The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  Eduardo stopped: ‘Now, this is the way a pool should be. This is magnificent.’

  I looked at the dark water, at the host of frogs burbling upon the rim, at the dragonflies flitting amongst the lilies and the flags. ‘It’s a bit on the grubby side at the moment,’ I apologised.

  But Eduardo was having none of it. ‘What does it matter?’ he exclaimed. ‘If the water were clear, you wouldn’t get that wonderful effect of the blossom against the greenness, nor that reflection of the rocks and hills. And it doesn’t smell of stagnant water or chlorine. This pool is a work of art.’

  I was beginning to warm to the man. I tore him away from the pool and led him up to the house. Eduardo took in the muddle of vernacular architecture with one sweeping glance. ‘There are a lot of buildings here,’ he commented. ‘Did you build some of them yourself?’ The question seemed ambiguous somehow, and not altogether admiring. He paused to peer through a gaping black hole, with a door swinging off its hinges. This was what I liked to call my workshop.

  Somebody once said to me that a man’s workshop is a good indication of the state of his mind. This was a rather unkind cut, for mine is perhaps better described as a wildlife reserve rather than a seat of industry and creativity. There are ants, cockroaches, earwigs and, though I’ve never encountered them, I know there’s the odd scorpion and centipede. It all lends a certain frisson of excitement to scrabbling around in the dark – there are no windows – among the chaotic heaps of tools and rubbish that litter the floor.

  When more rational and wholesome folks come to visit, they are appalled at the state of things. ‘Why don’t you clean it out?’ they suggest helpfully. ‘Get a shadow-board, put up hooks, make shelves, put a light in…’ and so on. What these well-intentioned people don’t seem to realise is that to do any of these things one needs tools – and I can’t find the tools. Also, this represents my natural state of being, and I feel that once you start to tamper with how you operate naturally you are sailing into dangerous waters; that way lies despair, nervousness, and the unleashing of the dark beasts of the spirit. Better it is to suffer a few imperfections than risk lousing up all your better qualities by trying to rise above yourself.

  I steered Eduardo determinedly away from this unappealing revelation of my innermost being, and led him down to the house to meet Ana, who was engaged in chopping up an elaborate but unappetising salad for the chickens. He considered this activity with some surprise.

  ‘It’s the way the chickens like it,’ said Ana with a grin. ‘They don’t have fingers like we do, so I chop it up for them in beakfuls. After all, it’s not much fun being a chicken.’

  ‘But if you had to be a chicken,’ observed Eduardo, ‘then I think that perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad place to be one.’

  Ana took this as a compliment and suggested we sit down in the shade and enjoy a drink; it was still far too hot to go traipsing round the garden.

  ‘So you’ve come to see our famous garden?’ she said, looking at him quizzically as she placed a bowl of olives on the table to accompany the cool beer.

  Eduardo took a big slug of beer and narrowed his eyes with pleasure. ‘I have always admired the English and their gardens,’ he replied, after a long pause. ‘So, when I read this article about you and your garden, naturally I was intrigued. And so here I am, drinking your beer… Mmm, these olives are good.’

  ‘We haven’t quite got a garden,’ said Ana, firmly. ‘It’s my dream to make one and I work on it daily, but I want it to grow organically, in its own time, rather than shipping in a whole load of ready-made trees and shrubs.’

  ‘A very laudable philosophy,’ agreed our guest, helping himself to another olive. ‘And so…’

  ‘And so’, continued Ana, ‘that’s why we haven’t got the sort of garden that you might want to put in Casa & Campo.’

  Eduardo smiled indulgently. ‘Ana, I think I realised that as soon as I met you both. But please believe me when I say yours is just the sort of garden I enjoy. May we go and have a look?’

  Eduardo’s charm had the effect of dispelling Ana’s reticence and embarrassment, and before long they were chatting easily together and setting off down the path. (It’s something to do with speaking the same language – horticultural Latin – and sharing a genuine appreciation for such matters as mulching and compost.) I decided to string along too, because I can’t think of a nicer way to pass a summer evening than wandering around in a garden.

