Poppy's Garden

by Holly Webb

  Poppy dumped her sketch book on the floor and reached for the essential oils kit on top of her chest of drawers. She needed something to cheer her up and help her concentrate. The oils and their lovely wooden case had been her birthday present from Mum and Dad, and she loved experimenting with them, making special mixtures to solve different problems. Mum said it was one of the best presents she’d ever given anyone, because it meant that Poppy always wanted to massage her shoulders with scented oils. Except that Poppy wished her mum would have something more interesting wrong with her than just being a bit tired, or having had a long day at work. Her mum was a doctor’s receptionist, and people quite often shouted at her because they were upset or stressed. Poppy had used up a lot of her jasmine oil on shoulder massages for Mum; it was great for making people feel loved and looked after.

  Actually, she could use jasmine now, maybe with a bit of rose. They’d make her feel better, and they were really good for confidence. She might stop feeling so useless at garden design. Poppy picked up the bottles and frowned. It was all very well feeling more confident, but what if they didn’t actually make her designs any better? Reluctantly, she put the rose and jasmine back, and picked up the little book that Mum and Dad had given her to go with the oils. She had a feeling that peppermint was supposed to be good when you needed to concentrate. She flicked through the pages. Yes, definitely peppermint. With basil, maybe. Poppy turned over to the basil page and giggled. Yes, she definitely needed enthusiasm, and some help overcoming her doubts.

  She dripped the oils into one of the little clay dishes, counting out the drops slowly, with some almond oil as a base. Then she very carefully lit the tealight under her oil burner. Mum hadn’t let her have the kit until her tenth birthday, even though Poppy had wanted it for ages before, because she wasn’t really happy about Poppy having candles in her room. Alex and Jake’s birthday present to her had been a table, a little one from IKEA that was not allowed to have anything on it at all apart from the oil burner, so that there was no chance Poppy could set fire to anything by accident.

  Poppy carefully lit the tiny candle, and sighed as she realised that her mum had been at the matches again. Her mum worried about the burner so much that she kept raiding the matchbox, so that Poppy never had more than about three matches, just in case…

  Mmmmm… Peppermint and basil was nice. Herby and fresh. Maybe she should do this when there was going to be a spelling test. Or before SATs, next year. Poppy took a deep breath and waited to feel enthusiastic and focused. It would probably take a little while though. She flicked through the essential oils guide, wondering if there were any other combinations she could try. She needed one for brilliant ideas…

  Poppy had been going through the book backwards, and now she was back at the introduction. She was about to close the book when she noticed a tiny illustration, buried in the text of the introduction. A medieval herb garden, the caption said.

  It was beautiful. Like an amazing pattern, all made out of plants. It almost looked like a maze, with the little hedges, but Poppy had a feeling they were too low to hide anyone. They were just there to keep the different sorts of plants separate. But the picture was so little it was hard to tell. She needed a better one, but she was pretty sure there was nothing like that in any of her other books.

  Mum liked gardening, though. There was a shelf in the kitchen with recipe books and a few gardening books, and Poppy was sure that one of them was about growing your own fruit and vegetables, and herbs came into it too. She’d seen Mum looking at it when she’d bought a basil plant from the supermarket, trying to work out if there was a way to keep it alive.

  Poppy bounced off her bed, pausing for a second to blow out the tealight under the oil burner, because if anyone found out she’d left it burning she’d never be allowed to use it again. Then she raced down the stairs. Their house was quite old and tall and there were a lot of stairs up to her room, which had been an attic once. Mum yelled at her for going too fast, but Poppy loved the feeling of swinging round the banisters.

  “Where’s the fire?” her mother muttered, looking up from some letters. Billy was flaked out beneath her chair, and Poppy could see that her mum was resting her feet on him – he didn’t mind. Then her mum’s eyes sharpened. “You haven’t set anything on fire, have you? I can smell something funny…”

  “It’s mint and basil, Mum. It’s helping me concentrate, and I blew the candle out before I came down.” Poppy rolled her eyes. “Please can I borrow your gardening book? The fruit and vegetable one? It’s for school – there’s a competition to design a school garden. If we win, we get a TV programme made about us!”

