The Gardens
That Mended A Marriage
KAREN MOLONEY
For our children and their children
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One: Wilting
Reason to stay married No. 1
Reason to stay married No. 2
Reason to stay married No. 3
A difference of gardening opinion
Darwin’s dilemma
In crisis
The decision
Chapter Two: Planning
The beginning
The search
Announcing our find
A Moorish house
A family garden in Northern Ireland
Worried about water
Finding our way
House vs. garden
Chapter Three: Designing
The distractions of exotica
Botanical Gardens, Putrajaya
Losing confidence
A cold Christmas
A romantic gift
Scraping the plateau
Choosing plants
Finding our feet
Chapter Four: Consulting
The gardens of Normandy
Down memory lane
Landslide
The Alhambra
The Alameda Gardens, Gibraltar
The Duchess’s hairnet
Chapter Five: Landscaping
The highest slopes in North Vietnam
Re-seeding the hillside
A treasured tool and a hairnet
The Professor
Chapter Six: Planting
Scaling great heights
Nothing growing
Turbulence
Respite in Tangiers
Remaining in control
Progress on the hillside
More damage
The invasion
The soil dump
Chapter Seven: Waiting
Cambridge University Botanic Garden
Building the second wing
Treat as annual
Waiting for divine intervention
Stasis at the town hall
Laying the hard stuff
A boutique hotel?
Hamburg
Chapter Eight: Nurturing
The vegetable patch
A Christmas interlude
Establishing the new beds
The problem of labelling
Kick-starting spring
Designing in four dimensions
The return of winter
Finally, some results
Chapter Nine: Harvesting
Bandera County, Texas
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Florida
What’s a garden for?
The Farm, New Zealand
Still no house
The marriage evolves
The garden thrives
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright
FOREWORD
I DREAMT I flew over all of the gardens in all of the world. It was not a slow, low flight such as Phileas Fogg might have taken in his hot-air balloon, greeting workers in the tulip fields below with a wave. It was more like the manic flight of a bluebottle, buzzing an old bent man raking his Japanese gravel, then dive-bombing a Manhattan volunteer weeding on the High Line, then off to the potager in Villandry to inspect the brassicas. A busybody visiting as many gardens as possible in the shortest possible time. When I awoke and turned over, the book I had been reading the night before winked at me from my bedside table. 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die. It was obviously time to get up.
My first task of the day is usually to step out into the back garden of our London house, mug of tea in hand. If the snails have been hard at work overnight, then I like to establish the extent of their attack and how proportionate my response should be. The sentence for light damage is an intoxicating but deadly beer bath. If they have inflicted serious harm, then I pick them off one by one with a head torch later that evening and throw them into the road where they are scrunched within minutes. If they have feasted on my hostas, then chemical-pellet treatment is called for or possibly the full-throttle flame-thrower. The mood I was in that morning favoured the torching option.
I have two gardens and a marriage. That’s what this book is about and they are my projects, along with a job that allows me to travel to places where I can, if I build in sufficient time, visit lots of other gardens, the gardens I have been ticking off in a list scribbled in the inside front cover of the book on the bedside table. The garden I was in that morning in London is old, my other garden in Spain is new and my marriage, well, let’s just say it is in the process of restoration. I decided to retreat indoors and let the snails eat what they wanted. There were more important things to do. Like these three projects.
I had this idea for a book, you see. I had explained it the day before to a publishing friend and he had been curious, although not exactly encouraging.
‘What do you mean ‘a garden is a metaphor for a marriage’?’
‘Well it is. You know that saying, ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a year, get married; but if you want to be happy for a lifetime, get a garden’?’
‘No.’
‘But that’s just it. I love the idea of a garden making you happy for a lifetime but I cannot sign up to marriage only making you happy for a year. If I thought that, I never would have married in the first place. A marriage can make you happy forever. You’ve just got to think of it as a project.’
‘A project?’
‘Yes. That’s what I want to write about.’
‘Marriage as a project?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mmm.’
‘And my two gardens as well. As projects.’
‘Mmm.’
‘And all the other gardens I visit all over the world as other projects.’
‘Mmmm. So where would this book sit on the shelves in the bookshops?’ he asked. ‘Under what category? Which genre? Would you find it in the Gardening section? Or Travel maybe, since you visit all those other gardens around the world? Or does it fit in Mind-Body-Spirit?’
He paused.
‘Or maybe in the Business section under Project Management?’
Now he was taking the piss.
‘Under all of them. Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Well my advice would be to go away and think about it Kaz.’
He was right. So I went away and here’s what I thought.