  Ana’s kitchen garden is her comfort and joy, her retreat from the cares of home and family and, if it’s not too fanciful a notion, the nearest thing our farm has to a soul. There are others in the Alpujarras whose gardens may produce a greater abundance, but for me the deliciously anarchic tangle of flowers and trees and crops, and the idiosyncratic notions behind their planting, reflect the essence of Ana – in a similar way, I suppose, that the disreputable chaos of my workshop may reflect me. A rather chastening thought.

  Eduardo carefully shifted the bedstead gate beneath the huge fig tree that stands at the garden entrance and then gazed admiringly around him. Ana’s eccentric creation really did seem to take his breath away. A blaze of marigolds – bright orange and the most vivid of yellows – had spread itself across the front of the garden, giving way beneath the canopy of orange trees to a haze of green from the filigree fronds of fennel, while at the back there hung a mist of blues and pinks from delicate Nigella or love-in-a-mist. The fence was covered with scented roses, little pink ones and big white tea roses, and a great amorphous rambler of a honeysuckle that clambered all over the ancient olive tree at the end.

  Among this apparently random tumble of flowers and plants were tiny vegetable beds, arranged so that they could be cultivated without stepping on and compacting the soil. For years Ana has worked those beds, digging them and assiduously removing every stone, working in copious quantities of moist black dung and compost, then mulching with the scraggy wool produced by our sheep. Eduardo ambled amongst them, casting an appreciative eye on the fine tilth as he went, and nodding in response to Ana’s explanations of what lay hidden beneath the surface, the patterns of planting and the arcane systems she employed.

  Chief amongst these was her particular system of crop rotation. Cabbages, for example, being capricious, don’t like to grow where cabbages have grown the year before, and nor do tomatoes and quite a few others. In order not to offend these vegetable sensibilities, Ana makes complex charts and, during the winter, anguishes over the locations and successions of the various crops. She is often to be found poring over these charts as she tries to cajole the various recalcitrant vegetables into their allotted places. It’s a sort of vegetable solitaire. (Of course, there are times when she loses and has to move one or other crop to a brand new patch she’s created by the alfalfa field.)

  As well as this, Ana follows the Rudolf Steiner method of ‘biodynamic agriculture’, where each operation in the garden has an auspicious day depending on the alignment of the planets. This began with a ‘biodynamic’ chart that a friend sent her from London, which she initially scoffed at and then decided to try in a limited way, on the basis that people round here have always attended to the phases of the moon when planting, so why not the rest of the solar system, too. Suffice it to say that Jupiter and Mars came through for the broad beans and carrots so convincingly that she continued the experiment. Ana doesn’t, however, stick assiduously to the biodynamic teachings, but simply follows those tenets that suit her and discards those she finds inconvenient or downright ludicrous.

  The main thing is that the work satisfies her spirit, and the pleasure we get from its anarchic beauty goes deep in all of us. When Chloë was a baby, we used to dangle her in a sort of baby-bouncer thing with elastic ropes from an orange tree while we were working in the garden. Later she gravitated to a sandpit I built her, my first venture into the world of home architecture. Now she takes her friends down there to root among the marigolds for early strawberries.

  It’s hard to s
ay just how many of these philosophical elements Eduardo picked up on, but being a man of horticultural perspicacity, he seemed to discern what it was all about, and made appropriate admiring comments as he ambled along in Ana’s wake. At length we moved on up the steps to the rockery.

  Now the rockery was a creation I was particularly proud of, having expended a great deal of energy the previous year, hauling interestingly shaped but extremely heavy rocks up to the terrace from the Cádiar riverbed. To make it more interesting I also gathered a load of aesthetically pleasing driftwood, which we incorporated into the design, along with some exquisite blue glass bottles that had entered our lives in the form of a crate of organic wine. It took a while to get the relative orientation of each element of the structure just right and fitting snugly before packing the interstices with earth. Just as I was putting the finishing touches to the work, directed by my wife, Manolo appeared as if from nowhere. He stared at the rockery, then turned with a baffled expression from me to Ana. ‘Ah, yes! A garden made with old rocks and bottles,’ he chuckled, and continued on his way, shaking his head in disbelief.

