The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  Before long, he started to take an interest in the goings-on outside our basement flat and when I complained one day that the lawn was claggy, he erupted into action and without even a mention, dug it all up. I had been going to suggest aerating the lawn by spiking it or adding some sand or grit to the clay to help with drainage, but before I could get the words out, he argued forcefully that a lawn was a stupid idea in a small London garden anyway, because the soil was gluey and the trees overshadowed the lawn and there were too many tree roots for it to be flat and well-maintained. He dug it up that very Sunday. By Wednesday it was pea shingle.

  That first winter I worked silently and perhaps a little sullenly on the borders. He constantly criticised the plants we had inherited in the garden, which I was nurturing along as best I could, and he didn’t like the old-fashioned decorative edging tiles that I had found, cleaned and repositioned or the dark red Victorian brickwork I was enjoying. So one day he presented me with plans for brand new bright yellow brick retaining walls on three sides, which would make the borders higher and easier to manage, a brick terrace at the end of the garden and a sturdy wall above it, rather than the black mouldy fence our neighbours at the end had let rot. It was, in truth, a splendid plan from a gifted designer, but in the mood I was in, I just saw it as interference and criticism and we fell out over this garden.

  In the end, he won and the work was finished that second summer, including a pond that I hadn’t wanted, convinced it was bound to attract our precious toddler to his certain death. Even though he listened to my concerns and embedded a lattice of wooden slats across the pond, secured by mortar, making it impossible for anything wider than a baby’s arm to go through, I never liked it. This was the first sign of a difference in taste that dogged our gardening ventures all our married life.

  We stayed in that flat for about five years, living an uneasy truce over the garden. Despite my efforts, it eventually became overrun with ground elder, symbolic, I thought, of the devil moving in where he sees opportunity. So when I became pregnant a second time - needing more space - I told Stan very clearly that our next garden would be mine, and that he was to keep out of the way.

  We bought an early-Victorian three-bedroomed terraced house in Kentish Town, which had been three flats and needed converting back to a family house. Stan got on with the house while I got on with having a baby and, when both were installed, I turned my attention to ‘my’ garden. In truth, I still needed Stan’s help with the layout, and so he created a simple path down one side of the 80ft-long site, with a small terrace at the southerly end and a deck outside the back door. In keeping with the family tradition, I pushed the pram out onto the deck on sunny days. This time we had produced a daughter who did nothing but sleep and it was a joy to sneak into the garden and potter around for hours as she snuffled away a few yards from me in the warm sunshine.

  As a concession to my designer husband, I let him put in a small pond at the end of this garden, which both children were warned so severely of going near that they always kept a terrified distance. Several of their friends fell in, however, to everyone’s amusement, and I had to keep a close eye and a spare set of clothes handy. Even I, as a part-time parent, knew that it would have been very bad form to return a child to its parents dead or wet. In return for the pond, Stan let me have a tiny lawn, which I kept flat and meticulously sheared. As it was no bigger than a tablecloth, I could literally shear it by hand, but after a few months of sore backs and blisters, I bought a small electric mower with various attachments that took up more room to store than the lawn it maintained. This time, we negotiated a slightly easier truce over the garden because, once the design work was done, he left the planting to me.

  The key feature of this garden was the four walls that surrounded it, two high and two low. I planted some delicious climbers: a gorgeous Actinidia kolomikta on the low west-facing wall which, although it never produced a kiwi fruit, rewarded us with lime-green heart-shaped leaves that turned rosy pink with a white edge. I would stand and admire its foliage for hours. Just for the hell of it, I put in a baby monkey-puzzle tree, knowing full well that I would never live to see it mature. But then I planted a rampant wisteria on the south-facing back wall of the house that leapt 30ft up to the guttering in two years and after a severe pruning in its second year burst into hundreds of Provençal-blue racemes. Different varieties of ivy on the east-facing wall and a glorious Virginia creeper on the high north-facing wall at the end of the garden completed the tableau. I was content.

  Then, one day about twelve years ago, I knew it was all over. I stepped out of the back door pulling on my gardening gloves, all set for a few hours of work, moving this to there, swapping that plant for another, tying in this one, pruning that one, cutting back and containing, and I stopped in my tracks, knowing that my work there was done. I distinctly remember the plants recoiling in alarm on seeing me step out.

  ‘Oh no. Here she comes again. Why doesn’t she just leave us alone?’

  They flinched every time I came near them. I had become obsessive, picking at them when I should have just left them alone, moving them around for no reason. In a small garden the regime requires control, especially when one has over-planted, whereas it’s in my nature to set free, to encourage abundance, to nurture young plants to maturity, to nurse sick ones back to health, to grow, grow, grow. All this cutting back, chopping down and pulling out was depressing me. I needed more space and a new challenge. But how would this idea be met by my already stressed husband? He needed another challenge like he needed a week in a torture chamber. All that work! Living with the builders again when we’d just become settled! His own business was so time-consuming; I was sure he’d hate the idea.

  ‘Why?’ he wailed. ‘What’s wrong with this house?’

  ‘Nothing. I love this house.’

