Poppy's Garden

by Holly Webb

  “What?” Poppy squeaked, quite loudly. “They’re filming today?”

  Half the class stopped what they were meant to be doing, which was a very boring set of reading comprehension questions, and stared at Poppy and Mr Finlay. They’d known that Poppy had won, of course – lots of them had been at the ceremony. But no one had realised quite what this meant. Everyone had assumed the gardens were being built in the summer sometime.

  Even Ali looked less wide-eyed and worried at the thought of being on television. There was about five seconds of silence, and then everyone started talking all at once.

  “Oooh!”

  “Oooh, sir, can we be in it?”

  “Can we all be in it?”

  “Will they come and film our class?”

  Mr Finlay held up his hands in a pretend panic. “I don’t know! Honestly, I don’t. The designers are going to talk to Poppy, and that’s all I’ve been told. I should think they’ll want to film a bit of the school, just to show everyone what it’s like. And they must be going to show the garden site, before they come and dig it all up. Before and after, that sort of thing.”

  Poppy hurried back to her seat, feeling a bit embarrassed. Of course she was excited about the filming, but she had a horrible feeling that everyone in the class was going to start fussing about it, and asking her if they could be in the programme. No one was going to believe that it wasn’t up to her – but it wasn’t. Joe, the patient-looking man who’d handed Cam Morris the envelope the day before, was part of the production team, and it was quite obvious that he was in charge, much more than Cam Morris, even if Cam was the star.

  Luckily, before Poppy’s entire class could spend break badgering her about getting them on TV, the crew arrived early and proceeded to get massively in the way. They did want to film the whole class, which was what everybody wanted, but that meant getting cameras and microphones in, and moving all the furniture round about six different ways. It was lunchtime before they were happy with it, and then the filming had to be done straight away before the light changed, which meant everyone was starving.

  “At least we’ll be on TV for a little bit,” Emily said as they hurried up to the dining hall. “They said all of us would be, didn’t they?”

  “Yes!” said Poppy, rather grumpily. She was hungry, and she’d been made to have a conversation with Mr Finlay about numeracy (which didn’t even make sense, as far as she could see) over and over again, while the film crew tried to get the sound levels right. She had stopped being excited about being on TV after about the fourth time. At least she had a packed lunch. Maya and Izzy were having school lunches, and they’d be lucky to get any.

  “Was there anything left?” she asked as they came back to the table looking resigned.

  “Mushrooms…” Izzy sighed. “I hate mushrooms. But there wasn’t anything else.”

  “It can’t be just mushrooms,” Poppy said, peering at the greyish gloop.

  “I don’t want to know what else it is,” Izzy said sadly, stirring it with her fork.

  “It’s the veggie option,” Maya pointed out. “This is what I get every day! Well, except I don’t, because I almost always have a packed lunch. It was only that I fancied having a jacket potato today.” She dribbled the grey gloop off her fork and stared at it. “We should make that production man eat this. Then he’d see what he’d done. I bet they’ve got a catering van as well. And the food will be gorgeous.”

  “A catering van?” Izzy frowned. “Like a kebab van?”

  Maya shrugged. “Sort of. Except not with disgusting burgers made out of the bits of animals nobody even wants to think about. Nice food.” She pushed the mushrooms away. “Want some bread, Izzy? There was a bit left. And some beetroot chunks on the salad bar.”

  “Yay, I can have a beetroot sandwich.”

  Poppy pushed her lunch towards Izzy to share, and Emily did the same as Maya came back with a handful of bread.

  “I hope the vegetarian option becomes edible when we’ve got your garden,” Maya said as she took a huge bite of bread.

  “This is Lily – she’s our garden designer.”

  “Ummm…” Izzy was so nervous about putting her hand up. But she was determined to stick up for Poppy’s design. They’d gone through enough just getting it into the competition. She wasn’t going to let anybody mess it around. “I thought Poppy was the designer,” she said, looking apologetically at Lily.