  A year later and the rockery is an unqualified success. Ana has planted it with carefully selected indigenous plants, and one or two outrageous cacti, like lifeforms from some improbable planet, and it dazzles all who see it – except, of course, Manolo, who sees the succulents and cacti as weeds. ‘They have a garden full of rocks and bottles and planted with weeds,’ he tells the amazed villagers of Tíjola. ‘Ay, these guiris – foreigners,’ they reply.

  But Eduardo was made of different stuff and was entranced by it all. ‘Ana,’ he enthused, ‘I love this rockery; this is just how a rockery should be in these dry mountains. These indigenous plants will survive the very worst conditions, and because they are cared for and nurtured here they will give of their best. Look at this beautiful little sedum, it’s exquisite.’

  Later that night, after a skinful of wine and a warm, animated exchange of stories and ideas, Eduardo showed us some photos of his own garden in Castile – which turned out to be more of an avant-garde sculpture park – along with a brochure for an exhibition he was organising in Madrid. The exhibition was called ‘Gardens for the Soul’ – and it was about the most baffling bit of post-futurist modernist deconstructivism that I had ever clapped eyes on. ‘But do you write about this in Casa & Campo?’ I asked, bemused.

  ‘No, por dios,’ laughed Eduardo. ‘It would be like, er, like…’ He cast about for a good simile. ‘It would be like trying to get across the attractions of El Valero. I couldn’t possibly put that sort of stuff in the magazine; our readers just aren’t ready for it.’

  ALL ABOUT OLIVES

  NOT LONG AGO I WAS IDLING AWAY an hour or two, in the way that one does, leafing through a book on Moorish Spain, when I came upon an account of a fifteenth-century Arabic treatise on agriculture. It brought me up short, for it offered a solution to a conundrum that I had been wrestling with: what to do when a favourite tree stops producing olives. It’s a knotty problem. You have an ancient tree, a thing of ineffable loveliness, providing shade from the summer sun – but no olives. Well, according to Abu al-Jayr, the Moors worked it out like this…

  The owner of the tree enlists the assistance of two friends. With the first, he enters the grove, and the two of them, holding hands, amble in a contemplative way amongst the olives. As they pass beneath the recalcitrant tree, the friend stops and admires it, whereupon the owner says loudly, ‘Oh, that one; I’m going to chop it down, it produces nothing.’ ‘A shame, it’s a fine-looking tree,’ says the friend. ‘Yes, but there’s no place for idlers here. Its time has come.’ And so saying, the pair pass on through the grove. Now the second friend enters. Taking the same route, he pauses beneath the tree and, looking meaningfully up into its branches, says, ‘He means it, you know.’ All being well, the tree will mull over this threat and return to the fold.

  The story set me thinking about the Arabs’ skill with agriculture, and their attitude towards nature. For, although modern wisdom has taught us that it is a fine thing to drench the earth with fungicide, pesticide, growth retarder and broad-spectrum systemic herbicide, there does seem to be a revival of interest in the simpler and less noxious ways of the past, a return to a more even-handed exchange with the land that nourishes us. Abu al-Jayr would certainly have approved. He might also have noted, with some satisfaction, how much has endured of Moorish cultivation of the olive in the Alpujarras. The landscape is still very much as it was terraced and planted by the Moors at the end of the fifteenth century.

  There is no time when you are more aware of this legacy than at harvest, which begins in October, when all the olive terraces are trimmed and rolled flat as pool tables, and their water channels and banks and walls cleared of all vegetation, lest a stray olive should seek to escape its destiny. The terraces that surround the villages, and the bigger olive groves that fold over the hills and valleys, take on the look of a well-tended garden.

