‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ she asked.
‘Of course, Mum. Why?’
‘It’s just that I’d hate this to all go wrong for you. You know your father used to have these crackpot ideas all the time and none of them ever came to any good.’
‘Yes I know, but that was Dad. Stan is different. He knows what he’s doing.’
My parents’ marriage had been a mismatch in some ways. Dad was interested in ideas, where Mum was focused on reality. He was trusting where she was skeptical. He was eternally optimistic where she believed global annihilation was not far off. So I was not surprised that she expressed doubts about our venture.
She rallied as we were about to leave and beckoned me over to some animal prints she’d found in the middle of a puddle of white concrete. They were longer than a dog’s print, more splayed, the pads were fat and long talon marks were gouged into the concrete. The stride between the four prints was about 30 centimetres, suggesting a large animal.
‘I don’t think that’s a dog print, Mum. It looks too big.’
‘What kind of animal could it be, then?’
‘Well, there are goats up here and wild boars, but they’re cloven-hoofed.’
We studied the prints in silence.
‘Maybe it’s a small bear,’ I pronounced. ‘The national park starts just the other side of the arroyo and I’ve read there are certainly wolves there and maybe bears.’
‘Wolves and bears?’
Uh-oh! I’d put my foot in it again.
‘You know what? It’s probably just Muscle Manuel’s Alsatian. Come on. Let’s go.’
The Alhambra
We drove on up to Granada and relaxed with a cool drink on the balcony of our hotel, which easily became three or four cool drinks, enough to watch the sun set, at any rate. I’m ashamed to say that the Duchess seemed slightly tipsy when we were called to our dinner table.
‘Well, I’ve had a very stressful day…’ she explained to someone whose table she bumped into. ‘What with killing the neighbours, and then there’s the wolves and bears…’
The next morning we joined a guided tour and I watched with pleasure as Mum, along with twenty-nine other tourists, slowly found their jaws dropping as I had done on my first visit to the Alhambra. They muttered various versions of ‘Oh my God,’ i.e. ‘Awesome!’ (young US), ‘Gee!’ (older US), ‘Would you look at that!’ (Australian), ‘Feckin’ amazing!’ (Irish).
If you’ve never visited the Alhambra, then it’s an excellent introduction to Moorish architecture and garden design. But if you’re the lucky one who’s seen all the gardens and palaces of the Moslem world, then perhaps your jaw won’t exactly touch the floor, but I guarantee it will open, for you cannot fail to be moved by it.
As I had seen the Alhambra before with Stan, my main motivation was to have another look at the courtyards, pools, rills and gullies. We needed to finalise the design of the water features for our courtyard and Persian garden and I needed ideas. The style of the Alhambra, with its intricately carved capitals and colour-swallowing ceramic tiles from centuries ago, is beautiful but inappropriate for our simple, contemporary building. The craftsmanship, however, is truly stunning and I went to have my faith in builders restored. But the famous story that the craftsmen who carved the plaster, drilled and soldered the doors, painted, fired and laid the tiles were cruelly blinded by their client when they’d finished so they would never be able to repeat their works of genius for anyone else may be apocryphal. If it’s true, then I know the craftsmen got their revenge. For you can hear their ghosts haunting each alcove and corridor and any visitor who pauses and listens will hear them too. You will feel their breath on the back of your neck as you move closer to examine the wood grain. You will hear their voices calling to each other as one opens the sluice higher up the terrace and the other calls as the water flows to him. If you linger before dipping your fingers in the cool water of a fountain, you can smell the sweat of the five men it took to lift the bowl onto the pedestal. They are still there, sighted or blinded, for you to eavesdrop on. Or even to thank.
We toured around, listening to the guide’s stories and jokes about the place, but I was more taken by the fully mature pomegranate trees resplendent with all their bounty: dark waxy leaves, joyous red and orange flowers and ripening fruit side by side on a branch, all doing their jobs as nature intended. Not in series, as in England, where the seasons encourage each phase of the cycle at a separate time, but in parallel, where the climate here allows nature some leeway, some laissez-faire, to act whenever she’s ready. So on the same plant at the same time, you can see both flowers and fruit.
Pomegranates are the symbol of Granada. They appear on the city’s flag and are forged into the tops of the cast-iron bollards that line the pavements in the shape of the fruit. A fabulous fountain in the Fuente de las Batallas has several enormous bronze pomegranates bursting out of their skins and spilling their seeds into a large lily pad. In fact, the name Granada means ‘pomegranate’. We needed several of these trees for the Persian garden. Although they have a slightly untidy demeanour, they give tremendous interest and colour with their bright red flowers and tiny green and blushing fruits and I was enchanted looking at the variety of forms they can present if cultured: bush, tree, hedge - all of them represented in these gardens.
However, admiring the pomegranate at the Alhambra that day was merely a flirtation, for I was about to start a greater love affair with an ancient Persian staple, one I hadn’t noticed much before on my visit with Stan. This is how it began. There is a narrow corridor in the Palacio Arabes, where visitors stumble into the backs of each other’s heels and slow down in the darkness before cramming through a small gate into the Patio de los Arrayanes. One by one we stepped over the wooden frame of the studded doorway into the blinding light of this impressive courtyard, where visiting ambassadors would have been kept waiting. In the centre of this 140ft-long courtyard is a marble pool or birkha, filled with cool water and goldfish. Water - being in short supply - was a symbol of power, so this impressive pool served its purpose well.