  “Don’t panic,” Lily told her cheerfully. “All I’m supposed to do is make sure the designs actually work. Yours is pretty sensible, Poppy, but one of the other winning designs has got a floating model cloud in the middle of it. I haven’t worked out what I’m doing about that one yet.”

  “We may have to change some things,” Joe pointed out. “But we’ll try not to.”

  “I think these mosaic paths are great.” Lily had a blown-up version of Poppy’s design spread out over the table.

  Poppy beamed at Lily. “I was hoping we could make them out of old plates, or something like that,” she explained. “I was thinking everyone in the school could bring a manky old chipped plate in, and we could smash them, and then make the paths out of the bits! Otherwise people would just throw them away, wouldn’t they?”

  Lily was nodding delightedly, but Joe closed his eyes for a moment, looking slightly horrified. “Yesss … except that might be a slight health and safety problem.”

  “We could wear swimming goggles,” Izzy suggested hopefully. She loved the idea of smashing plates. She might even be able to convince Dad to get rid of all the Peter Rabbit plates they’d had since she was a baby! She had to hide them before anyone came round, so he didn’t serve up tea on them.

  “I’m sure we can get round the safety issues,” Lily murmured, scribbling notes. “This garden’s full of nice recycled bits. And you’ve got lots of great ideas for gardening responsibly. All these water butts, and the wildflower patch.”

  “Do you think we can make the sculpture?” Poppy asked hopefully. “It’s one of my favourite ideas. We found loads of bits of an old bike when we did a canal clean-up a few weeks ago. We put it all in a skip and got rid of it, but I kept thinking about how good some of the pieces looked – like they were artwork.” She frowned. “I wish we’d kept them, but my mum would have been furious if I’d put lots of bits of rusty bike in my bedroom.”

  Poppy had added the sculpture as part of the Sight section of the garden – she’d thought about putting a scarecrow in and then decided that actually she’d rather have a scareboy instead. She was pretty sure that lots of the flowers and vegetables were going to get ruined by people kicking footballs into them or racing round the different beds. So she’d designed her sculpture, a massive bird standing in the middle of one of the beds.

  Izzy laughed. “I love his legs. You could grow beans up them or something.”

  “Ooooh, good idea.” Lily nodded and scribbled harder. “I like the way you’ve got vegetables and fruit scattered through the garden actually, Poppy. It’s not just in the Taste bit. Gives you a lot more room to grow things, as well.”

  Poppy looked round worriedly at the grim corner of the playground. This was the first time the production team had seen the place they were going to transform – apart from in photos. It looked awful – just tarmac, and one lone bench, and then a high brick wall that divided the school from the houses next door. It didn’t look like it could ever be a garden. She glanced up at Joe and Lily anxiously, hoping they weren’t going to be horrified.

  But Lily was turning round slowly, looking up at the sky and squinting at the sun. “Mmmm… We might want to move your Taste bed, Poppy. You’ve got a nice bit of south-facing ground here. That means it’ll be sunny,” she added, as Poppy looked bewildered.

  “Oh!” Poppy nodded. “I didn’t even think about that,” she said apologetically. “Is anything else in the wrong place?”

  Lily was holding the plans out and pacing round the patch of ground. “I don’t think so. Because we�
�re starting from scratch, there’s not as much worrying about what you’ve already got as there usually would be. It’s fun – like a blank canvas!”

  Poppy gave Izzy a relieved sort of smile. A blank canvas sounded exciting – as though they were painting the garden on to the crumbling tarmac.

  Actually… A totally evil, very funny idea flitted into Poppy’s mind. Her smile broadened into a grin, and she beamed into the camera. “Do you think we could have a mural as well?”

  “That’s mean,” Izzy sniggered, and Poppy nodded. They were in PE, the last lesson of the day, and they were supposed to be planning a dance routine, but this was the first chance she’d had to tell the others about her idea.

  “I know. Do you think it’s too mean?”

  “Of course not!” Izzy shook her head. “They definitely deserve it.”