CHAPTER ONE: WILTING
To wilt: to become limp through heat, loss of water or disease; droop; lose one’s energy or vigour.
THERE was nothing wrong with our marriage, really, except that it had run out of reasons to exist. We were no longer creating our family – they had grown up and moved on, we felt too old to start again with new partners, and too young for grandchildren. There was nothing much, it seemed, for us to do. We had, in short, wilted.
Reason to stay married No. 1
There had always been the children of course, the main focus of our attention. Conceiving them wasn’t too difficult; we seemed particularly fecund. But giving birth, raising them to school age, then getting them through the labyrinthine school system while both of us were trying to run our growing businesses had taken an effort of Herculean dimensions which at times had tired us so badly we were barely able to exchange a civil word to each other in the evenings. We had no parents nearby to help us and relied on expensive childcare, at times of questionable quality. It became a cause for celebration if we could get the children out of the door to school in the mo
rning and, like most young parents, the topics of conversation in our marriage for about ten years were completely strategic or operational. Our regular rushed Sunday-evening diary meetings must have sounded like a joint military forces summit.
‘We’ll have to organise the tutor for the Easter holidays.’
‘Check. Have you remembered to book the half-term activity week?’
‘Check. What’s the latest on the braces?’
‘The regular orthodontist has gone AWOL. Practice will recommend new one.’
‘Check.’
‘I have to be in Rome on Tuesday, can you change the meeting with the teachers?’
‘Not possible, you’ll have to move Rome.’
‘Roger, will do.’
But despite all of this operational efficiency, things still slipped through the net. To have raised them both to young adults without either of them having died of a tragic accident, infectious disease or simple neglect was a considerable achievement. Although our concern for our children has never waned – even when they reached adulthood, we still spent a considerable proportion of our time talking about them – our tone was no longer operational, for finally they were able to manage themselves and we could relax.
It was almost as if, now they were grown up, the project was over. The biological imperative, to procreate the species, had been answered. Evolution could ask no more of us. Now what were we to talk about? Surely we had more in common than raising the children? And surely this empty space in our lives must have been faced by empty nesters throughout eternity? And surely, someone somewhere had dreamed up a better response than lapsing into resigned contempt for each other or getting a divorce?
Reason to stay married No. 2
In the beginning – BC, Before Children – our separate careers had bound us together. We were both newly qualified, he as an architect, me as a psychologist, completely green and impatient to join the world of work and, as we saw it, sort it all out. We fantasised for hours about our future. I remember sitting on the stool next to the bath, listening as he soaked his frustrations away, moaning about his employer.
‘How was your day?’
‘You won’t believe what happened. Martin put forward those proposals I told you about.’
‘No! Really? What was he thinking? It’ll ruin the company.’
Etc. etc.
Then we’d reshape our employers’ businesses and plan what we’d do when we were in a position to start taking control of our own enterprises. After three years of mutual encouragement we had accumulated enough courage to start our own companies. It was daft really, both so young, our first baby newly arrived, neither of us with a clue as to what we were doing or sufficient funds to guarantee bank loans or stave off the bailiffs if we failed. But there was little choice. We were the kind of people who had to run our own show. We were both just born that way. Naivety, ambition, energy, control-freakery, call it what you will, self-employment was and has remained the way we’ve done things.
Because we were both up to our eyes in it, we could exchange experiences, share each other’s daily scrum of impatient bank managers, indecisive clients and recalcitrant employees. Building these two businesses was the constant backdrop to our marriage, the limit on what we could afford and the constant struggle to balance the needs of staff and clients with the needs of our children. There were times when his business was close to the edge and times when mine was, but fortunately those times never coincided and we were usually able to rely on each other to pay the mounting bills.
Now in middle age, it was ironic that, having grown successful companies, we found ourselves in a state of relative comfort but with little to excite us. We were secure enough financially to withstand lean years and wise enough to turn down work that we weren’t going to enjoy or that would only cause us trouble. I left my company and returned to working on my own, which gave me considerable freedom, and my husband, Stanley, and his partners had acquired able deputies who took a lot of the strain that had previously been theirs.
So there we were, in the unfamiliar position of having nothing to worry about. A fine position to be in, you might say. But those early years full of excitable conversations about the unknown had turned into later years of routine questions in anticipation of a routine answer.
‘How was your day?’
‘Fine. Yours?’
‘Fine.’
‘What’s for supper?’
That was it. What would have taken twenty minutes to share, laugh about and express disbelief over ten years earlier was now over in a millisecond. The tone of our conversation, if you could call it that, was flat, bored, with no reason to inflect; the content was without affection or humour, the delivery vacuous. Another day of our separate, predictable lives had been passed without even a mention - lost forever.