But alongside these reflective pools are planted 4ft high myrtle hedges. If you know myrtle, you will know it as bilberry, a reliable shrub with a tiny leaf, almost like a box, that has a sharp pointed end and a thicker, waxier texture, which suggests it needs to conserve water and survive a harsher climate than soft box. It looks unremarkable, dense enough to do its job as a hedge, green enough to relax the eye, bold enough to pronounce a barrier or boundary, but its hidden glory becomes apparent when you crush a leaf. The scent is transforming – somewhere in the meltdown of black pepper, cardamom and honey. So I am really pleased that Jennie persuaded us to use this for hedging in the Persian garden. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the Duchess kept pulling leaves off, squashing them between her fingers and inhaling. Having suffered from asthma all her life, she was rather good at breathing in medicaments deeply. What a rush she must have been getting, for she filled her pockets with myrtle leaves and carried on sniffing for hours, oblivious to the signs everywhere asking visitors not to touch.
To liven things up a bit while walking through the gardens, I went into a rant about roses. The Duchess, high on myrtle, was only half listening and had heard my rose rant before. So I shared it loudly with a sweet couple from Arizona who’d had the misfortune to walk beside me.
What is it about roses that inspires so much reverence? I can’t see the point of them, to be honest. I have never wanted one in any garden I owned in England and I won’t have one in Spain, even in my Persian garden, where they are expected. I admit that this may be because I’ve never managed to grow them successfully. The two roses I’ve owned, both of them gifts from wonderful friends who didn’t know of my aversion, have fought me through long and bloody battles. I have tried, I really have, but both roses – for spite it would seem – bore black spot, green-fly, white-fly, botrytis and anything else going. They dropped their heads just a
s the blooms showed promise and sent up bastard runners of seven leaves just as promising healthy shoots were trying to establish themselves. I found the flowers attractive momentarily, but they faded quickly. Neither rose was scented and both had nasty thorns. Their bushes and shapes tend to be straggly and they frequently need deadheading and pruning and support.
To see them planted so copiously in the sweltering July heat of the Alhambra was further evidence of their iniquitous misuse by gardeners and blind loyalty by their fans. These roses were not scarred by disease – there was no sign of damage – but their petals and leaves were sad and dusty, flaccid cousins of the gentle, dewy English rose. Their colour was bleached from the sun and their edges brown and curled. Furthermore, these poor, miserable things were everywhere! In between formal hedging in the knot gardens, many of them in herbaceous borders, adding nothing and taking the place where cannas and stachys should grow.
Underneath the roses were even more inappropriate water-sucking flowers: busy Lizzie, coleus, salvia, petunias, all looking limp and lifeless, their large flat leaves and petals stretched open to the limits of their stoma, all sweated out. All thirsty and parched. Why not plant fine-leaved aromatic herbs that respire little and conserve their water? The whole garden looked as if it needed a shake-up – I continued preaching to the poor Arizonians. They scurried off without looking back.
The Alameda Gardens, Gibraltar
We set off south, taking our time, trying not to think about running taps or slipping mountains, dead neighbours or wild animals. On the way we passed several escarpments, where the landscape had been cut away for the road. To stop the earth slipping, large squares of metal netting had been placed over the cuts.
‘That’s what you need for your hillside,’ Mum declared. ‘A steel hairnet.’
Ignoring her, I pressed on and we made Gibraltar that evening. Our first stop the next day was the Alameda Gardens.
‘Are these how you remember them, Mum?’
‘No. I don’t remember them at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I remember it in the photographs. That’s all, really.’
‘It was sixty years ago, I suppose.’
‘Although this looks familiar,’ she sighed, moving towards a play area for children. As she was racking her brains to remember, one of the gardeners stopped.
‘Careful,’ he cautioned. ‘That cactus you’re admiring is vicious and the only way to get the tiny brown spines out of your skin if they became attached is with a pumice stone.’
‘No!’
‘Oh yes. They’re the devil,’ he told us with a raised eyebrow and a glint that looked as if he knew what he was talking about and was in need of little encouragement to continue.
‘So are you responsible for this cactus garden?’
‘No, I’m the palm man,’ he said, puffing out his chest in pride and pointing fifty yards further along to the palm grove.
He was young, no more than thirty with trendy long thin sideburns and the torso of a god. It took only forty seconds for the Duchess and I to fall in love with him.
‘I’m responsible for all the palms in the botanical gardens,’ he said proudly. ‘Would you like to see the best of the best, girls?’
How could we resist? His invitation was the overture to Alameda the Musical, performed personally for us. This was one of those moments when everyone in the park stopped what they were doing and burst into song. He put down his wheelbarrow and danced us around the gardens like Gene Kelly. He first showed us the silver-leaved Butia that Stan and I so loved and had on our list for ages for the palm walk until we saw Guzmán’s price. Then the Washingtonia palms with their big fronds, including two which were over 60ft high and which he told us were donated by a teenage girl who was evacuated from Gibraltar during the war and had to leave her two palms behind. She was so heartbroken that she donated them to the Alameda gardens, thinking that would be the safest place for them while she was away. Sadly, she never came back and there they stood nearly sixty years later, watching out over the Strait of Gibraltar for her return.
