On Saturday, I went to visit my friend Julian at his allotment. It’s an unpromising scrap of South London tucked in behind a pub; a chaotic patchwork of plots nestling alongside the waterworks in the shadow of the prison.
We sat for a couple of hours by Julian’s shed, hemmed in by peonies and ranunculus, with two flasks of coffee and plenty of time.
As we sat, I saw the order in the patchwork: the carefully-tended pathways between raised beds of salad and vegetables; water butts catching rain from enterprisingly repaired sheds of great antiquity; the produce and growth, the fulness of life.
And the trees. Town trees like planes and limes; shrubby elder, ash and sycamore; and fruit trees: pears, apples, cherries, plums, figs.
The measure of an allotment is more than a thousand years old and, even though these allotments were much younger, there was the feeling that this was an ancient place. It was in the reuse of everything from timber to bricks to old windows and string; it was in the exact placement of a pear tree or a bed of garlic according to the daily journey of the sun, the annual rotation of crops.
Thousands of years ago, the prophet Isaiah had a vision of the world as it should be; fruitful, just and peaceful. It was a vision so beguiling, so optimistic, that Isaiah says ‘the trees of the field will clap their hands’.
Sometimes, I think, we come across places where we encounter that world, the world as it could and should be; where we produce what we need and collaborate with our neighbours, where seeds and cuttings, fruit and vegetables and flowers are shared. It is a just and hopeful thing, to come across that deep potential in a scrap of nothing in the middle of a city. It’s a glimpse of what happens when the world is right. It’s where you can hear the trees clap their hands.
Of course, the coffee didn’t last forever and so, because it would have seemed rude not to, we went to the pub. And there, we sat over a pint, doing what friends do in pubs and exactly what we’d seen the allotment doing all morning: we put the world to rights.
Julian is my Silas’s godfather and knows how to build things. He has beautiful, architect’s handwriting.