Reason to stay married No. 3
What about homes and gardens? They’re things that bind a couple, particularly in the early years. When we bought our first home together it felt like an adventure. It was a small second-floor flat in north London and we paid far more for it than we could really afford. But youth granted us optimism that our incomes would rise and that property prices would follow, especially as the improvements we planned to make would add, we hoped, some value.
When I say a small flat, it didn’t even have a bedroom. We slept on a mattress on the floor at night, and then hung the mattress on the wall during the day so we could walk around. We knocked down what few walls there were, living with half-demolished studwork, wood lath and horse-hair plaster for weeks, waking up on the floor, choking on the dust, turning over and seeing layers of Victorian lead-based paint inches from our eyes. But when it was finished, we had created what the estate agents called an ‘architect-designed’ modern studio flat on the ‘Hampstead borders’. Our inventiveness caught the attention of Blitz magazine and photographs of the flat were published with the headline ‘Arch Hi-Tech: no compromises’. The theme of compromise pervades our marriage still, as it does most partnerships. But there’s something about artists, designers and architects, whose vision needs to be so strong and whose will needs to be so resolute, that makes compromise difficult.
When I became pregnant, I noticed for the first time a gnawing inside that was to accompany me throughout my life, a desperate need for more space, and in particular, a garden. Our studio flat was on the second floor and had only a window box. I’m sure it was hormonal; as if this thing growing inside me was a little Hitler with ambitions beyond the uterus, who expected, once born, to inherit an empire at least the size of Europe. We walked miles every evening for weeks around all four corners of Hampstead Heath until we found an affordable, decent-sized basement with a tiny garden in Dartmouth Park, less than five minutes from Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Ponds. The location was perfect for teaching our youngster to toddle, ride a bike and play tennis. But to make the basement flat into a successful living space presented a more serious challenge. It was low, damp and dark and needed opening out and lighting up. We were no strangers to living on a building site, but I was very tired and nauseous for the first twelve weeks of my pregnancy and it took several months for the builders to finish what had been the fairly simple addition of a conservatory. For years afterwards I could not smell fresh paint without retching.
The reality of owning our first garden, however, allowed me to breathe and marked the beginning of my lifelong love affair with growing things. We laid a small terrace outside the conservatory where I could site the pram on sunny days, on the few occasions when our newborn son slept. There were four steps from there leading up to a garden, which belonged to the ground floor flat above us. We needed to walk through theirs and under a pergola into our garden, which was oblong, west facing, only about 30ft by 20ft but to me, possibly the most exciting space in the world.
It was a typical London garden with wooden fencing all around, an untidy elder tree at the end, straggly borders on three sides, convolvulus attacking stealthily un
der the neighbours’ fences and a tatty lawn. But I was raring to go and set about planting hundreds of mismatched bulbs, crowding in shrubs that would grow far too big too quickly, populating it with the plants I liked rather than what would thrive and making all those errors typical of a new gardener, including the odd cliché such as a wicker basket of primary coloured primulas copied from one I saw at the local garden centre.
A difference of gardening opinion
It was during these first two years of our son’s life – and the first two years of our fledgling businesses – when we were both physically exhausted, mentally stressed and totally confused that I saw the signs of a fissure in our relationship that would plague our marriage for years. I had learned to let go of the house because that was Stan’s domain and it was far more important to him than it was to me. He decided how the rooms were arranged and where things would go, organised the builders, chose the furniture, and selected every designed object, even down to the cushions and soap dishes.
I had struggled at first to abdicate responsibility for our home because, like many young women, I had my own taste and had looked forward to creating a home. But it mattered so deeply to him and, to be honest, he was better at it than I was, so I left him to it. He had a wonderful eye, and I had loved what he had done with our first studio flat and now our new two-bedroomed basement. But I had innocently thought that the garden would be my domain.
Now there’s something you need to know about architects: they’re obsessive. I couldn’t say what they’re obsessive about, because each is obsessive in his own way. But take it from me; they’re programmed to have bees in their bonnets about the most obscure things. The number of holes per square inch in the mesh fabric covering an amplifier, for example. Architects can be obsessed with the lightness and durability of sail booms and bicycle frames. Or about linearity. For many architects, under the veneer of professionalism, it becomes OCD. My husband’s own obsessions included the nineteenth-century mills of Derbyshire, Manchester United football club and northern soul. Add to this an insistence on right angles in everything, blue as the only colour on the palette (in addition to black and white) and an expensive interest in Russian icons, and you begin to get the measure of the man. Into the mixture add Stan’s superhuman energy and he becomes explosive.
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