Postcards Ep V - Early Spring
With patience and tending
Two people, Be Budding and Mark Crutchfield, writing separately from their own spaces. Two small sheds where things are tended, paused over, sometimes left alone.
These are postcards from those places.
Across the seasons, we exchange short notes — observations, thoughts, fragments — written from our own potting sheds, wherever they happen to be.
Some things will be growing.
Some things will be resting.
Some may fade without ceremony.Each postcard carries its own moment,
part of a shared conversation,
written, received, and left open.Winter feels like it’s almost leaving us behind, and spring is breathing closer.
The story whispers on…
My Dear Fellow Gardener,
Your postcard arrived the other day, just as the sun was breaking through the clouds and warming the soil for the first time in a while now. Small mist vapours rose up and it felt like the earth had warmed up to welcome your postcard.
The Milkmaid is such a beautiful painting, and I can feel how the colours would brighten even the darkest of days in your potting shed. I do hope it’s not an original!
These days of ours with the tending of plants feel like more than just watching the seasons pass by. There’s something gentle and meditative in the waiting and the patience. Just like the milkmaid takes her time, so must we, and with care.
I do like sitting here in the doorway of the potting shed. With your postcard in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, I feel at peace. The robin passes by every morning with a little wink in her eye, as if she knows more than me about the coming months, and maybe she does.
My seed packets are ready now. I do tend to leave things to the last minute, so this year I am prepared and ready to start, as soon as the frost breaks, which can’t be long now.
Did I mention I am thinking of finding a dog to keep me company here?
Some days, I do feel an ache, a need for companionship, and maybe a dog is the way to share this. As long as she doesn’t dig up my bulbs!
Do write again soon, my dear gardener, as it is your letters that keep the warmth lingering long after the sun goes down each day.
Your Remote Gardener
My Dear Remote Gardener,
When I sit here beside my potting shed, this small sanctuary of devotion, I feel deeply at home. It is a place of stillness, of rootedness. And yet, as the sun lowers herself and the day loosens its golden threads, something in me begins to stir. Reading your postcard, I think you feel this too.
At dusk especially, I feel a call toward unknown places. I dream of green expanses I have not walked, of sunlight warming foreign fields, of a soft breeze carrying scents I cannot name. I find myself wondering, what else is there? What other light, what other air, what other way of simply being?
And yet, what I truly long for is not so much a place, but a state of presence. To exist fully. To stand in a moment as completely as I do here among my seedlings. As the milkmaid once stood in her kitchen, wholly attentive to the milk pouring from her jug, not distracted by distant horizons, but devoted to the simple act before her. There is something essential in that kind of attention.
That is why I love my garden. It keeps me here. It grounds me in the tangible rhythm of growth and waiting. Without it, I suspect my thoughts would wander endlessly toward faraway shores, chasing imagined landscapes instead of tending the one entrusted to me, until the robin awakes me from my dream with her gentle song.
Tell me, dear Remote Gardener, do you feel this too? Is it perhaps this same gentle ache that makes you consider the companionship of a faithful dog? Someone to share the silence of your shed, to anchor you in the present when the mind begins to drift toward elsewhere?
I wonder if sometimes we do not long for places as much as we long to be witnessed in our being.
Do write soon, and tell me how the frost retreats from your soil, and whether you have found a faithful companion to share your shed with.
Your Fellow Gardener
My Dear Fellow Gardener,
It’s calming to know we both find peace when spending time in our potting sheds. There is something truly special about this as a place of stillness, patience and tending.
That feeling of something loosening when the sun is setting, I do feel it too, and it is your cards that carry the warmth through the colder nights.
I often feel a calling. Sometimes, to find different places, plants and pollen in the air, yet other times maybe not to find a place, as you mention, but more to feel the presence of others, and to feel noticed.
We notice the growth in our gardens, and sometimes I do wish the plants would notice us back, as I sense that you notice my words.
The garden keeps me grounded, the soil nourishes my roots, and the air lets me feel life all around.
My robin has started singing a different song these days. Before, it felt like she was claiming her territory, but now she sings more joyfully. Almost like she feels the spring approaching.
I am not yet fully decided on a dog, but I do feel the calling. Maybe this is one of the signs — a need to travel outside of my comfort zone.
The ground here is almost frost-free now. Worms are dancing in warm sunshine for the blackbirds, and the mornings are a pleasure to hear them calling.
Do tell me which seeds you look forward to planting first.
Sending warmth through the sun’s rays and over the channel to you, and looking forward always to your postcard.
With warmth of springtime,
Endearingly, your Remote Gardener.
My Dear Remote Gardener,
Your last letter lingered here like warmth stored in stone long after sunset. I carried it with me into the garden the following morning, and perhaps it was your words that sharpened my sight. For suddenly — as though in a single night the world had turned its quiet key — I saw that the magnolia had begun to gather her pale, silken buds. The hydrangea too, shy and green, is unfurling at her tender tips.
How had I not noticed?
Perhaps I, too, was still sleeping. Winter does not always depart when the frost does. Even though I had felt those first tender sunrays on my face when your previous postcard arrived — like a soft hand brushing my cheek — I see now that I had not fully awakened. One can feel warmth and still remain folded inward.
But spring does not wait for our readiness. She arrives in her own time. And now that I see her moving through my garden, it is indeed time to decide what I will sow this season.
I think of ivy. There is something mysterious about her — how she clings, how she weaves old walls into living stories. Ivy feels like a secret whispered in green. Yet she binds herself with devotion, and I wonder whether my potting shed would welcome such intimacy, or whether it might slowly lose its breath beneath her embrace.
Then there are green beans for the vegetable patch — faithful and generous, always offering more than I expect. They remind me that some seeds never fail to answer. And wildflowers — yes, I still dream of them. A small rebellion of color. A gentle invitation to the bees, those tireless pilgrims of bloom and nectar. What flourishes in freedom often nourishes more than we can see, and a garden is never grown for itself alone.
Ideas, as you can tell, are abundant. What remains is the courage to choose — and then to begin. For dreaming is a kind of sowing, but only the hand in the soil makes the season real.
Perhaps this is not so different from your wondering about a dog. We circle the possibility before we open the gate. We listen for the echo of our own longing before we allow another heartbeat into our days.
Spring asks for commitment. Growth asks for risk. And still, we stand here, seed packets in hand.
The light grows longer here each evening, and I await your next postcard with anticipation, eager to hear of the promises your garden holds.
~ Your Fellow Gardener
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Instead of ending the conversation, the pages remain open — letters folded softly between postcards and letters, like bulbs sleeping in the dark.
Somewhere, the Remote Gardener holds a pen, pausing….will he be ready when spring arrives — when the thaw begins and everything buried asks to bloom?
The postcards will continue to travel between Mark Crutchfield and Be Budding
You’re welcome to follow along if you’d like.
Be & Mark
Inside the Potting Shed
If you’d like to step a little further inside the shed, there will be additional notes waiting there.
Small reflections as the days pass and the seasons shift — thoughts that don’t always travel by postcard, but still belong to the same soil.
“Inside the Potting Shed” is open to paid members who wish to linger a little longer.
You’re welcome, if it feels right.
If you happened to miss the last exchange of postcards, you’ll find it waiting just below.
From Be Budding and me.
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Thank you, so glad you like it. Writing these cards is such a joy. It reminds me too of when I had a pen pal and the wonderful anticipation of waiting for a letter.
Wonderful writing ✍️❤️