  “And you want to grow vegetables?” her mum asked, sounding a bit doubtful as she handed over the book from the shelf by the fridge.

  Poppy shook her head. “Not really. I want to read the herbs bit. I found a picture of a medieval herb garden, and I thought I could do an updated one… Oooh, Mum! This book’s by Cam Morris! He’s the person in charge of the competition. I definitely need to look at this, then I can find out what sort of gardens he likes! Can I take it upstairs?”

  Her mum nodded. “Sure. Show me the design when you’ve done it, won’t you, Poppy? I’d really like to see it.”

  Poppy grinned at her. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to be any more into gardening, Mum. I don’t want to go and deadhead the roses, or whatever it is you were going to ask.”

  “Oh, well. It would just be nice if one of you liked gardening.” Her mother sighed. “Alex and Jake only go in the garden to play football, or if I blackmail one of them into cutting the grass.”

  “I like picking the flowers for making things,” Poppy reminded her. “Lavender and rose petals and things. I’ll look after the book, Mum. Thanks!”

  She went slowly back upstairs, leafing through the book. It was full of gorgeous pictures of flowers, and just as she reached her bedroom, she gave a satisfied sigh. There it was. The kitchen garden from a chateau in France, laid out in the same sort of way as the little picture in her essential oils book.

  Poppy smiled at the map as she went to sit down on her bed. Somehow it reminded her of her mum’s new kitchen tiles. The fancy blue patterned ones she’d had put along the back of the sink. It was the same sort of geometric pattern. Poppy flicked over the page, and there was a photo of part of the garden. Tiny, delicate little hedges, so straight and perfect. It looked like they must trim them with nail scissors and a ruler, she thought. There was a rose bush in the middle of the square, and oddly familiar round green things were planted in between the lines of hedge. Poppy frowned at them, until she realised they were cabbages. Cabbages and roses! She giggled.

  She scanned the text by the pictures. It made sense, all the little stone paths, winding in and out of the beds. It meant you could get at the fruit and vegetables easily to harvest them. And the nicest gardens were often in monasteries, where the monks had time to work on looking after the plants carefully, and they only had quite small spaces, so everything had to be planted up close.

  Just like the school garden. And it would be easy to make it accessible for wheelchairs, because of the little paths – in fact, some of the beds could be raised up perhaps, so people didn’t have to lean down. Poppy twirled her hair round her fingers thoughtfully. She needed to put the green and blue streaks back in, she noticed – they were growing out. She had to be a bit careful with them, because they weren’t supposed to have dyed hair at school. But she had really thick, wavy hair, and she only dyed the underneath bits, so she got away with it as long as she was careful tying her hair back for PE.

  The monks would have herb gardens too, she read, because the only hospitals at that time were the ones in the monasteries. Poppy blinked. She loved using alternative remedies, but her mum did give her Calpol if she was feeling really awful. It might be a bit scary to have nothing but herbs…

  Poppy looked at the entry sheet for the school garden and carefully copied the diagram of the real garden sp
ace into her sketch book. For a garden like one of those medieval ones, she’d need to be really careful about fitting it into the space – no artistic guessing. Once she’d drawn it out, she chewed the end of her pencil, looking at the space. How was she going to split it up? The monks had sections for different herbs in the hospital gardens, and different kinds of fruit and vegetables in their kitchen gardens. And the beautiful chateau garden seemed to have everything. Vines, even.

  Plants that smell nice, she scribbled along the bottom of the page, thinking of the roses again. And of the way the lavender in their garden smelled so lovely when she brushed past it while she was throwing a ball for Billy. Or when she accidentally threw the ball into it, and Billy crashed into the middle of the lavender bush to get it out…

  Smell… A scented garden would be lovely. All sorts of different smells. But was that enough? Maybe it ought to be all the senses, Poppy thought, scribbling frantically. Plants with furry leaves. And prickles to stop stupid boys picking them. And they could have herbs that tasted nice too! Mint. That would be good. All the teachers could chew it so they got rid of their disgusting coffee breath after spending break in the staff room. Sight was easy – it would just be hard choosing the most beautiful flowers. But sound? Plants with rattly leaves, somehow? Ferns that rustled when the wind blew through them? Poppy looked doubtfully at her notes. Maybe they could cheat a bit and put some wind chimes in…

  “Poppy! Are you still doing homework? You haven’t even got ready for bed!”