  ‘Then why move?’

  ‘I’m bored. I want a new garden. This one’s too small.’

  So, knowing how troublesome his wife could become when bored, he agreed and we bought this glorious late-Victorian end-of-terrace six-bedroomed house in Crouch End, where we have lived ever since. Here we have raised and let fly both our children. We have built our businesses and peaked our careers. We have developed and redeveloped our fourth property and finally come to accept our differences of opinion about the garden. We love it here and don’t really want to move again, but don’t have any new projects to get excited about. So every few years we redecorate a bit of the house or redesign a part of the garden or cut down that tree and plant some new ones, but to be honest, it’s not on the scale I enjoy. The biggest challenge of the week might be to get someone in to repair a leaky gutter or replace the shower hose over the bath. There’s no thrill in using a can of WD40 on the new front door locks, not unless you’re addicted to solvents. There’s no romance in replacing the rubber sheets that stop bamboo spreading.

  Maintenance is for people who love stasis, who enjoy nothing more than looking after things, keeping them tidy and healthy. Fine. I can do that. But my pulse doesn’t race and my blood doesn’t whoosh and what’s the point in living if you’re not racing and whooshing?

  Darwin’s dilemma

  People marry for many reasons. Charles Darwin, in considering if and why he should marry the charming Emma Wedgwood, wrote notes that clearly reveal his ambivalence:

  ‘If he were to marry:

  ‘Children — (if it Please God)

  ‘Constant companion (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one

  ‘Object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog, anyhow

  ‘Home, & someone to take care of house

  ‘Charms of music & female chit-chat

  ‘These things good for one’s health.

  ‘But…

  ‘Forced to visit & receive relations

  ‘The expense & anxiety of children

  ‘Terrible loss of time

  ‘Perhaps quarrelling

  ‘Cannot read in the evening
s

  ‘Fatness & idleness

  ‘Anxiety & responsibility

  ‘Less money for books &c

  ‘If many children, forced to gain one’s bread.

  ‘But if he were to stay single:

  ‘Freedom to go where one liked

  ‘Choice of Society & little of it.

  ‘Conversation of clever men at clubs.’

  Despite the longer list of cons than pros, he decided eventually to marry and turned out to be, by reliable accounts, a good husband and a loving father to ten children. That he begat so large a family suggests that his wife was, indeed, a lot more beloved and playful than a dog, with the consequence that he needed to keep working his whole life to gain his bread. I take much comfort from the thought that the world is the better for Charles Darwin having married Emma Wedgwood. If he had stayed single and frittered away his time on the ‘conversation of clever men in clubs’, he might never have felt compelled to earn a living, documenting his voyages on the Beagle and publishing his theory of evolution.

  I digress. There is no doubt that our marriage had garnered the synergy of the two of us to raise our children, support our mutual careers, and create four lovely homes and gardens, and in doing so I don’t think either of us had strayed into ‘fatness and idleness’. But the fun was all over. What were we supposed to do? There has to be something to talk about, something to plan and get excited about, laugh and squabble over, some kind of goal. Otherwise we faced the future of simply existing for the next thirty years, repairing gutters until one of us popped off and the other followed. It would be like a long stage play with a poor third act that didn’t reach a conclusion.

  Besides, what was life for? I couldn’t bear the thought of just shuffling off without having made my mark, left the world a better place than I found it and all that. We had to do something for the planet to pay it back for letting us live here. No, we hadn’t won major prizes or discovered the vaccine for a pandemic, but we had raised two good citizens, improved the psychological health and built environment of our clients, and saved four properties and three gardens, which will hopefully give other families much pleasure and encouragement to preserve further. But it didn’t seem enough, somehow. I was bored again. Stan and I had nothing to talk about, nothing to build; we had lost our purpose, our energy and our vigour. We had, indeed, wilted.

  In crisis

  The force of this realisation hit me one rainy afternoon when my accountant had asked me to look back through my diary for the previous year for something, I can’t remember what. As I was idling through the weeks and months of appointments, I noticed that one name came up more than anyone else: Anya, my personal trainer. We always met twice a week in the gym for an hour, sometimes more if we had a long run or played a game of tennis. She was a constant fixture in my life, a secure and dependable presence in my diary. We had shared the ups and downs of our various fortunes, the ebb and flow of our days, as women do when they get together. It had been going on for years.

  Of course, one doesn’t make appointments with one’s husband in the same way as a trainer, and one wouldn’t expect to find Stan’s name in my diary, but out of curiosity I counted how many contact hours he and I had each week. I included time spent together at home (but not asleep) and on holiday, and it worked out that I had seen more of Anya for several years than I had of Stan. Furthermore, it dawned on me that the topics of my discussions with her, were like those I should be having with him. The final straw, and this was the bit that really shocked me, was when I realised that in the course of our sessions, when she prodded my back muscles to show me where my core needed to be stronger, or pulled my leg towards my head to stretch my glutes, she had touched my body more than he had.