  “We have to do it,” Maya agreed. “Can we all paint a bit of it?”

  Poppy nodded. “They’re going to do most of the building of the garden at the weekends, and at the beginning of the Easter holidays – they said it would make too much mess and disturb everybody if they did it in term-time. But you can all come and help! There’s a letter going out this afternoon.” Poppy hurriedly arranged her arms into a vaguely dance-y sort of position, as she saw Miss Grace looking their way. “We’d better get on with making this dance up. Miss Grace is definitely watching us.” She smiled to herself, glancing at Ali and Lucy, who were bossing Lara and Sophy around in the other corner of the hall. She would go home and draw her mural design tonight.

  “Do you think they’ve worked out it was us yet?” Izzy asked her as they got changed after the class.

  Poppy pulled her cardigan on, frowning. “I don’t know. Ali hasn’t said anything to me at all today, and she usually manages to get some nasty little comments in, doesn’t she? She’s definitely avoiding us.”

  Izzy nodded, and Emily sighed happily. “Best revenge ever. They really believe you called up a ghost.”

  Poppy smirked. “I think they do. And we’re going to make sure they remember her every day…”

  When she got home from after-school club, Poppy sat down at the kitchen table with a pad and her favourite pencils, so she could tell her mum and dad about the filming and what Lily had said about her design.

  “They said we could put a mural in as well,” Poppy explained. “We’ve got big walls all round the garden, so we can paint all of them! It’s a huge job,” she said happily.

  “Is that what you’re drawing now?” her dad asked.

  “Mm-hm. I want it to look like the garden goes on for much further than it really does, so I thought the mural could be mostly trees.”

  “Nice,” her mum commented. “So it’ll look green even in winter as well.”

  Poppy nodded, sketching branches and dabbling a haze of leaves over the top with her favourite watercolour pencils. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, remembering, and began to draw a slim figure in a flowing green dress, half hidden behind the trees. She added swirling brown-gold hair, dark, dark eyes and the high arched eyebrows she remembered from the portrait, and then sat back and smiled at her design. She needed to draw out a few more panels – there was quite a lot of wall – but this was the important one. When she was done, she’d get Dad to let her use the scanner, and then she could email it to Lily, who needed to order the special outdoor paint.

  Ali and Elspeth and Lucy weren’t going to forget the Green Lady in a hurry.

  Poppy and Izzy sat on either side of the little path that wound past the raised beds, carefully pressing broken china pieces into the cement. It had turned out that even with everyone in the school bringing in battered plates, they didn’t have enough for all the paths – mosaics took a lot more bits than Poppy had realised. But Lily had helpfully suggested making most of the paths in a mosaic of flat-topped pebbles, with just a ribbon of china bits running through them, and Poppy thought she was right. It would have been odd to have just one section of path covered in china pieces, and all the rest different. The really good thing was that the paths gave lots of people something to do. Almost everyone in the school had brought back the letters saying they wanted to help, even though it meant coming to school in the Easter holidays.

  Poppy glanced up, looking round the garden. There were at least twenty people working on this path – they had to do it bit by bit or the cement dried before they got the pebbles in properly. And there were another fifteen or so painting the mural. Lily had drawn most of the outlines – Poppy had helped her a bit, but she wasn’t tall enough to reach the tops of the walls without a ladder, which meant it took ages if she tried to do the trees. But she hadn’t minded. She got to draw the more interesting bits at the bottom of the wall – rabbits, and a fantastic badger peering out between two trees that she was really pleased with. And, of course, the Green Lady. Once Lara and Sophy and a couple of other girls from their class had finished that bit of the trees, Poppy was going to paint her. She was really looking forward to it. And not just because she wanted to see Ali’s face when she spotted the ghost.

  Poppy had actually wondered whether Ali and the others would bother turning up this weekend, as she was pretty sure gardening wasn’t their thing. But of course, they were desperate to be on TV. All three of them were over on the other side of the garden making a path, or rather, chatting and pretending to work until the cameraman happened to look their way.