  Poppy blinked up at her mum owlishly. She was quite tired. At some point she’d put the light on, but she didn’t quite remember when.

  “Is this your garden design?” Her mum sighed. “You sounded very enthusiastic about it at dinner, but I didn’t realise you were planning to finish it tonight.”

  “I wasn’t,” Poppy murmured, yawning. “It was just hard to stop, once I got going on it. It’s fun.” She held the sketch book out to her mum a little nervously. Her mum loved being in the garden. It would be awful if she took one look at Poppy’s design and said it was horrible, or that it just wouldn’t work.

  “Oh, Poppy, this is really pretty,” her mum said, smiling. “It reminds me of something…”

  “Your kitchen tiles,” Poppy said, with another massive yawn.

  “Yes! A sort of Moroccan pattern. But it’s based on a medieval garden, I can see that. It’s lovely.”

  “There’s a wild flower patch,” Poppy called to her as she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. “To attract butterflies. And I thought that could be in a butterfly-shaped bit of hedge. That bit took ages, trying to make it look properly like a butterfly. Do you think you can make hedges grow in shapes like that?”

  Her mum looked round the bathroom door. “I’m sure you can. Think of topiary. You know, when they make hedges into statues? Like Mr Simpson’s peacock hedge down the road.”

  “Oooh!” Poppy bounded out of the bathroom. “Topiary! I haven’t got any of that. That would work brilliantly in the sight bit.”

  “Not now!” her mother said sternly. “Bed. I know you, you’ll be drawing it at the breakfast table tomorrow. Well, you can just get some sleep in first.”

  “Wow!” Izzy peered at Poppy’s intricate design.

  “Do you think it’s OK?” Poppy asked her anxiously.

  She hadn’t wanted to get the design out until they were in the classroom, in case it got rained on. It was spitting a bit, but it had to be tipping it down before Mrs Angel, the head, would let anyone into school early.

  “It’s beautiful. It’s so detailed, Poppy. It must have taken hours.”

  “Yeah, it’s lucky we only had that little bit of science homework last night. I did that in the car on the way to school,” Poppy admitted with a yawn. She was really tired. She’d been so excited about her design and all the ideas that she’d taken ages to get to sleep, and then she’d dreamed about princesses and unicorns wandering through her garden. The unicorns kept bumping into the wind chimes.

  Izzy tried not to look disapproving, and almost managed. She was one of those people who couldn’t not do homework. Like she couldn’t write the date at the top of her work without drawing a line under it. With a ruler. But Poppy loved her anyway.

  “Have you brought yours in?” she asked.

  Izzy shook her head. “Not finished. But don’t worry, Poppy, it’s not going to be any competition for that! And I’ve seen Lara’s…”

  Poppy rolled her eyes. “Did it involve a pony, by any chance?”

  Izzy nodded, grinning. “A pony-shaped flower bed and an actual pony…” She giggled. “Well, horse manure is very good for your garden. But it didn’t really have anything else in it, except a carrot bed.”

  Poppy frowned. “Oh, of course! For feeding carrots to the pony.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Maya and Emily came in and dumped their bags. “Oh, Poppy! Look, Ems, it’s beautiful!” Maya squeaked. “OK, I’m definitely not entering. No point.”

  Emily put an arm round Poppy and hugged her. “That beats Nick’s design,” she whispered, nodding to the noisy table of boys behind them. “He was waving it about on the bus, wasn’t he, Maya?”

  “Yup, and it’s basically a skate park. With a tree in the middle.”

  “You didn’t draw that.”

