The gold in the garden

On slow fashion, billowing blue and napping cats

Hello, I'm Josefin, a spinner of wool and crafter of words. In this space I practice being brave with my words to mold them into beauty. If you enjoy evocative writing about the little things in a big world, this space is for you. Bring your favourite tea mug and come sit beside me.

I go to the allotment garden, gravel crunching under my feet, a handful of seeds giggling in my pocket. It's only 150 meters, but I haven't been there in a week or two. Proofreading my book has taken a lot of my time and energy and going to the allotment has felt overwhelming. Today I long to be there, though, and my steps are light in the early summer morning.

Newborn flax babies in spring rain.

The allotment is tiny, only 40 square meters [430 square feet] and divided into twelve beds in four crop rotation quarters. We grow mainly vegetables, but also some flowers.

Two of the beds are always reserved for my flax. I have grown it since 2014. A square meter or three, but much loved. I call it my experimental flax patch – I keep it to learn about the process, where every step can alter the end result. I keep my finished stricks – sometimes no thicker than a rat's tail – in my fiber cabinet, marked with the year I planted it. Every now and then I open the cabinet just to look at them, just like a parent would watch their children sleep.

The best day to sew the flax is on the Karolina day on May 20th. Preferably by unmarried women with their hair down to show the flax that it needs to grow long. And of course, without underwear to prove the need for a new set. I sowed mine in early May this year, hair up, married and decent, with seeds from last year’s harvest. A couple of weeks later, tiny sprouts with two perfect leaves emerged.

There’s always a tension in the air, an itch in my mind, before I see them above the soil. But there they were, the promise – or at least the chance – of gold, if I play my cards right, if the weather goddesses are kind, and if the neighbours' cat chooses another spot for his midday nap.

When I come to the flax patch today the plants are over 30 centimeters. The weeding I did at 10 centimeters has proven effective; speedwells and borage keep a low profile. The young carpet has grown into a billowing ocean – soft and fluid, sheer and strong.

In a couple of weeks, the flowers will start to open. That first sight of blue is always the prettiest, the most longed-for. A translucent lantern the colour of the sky, strips of dark blue paving their way through the petals like veins on paper skin. Bells striving toward the sun in the morning, nodding their heads in the afternoon.

Day by day buds open and form a haze of azure above the dance of the green. Whispering in the wind about gold spun through millennia to sustain families and sail ships, dress posh and penniless, be handed down and carefully mended.

A journey from seed to yarn, from the allotment garden to my balcony. Slow fashion at its core.

"Thank you for growing them", said an allotment neighbour when I showed her the green shadow on the flax beds in May. "They are such a joy when they bloom!". Even if only two or three square meters they are just that, an ordinary and extraordinary joy just by being green, blue and dancing.

Thank you, flax, I say, for your frailness and strength, for your transformation from green to gushing, to rattling capsules at harvest time, through retting and processing with techniques as old as time itself. To bare feet on the pedals, to spinning joy. To gold.

I walk the few steps back home with a lightness in my heart, longing to come back tomorrow. I might swing by the weaving room too, and finish the shawl I’m weaving from my first ten harvests.