Introduction

Getting the plants out of their pots and into the ground

“I think I just put them in the ground wherever it felt good to do so!”

This was the answer I gave my brother when he asked me how I had designed my garden.

To be honest it was a lot less random than the comment might have made it seem. I had a head full of permaculture and homesteading videos, a lot of enthusiasm and dozens of plants in pots that I had accumulated during years of moving from place to place.

The house has a large yard and when I purchased it four years ago it had no trees, no shrubs, no flowers - nothing but weedy lawn. To me, that was perfect. It was a ‘blank slate’ like a new notebook - untouched, virginal, full of potential.

But whilst I used to find new note-books intimidating I had no such reservations when it came to digging up that lawn. When it came to writing in a notebook, the better the quality the greater the fear. Should I write in pen? Should I date each page? Not so for the garden.

There was a kind of urgency to get the ‘high maintenance’ pot plants into the ground. The ground, it turns out, has a way of looking after the plants itself. I’d propagated many pot plants only to lose them through neglect born of busyness. So I made it my priority to get them out of their pots and into the ground as quickly and as sensibly as I could.

It worked.

Some died, some thrived, and some were later dug up and re-planted somewhere else. And through it all I learned what works and what doesn’t.

So I think I’m going to approach writing the same way. I’ve hovered around Substack for a couple of years now - “long-time commenter first-time publisher” you might say.

It seems that up until now I’ve treated it like a new notebook - intimidating - convinced that as soon I make progress along a certain topic I’ll be locked into it and fearful that I will regret the choice of direction.

Well, I’ve had a change of mind and I’m going to treat it like my garden. Better to get the ideas into the ground. Lets see what thrives and what gets burnt to a crisp once it’s exposed to full sun.

So what is it I want to write about anyhow?

Firstly, I have been following Jonathon Pageau’s “Symbolic World” organisation for some years now and I want to explore that world-view further. Of particular interest is how the concepts relate to my own profession of Accounting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between the symbolic concepts Jonathon covers and what I see as the philosophy that underlies double-entry accounting - namely the balancing of ‘Identity’ and ‘Manifestation’. I hope to interrogate the limits of this correlation and push it as far as it will reasonably go.

Secondly - and I expect somewhat connected to my first answer - I have been following the writings of Paul Kingsnorth and Peco and Ruth Gascovski as they have wrestled with the dehumanising, “machining” aspects of technology. I find I often rant to my co-workers about the increasingly intrusive nature of (so called) tools these days - the digital ones I mean. What better place to refine what I think and road-test my conclusions than here.

Thirdly, and perhaps this integrates the first and second, I converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity about five years ago. It’s given me a new found appreciation for the natural world as we find it, a new love of history and tradition, and a healthy scepticism toward unbridled tech-optimism.

Lastly, as you may have already deduced from my introduction, I love gardening. I expect some of my successes and failures (hopefully mostly successes) will find their way here.

So there we have it. The ideas are out of their pots and in the ground.

What will survive? I suppose time will tell.