.
Uprooting: from the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden by Marchelle Farrell is published by Cannongate at £16.99. Or buy it for £13.59 at guardianbookshop.com