  Of course, I liked Anya very much and I suppose if I had been tempted, I could have made a pass at her, but without doubt she was straight and I would have been wasting my time. And besides, why spoil our professional relationship? If I wanted some extra-marital excitement, I’d have to look further afield. Maybe the clichéd window cleaner or the gardener? My window cleaner, although cute, was a Jehovah’s Witness and straight as a die. And my gardener? Well, I didn’t have a gardener, did I, since I enjoyed that passion alone. Thinking about my male business colleagues, friends, contacts, no one else sprung to mind.

  My girlfriends and I had sometimes played that game called ‘Who would you shag?’ when you have to look round the restaurant or pub and say who might be a contender. But for years I had consistently failed to get excited about anyone. If I were to revitalise my marriage, infidelity wasn’t the answer.

  But then, maybe revitalising my marriage was the wrong thing to do anyway. Perhaps it wasn’t worth saving. Why not jack it in? A solicitor I’d spoken to had said that she was getting more couples than ever coming to her for a divorce after the age of sixty. Typically, she reported, the wife was seeking another role once the children had left home without the encumbrance of a husband, or they’d both retired and realised that they had very little in common and wanted an easier life without squabbling, or they’d discovered that they wanted something different out of this third phase in their life; usually code for sex with someone else. So off they went and got divorced.

  I admit that the idea of a completely different life was appealing. Freedom to do whatever I wanted, when I wanted, with whom I wanted. I could go to the cinema on Saturday afternoon and stuff my face with salty rather than sweet popcorn. I could lie in bed all day reading and not worry about being caught. I could watch end-to-end programmes of babies being born every minute on television.

  Then one evening, when Stan and I had eaten and were sitting opposite each other in our familiar vacuum, I announced, ‘I think I’ll go to India for a year.’

  He looked at me and frowned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get away for a bit. Find myself.’

  ‘Mmm. Why don’t you save yourself the airfare?’ he said. ‘Start looking on Grindleford Road.’

  ‘But I’m bored! I’m bored with my life, with my friends… I’m bored with me. And I suspect you’re bored with me too.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, I’m bored with you!’ I blurted.

  He sat stock-still. Then collapsed forward slightly as if a big, red, stuffed boxing glove on a spring had exploded over the table and bashed him in the stomach.

  ‘Are you?’ he said slowly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to India.’

  ‘And when you come back? What if you’re still bored with me?’

  ‘I may not come back.’

  I sounded like a stroppy twelve-year-old.

  ‘OK.’

  After a moment, he stood up, pushed his chair back and looked directly at me with a sadness I shall never forgive myself for causing.

  ‘If and when you decide to come back, I’ll be here, waiting for you.’ As he straightened up slightly, I thought I heard the sound of his heart muscles tearing. But he didn’t flinch. Instead, he put out his hand towards me. It was shaking. I reached out to grasp it and then stopped, realising what he meant.

  ‘Pass me your plate.’

  He took our dirty dishes into the kitchen and I burst into tears.

  The decision

  This wouldn’t do. I couldn’t leave him. But I couldn’t stay with him either, not in this state. This wilting was killing us both. Loss of vigour, limpness, lack of energy. What would a plant do, I wondered, in this condition? I looked on Wikipedia. Wilting was sometimes a result of disease or pestilence, but mostly moisture loss. So, without doubt, a plant would set about conserving water. The first thing it would do is close down its pores, the holes that it sweats through, to keep moisture loss at a minimum. This was, I realised, what we had done. We had stopped sweating, hoping that in conserving energy, we would somehow stumble on long enough, like the astronauts on Apollo 13 when they began losing oxygen. We had stopped saying things to
each other; we’d stopped going anywhere, doing anything, enjoying things together. In doing so, we had dried up and begun to keel over. We’d wilted.

  I went back to Wiki. The other thing a wilting plant would do is to send all of its roots down deeper, searching for water, reaching lower, twisting and turning their white tips, curling between stones, seeking out holes where the tiniest droplets of water might reside, reaching, reaching into the deepest, darkest space to find what it needed to survive. Any molecule of water, no matter where it was encountered, would be sucked into the tiny hairs on its roots, absorbed into the xylem and sent up into the flaccid stems to recharge them into turgidity. This was more like it. I could either leave Stan to keel over with his torn heart or I could find some source of sustenance to reinvigorate our wilting marriage.

  If only I had remembered that proverb about being careful what you wish for.

  CHAPTER TWO: PLANNING

  ‘You’re an architect, aren’t you? Where’s my house?’

  THESE were the words that started all the trouble. I’m not sure now that I used this exact phrase, neither is Stan, but the sentiment was undeniable. A house could be the project to kick-start our marriage. Over twenty-five years with this man, I had stood by and watched enviously as he created buildings for other people, not for us. I knew I was being completely selfish but come on, our marriage was at stake. Besides, it was a reasonable question. If you marry a doctor you expect to get the odd physical examination, even some free medication, don’t you? If you marry a composer, it’s not unreasonable to hope that he might write a piece of music for you. It just seemed like a very romantic idea to me, to ask for a house. A new one, from scratch. It’s every architect’s dream - isn’t it - to build their own house?