  Poppy snatched up her design in a hurry and looked round at Ali and Lucy and Elspeth. They were such good sneaker-uppers, she hadn’t seen them at all. “Yes, I did,” she said stubbornly. Ali had a piece of paper in a smart see-through pink folder, and she snatched it behind her back as she saw Poppy looking at it.

  “No copying!” she snapped.

  “I don’t want to copy yours…” Poppy started to protest.

  Ali smirked. “You don’t need to, do you. You already copied that one.”

  Poppy shook her head. “No, I didn’t, I drew it.”

  “I bet she copied it straight out of a book,” Elspeth said. “Don’t you think so, Ali?”

  “Of course she did,” Ali said scornfully. “No way she came up with that by herself. She cheated.”

  “I didn’t copy,” Poppy said faintly, but she was starting to wonder. How much had she copied her design out of Cam Morris’s book? Maybe she was cheating. She stared down at her beautiful design, her eyes troubled, and Ali smirked at her two sidekicks.

  “See? Look at her. She’s gone all red. You’re such a cheat, Poppy. Mr Finlay’s going to be so disappointed.”

  She’d copied the way the little hedges surrounded the flowers from those photos in the book, Poppy realised. And it was a book by Cam Morris – he’d recognise it, wouldn’t he? So even if she won the competition at school, when all the different schools sent their designs in, he’d spot it at once.

  Poppy stuffed the drawing into her bag, crumpling it a little. She didn’t care any more. She couldn’t give it in now. She felt her eyes burning, and bit hard into her bottom lip. No way was she going to let Ali see her cry. But she felt so stupid. She’d been really, really proud of her design, and she hadn’t even thought that it was copied.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Izzy hissed as Mr Finlay came in and started to do the register. “Poppy, you know how horrible she is. It’s a brilliant design.”

  Poppy sniffed and put her pencil case back in her rucksack on top of her entry form. She didn’t even want to be able to see it.

  “Poppy, are you OK?” Izzy asked her anxiously as soon as the bell rang for break. Poppy had been working silently all morning. She managed a tight little smile a couple of times when Izzy nudged her, looking worried, but she hadn’t wanted to talk. She was too disappointed, and angry with herself. She’d felt so pleased with the way her design had come out. It had looked really professional, and her mum and dad had been so impressed with it. Even Jake and Alex had grunted at it in an approving sort of way, in between shovelling in half a packet of cornflakes each. All that effort had been for nothing, and there was no way she could come up with another desi
gn. There was time enough, but she just didn’t want to. She couldn’t face starting all over again. And anyway, she didn’t have any more ideas.

  She tried to smile at Izzy again, but it didn’t work very well. She could tell she didn’t look very convincing, and Izzy stared at her anxiously.

  “You mustn’t listen to Ali. Seriously, Poppy. I don’t believe you copied it. You wouldn’t do that.” Izzy glared at Ali and Elspeth and Lucy, who were huddled at their table, making admiring noises over Ali’s garden design.

  “But I sort of did,” Poppy told her miserably. “I didn’t think of it that way until she said it, but I did – I got the idea out of one of my books on essential oils, and then I added bits to it from another book. So I did copy it…” She sank her chin on to her hands. Talking about it made her want to cry, and she blinked fiercely at the table.

  “That doesn’t mean you copied it!” Izzy hissed crossly.

  “She’s right, Poppy.” Maya nodded decidedly. “Show it to us again.”

  Poppy shook her head. She didn’t even want to see it.

  “Please!”

  “I don’t want to!” Poppy gasped, grabbing the piece of paper out of her bag and jumping up from her chair. As she went past Mr Finlay’s desk she shoved the design into the bin – it was the wrong one, not the recycling bin, but she didn’t care. Maya could tell her off about it later. She hurried out into the corridor, wondering where to go. She didn’t want to have to talk to anybody right now.

  “Poppy!” Someone was calling her but Poppy darted off down the corridor. It didn’t matter where she went. She needed to get away from everybody. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone? She didn’t want them laughing at her for being so stupid.