  Poppy went back to pressing the china pieces into the cement, a small smile twisting the side of her mouth – a smile like Sophia’s in the picture. It was funny. She’d made up the whole story, and of course there never had been a ghost, but Poppy almost believed in her now too. She was sure that the floaty, shimmery figure behind the trees was going to make the garden even more special. As though the Green Lady was going to watch over the garden. Poppy was sure that once she was painted into the mural, the garden would start to feel real, even though it didn’t have any plants in it yet.

  “Poppy, what’s going here?” Lara called, pointing to the whitish patch where the Green Lady was waiting to be painted. “We’re done with all the branches now, I think; there’s just this bit left. It’s going to be a person, isn’t it? Who is she?”

  Poppy got up and looked slowly along the wall. It wasn’t perfect yet – there needed to be some plants, and the real fruit trees, to make the painted ones fit in. But already she could see that it was going to look brilliant.

  “I can’t believe you’ve done all those trees,” she said happily to Lara and Sophy and the others. “Even the high bits. It looks amazing.” Poppy ran her fingers over the Green Lady’s bare face. “She’s – she’s like the spirit of the garden,” she explained slowly. “I had a dream about her…” She glanced round at Lara, hoping that she didn’t sound like a total fruit bat. She supposed most of the people in her class thought she was a bit mad anyway…

  But Sophy only smiled, and traced a finger down the outlines of the green dress. It was as though she understood the magic of the green girl too.

  “Nice.” Lara nodded. Then she looked hopefully at Poppy. “Poppy, you know we’re going to do trees all round the garden? There’s loads and loads of them. I don’t mind painting them all, it’s fun, but, well, can we add just one thing?”

  Poppy blinked. “Oh! Did you want a horse in it? I can’t draw them, Lara. I would, but they’re so difficult. I always get the legs wrong. I’d ask Lily for you, but she’s not here today.”

  “I can draw them!” Sophy said excitedly. “We both can. Horses are the only thing we can draw. Just one? A small horse, just a pony really. Peeping out round the trees?”

  Poppy hugged her quickly. “Of course you can. You’ve been painting trees all day. What colour horse?” She giggled, remembering the pink unicorns in her fairy palace drawings. But Lara and Sophy weren’t into pretty fantasy horses at all. They immediately went off into a very serious discussion about greys, and chestnuts, and which would look better in the wood, leaving Poppy to stand
in front of the Green Lady, mixing just the right shade of paint.

  “Poppy, just watch out for Ali, OK?” Izzy came up behind her and Poppy turned round, staring at her vaguely. She’d been painting the Green Lady for a while now, and she’d almost forgotten about the other people in the garden.

  “What?” she murmured.

  “Poppy! Wake up! Ali’s seen what you’re doing and she looks like she wants to strangle you right now! She’d probably even do it on camera.”

  “Izzy’s right,” Emily muttered as she and Maya hurried over to join them. “She’s plotting something.”

  Poppy eyed her painting sadly. “I thought this might keep her off our backs for a while.”

  Emily shook her head. “I think the scare’s worn off her. It was a couple of weeks ago, after all.”

  “She can only stop being mean for so long,” Maya sighed. “I suppose the painting just reminds her of looking stupid.”

  Poppy shrugged. “I don’t care. I love it. And I’m not changing it!” she added fiercely, glaring at the others.

  “Calm down! No one said you should!” Emily rolled her eyes.

  “It would be awful to change her,” Maya said seriously. “All your paintings are amazing, Poppy, but there’s something special about this one. She’s so … mysterious.”

  “I know.” Poppy stepped back off the wooden edge of the raised bed, where she’d been balancing to paint, and took a few more steps backwards to see the whole wall properly. She shivered, her shoulders twitching with excitement. Maybe it was just because it was so big – but the wall looked fantastic.

  “Wow, Poppy! That’s really beautiful.” Joe, the producer, came bounding over. “We need to get you standing right there for your piece to camera, I think. It’ll look great.”