I have one pro-tip about gardening...
...it’s better to do it yourself, writes poet and artist Frieda Hughes – who’s not shy about donning her waders and getting amongst the lily-pads
WATER LILIES
Quietly, beneath fish and the reflection of sour sky
During a year in which the sun barely rose to its knees,
The tubers extended their gnarled wrists
And lily-sprout fingertips. Their thousand frond roots
Like skeins of hair, tangled in the depths, melting
Into the rot and sediment of their previous incarnations.
Slowly, their unstoppable extensions
Shrank fish-space as if absorbing water.
Their exuberant bulk found a foothold in every pond angle.
The fish nose and nudge against the firm cellulose
That contains them, and today, a day without rain,
I must wade into the morass and saw logs of lily-flesh
From the silt, chest-deep in waders, iced to the bones of my feet.
The saw must not touch the liner, invisible beneath lily-mass,
Nor must I tear it, as fragile as it seems now
Against the passage of time. In the back of my mind
My fish are gasping for air, and there,
Examining me, is one small orange body,
Flickering like a candle in the cold clamp of winter
That drags in its first chill before I even escape.