  The countryside gathers a new life and momentum, too, as people come out from town to work their patches of land – for everyone has at least an olive tree or two – and gather the harvest for the coming year’s oil. All through winter the Alpujarras ring to the sound of the beating of trees, the unmistakable hollow clack as the long poles, cut from canebrakes in the river, strike the hard wood of the olive branches. It’s a family affair, full of the chatter of children, and also a bit of a festivity. Everywhere there is the blue smoke of fires and the irresistible smell of roasting meat – for it would be unthinkable to go to the country for the day without having a picnic, and to a Spaniard there would be little point in having a picnic without roasting some meat.

  But inevitably things are changing, in ways that might bemuse Abu al-Jayr. Those olivareros more receptive to the march of progress have exchanged their flimsy canes, or barras, for more durable and harder-hitting rods of glass fibre. These are coloured a dazzling dayglo green, so you don’t lose them, and they change the music of the winter countryside by making a thunk rather than the traditional clack. And the seriously modern-minded growers have taken things a step further, adopting the Honda tree vibrator, a device that shakes the living daylights out of a tree to dislodge even the most fiercely persistent fruit. So, for much of the winter, the countryside rings to the whining of shoulder-mounted Japanese petrol engines.

  We have about fifty ancient olive trees, and about a hundred young ones that we put in three years ago. Most of our trees are picuales, the variety best suited to the Alpujarras, as it will hang on tight to its fruit right through the violent winds that can lash the region in winter, yet the olives obligingly fall when you want to harvest them. The others are mainly manzanillas, which produce the most delicious of all the eating olives. They are the ones you get in tins and bags, industrially processed and stuffed with a pepper, anchovy or almond.

  We’re not what you’d call scientific about the blending of our olive crops, and I suspect any chef worth his salt would throw up his hands in horror at the contents of our extra virgin. We just chuck the whole lot in – picuales, manzanillas, a few de agua, as the local eating olive is known, and a scattering of acebuches. This acebuche – pronounced athi-boochi – is the wild olive from which all olives are sprung. Its fruit is tiny and charged with an infinitesimal drop of tangy green oil, in which the palate with an inclination to sentimentality and bombast may detect four thousand years of Mediterranean winds, heat and dust and the pungent aroma of numberless aromatic plants. It’s hardly worthwhile to harvest the acebuches, but there’s a thrill to including a little of that ancient line in your oil, leading you to muse at breakfast time on the antiquity of the earth as you drench your hot toast in thick green oil.

  Acebuche is used, too, as a root stock for grafting the more delicate, modern olives onto. It grows ponderously but solidly, and will give you a tree that will survive the worst excesses of heat and drought and cold, cold winters, squeezing up from the very bowels of the earth all the swee
tness and pain of the world. (You have to have good bread to appreciate this.) Wild acebuche also makes the most beautiful walking sticks. Its young growth is perfectly straight, with a uniform alternate branching, and, when prepared, picked, peeled and polished, has the feel of fine silk. The sticks are much prized by country people, and everywhere, even in the remotest and wildest places, you see acebuche with its branches bent and tied into rings, to be cut a year or two later with the graceful curve of the stick’s handle neatly grown.

  I can clearly remember when I first visited Spain, thirty years ago, and found myself wandering in an olive grove somewhere near Córdoba. Olives hung enticingly everywhere and, not having a clue what the little green fruit was, I picked one and popped it in my mouth. Of course, it tasted foul.

  Worse than foul, in fact, for the bitterness of a raw olive is truly bestial, and it seems a miracle that anyone ever worked out what to do with this strange fruit; when to pick and how to pickle the ‘eating’ ones, and how to leave them for longer, if you intend to crush them into oil.

  As an olive producer – albeit one who doesn’t register on any conceivable European Union statistic – it is the olives that we pick and pickle that give me greatest satisfaction. These begin the season in October, and you gather them, shading from green to purple to black, by hand. What you do is ‘milk’ the tree, combing its tresses with a rake or your fingers; the business of thrashing the daylights out of the tree with a stick won’t do here. Then you steep your olives in spring water (no chlorine), changing it every day and ruxing up the fruit to clear the slime. After twenty days or so, you taste an olive for bitterness.It’ll still be wickedly bitter – it takes about a month to dwindle to an acceptable level – and the trick is to retain just a hint for flavour and bite.