As he unlocked the amphitheatre, he told us he was going to let us see his favourite palm, rarely on view to the public. Parajubaea cocoides grew steadily upright, with a large base to each frond that gave the tree the appearance of a long swelling between the leaf and the trunk, like someone with a goitre. It wasn’t to my taste, but he liked it. He also said that as a treat, because we were two such lovely ladies, he’d unlock the Italian garden for us. There he guided us around a wet tropical paradise recently restored in honour of three generations of the head gardener’s family in the nineteenth century. We saw two different types of papyrus, Cycas, Strelitzia, both the augusta and the travellers’ palm, a Monstera deliciosa in full flower with three large fruits (edible, he claimed) that have the shape of a banana, the colour of a cucumber and the surface skin of dried frogspawn.
‘Who owns these gardens?’ I asked.
‘The government used to but they never spent any money on them. So several years ago a private company was brought in to maintain the gardens.’
It was at this point, he explained, that they changed the name from the Alameda to the Gibraltar Botanic Gardens and began to get more serious about the plants and less concerned with providing pleasure to the public. They had great plans to restore more of the run-down parts, while keeping the spectacular highlights such as the older palms, the dragon trees, the pines and wild olives. But in the meantime, funding shortages meant they had to keep many areas closed to the public - hence our private tour.
Before letting us go, he warned us to beware of buying Phoenix canariensis palms, since they were being devastated all across the Costa del Sol by a beetle introduced from Egypt in an assignment of unregistered trees.
‘It’s tragic,’ said this self-confessed ‘palm man’, almost weeping. ‘The beetles lay their eggs in the veins in the leaves and within two weeks the tree can be dead. They’re such a hazard they have to be taken down and cut up quickly or they’ll fall over and kill someone and you know the size of these, ladies!’
Promising to check with Guzmán’s exactly what we were ordering the next year for the courtyard, we said goodbye. His name was Albert he said, and he was so delighted to have met us that day. A year later, I emailed an enquiry to the Alameda, looking for a Bismarckia nobilis and asking if the message could be passed to Albert, the palm man. The taciturn head gardener who replied informed me that Albert no longer worked there. I wondered if his free spirit and good nature had suited him more to a career in show business than in the Botanic Garden. I don’t know what happened to him, but in my fantasy, he’s living in Palm Beach.
The Duchess’s hairnet
As the Duchess and I turned east and headed back towards Málaga, we passed mile after mile of cut cliff and slipped mountain, managed ably by the local councils, whose job it was to stabilise their works with diggers and dumper trucks and acres of steel mesh and engineering experience. I’d never had to contain more than a raised bed in my London gardens and felt out of depth looking at the engineering required to hold back the side of a mountain. I don’t think we ever realised just what we were taking on. My husband’s ingenious plan, to broaden the platform by scraping all the soil off to the side and flattening the site, seemed simple enough. But then my husband had spent many summers on Mablethorpe beach as a boy building castles from wet British sand. Heavy, sticky brown sand that can be carved and crenellated and formed into intricate model forts with steps up to the castle walls and billets for the soldiers.
Our castle in Spain was sculpted out of a different kind of sand altogether. It was dry, white, wispy sand. The kind that pours out of the upturned bucket into a perfect cone of sparkling crystals, the sides of which then slip continuously despite childish efforts at reinforcement. Once the wind finds it, any well-conceived turret or moat is reduced to a formless dune within minutes. So it was with our earth moving in Spain. We would discover in time
what native peoples the world over have known for millennia: that mountains did not like to be moved, sculpted or scraped, and our mountain, in particular, would roar in anger if violated.
We flew home. I deposited the Duchess safely back in Ireland, counting the holiday a great success: no major flooding, illegal entries at border control or similar disasters, bearable handbag rummage times and a lot of fun along the way. Furthermore, I think she’d been impressed with our project.
I returned to London the following evening to catch up with Stan.
‘Hey Kaz, I think I’ve come up with a solution to the problem of slipping mountain.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I’ve ordered metres of welded metal mesh to lay across the slope.’
‘Really?’ I smiled to myself. The Duchess’s ‘hairnet’. For that one suggestion alone, she was worth her passage.
CHAPTER FIVE: LANDSCAPING
LOOKING at Britain from above, from a plane or a high vantage point, the land seems divided like a stained-glass window into different coloured patches, separated by hedgerows, carved by roads, dotted by medieval villages. Of course, there are modern adaptations. In the home counties of England, for example, the space between farms and towns seems taken up with acres of ugly golf course. Fly over the Netherlands, for example, and you can’t help but notice the flash of thousands of greenhouses and polytunnels that supply their massive horticultural industry. Across Eastern Europe the borderless landscape retains elements of cooperative farming. Looking down on Andalusia from above, the marks made by the farmers are more like perforated tin. There are no boundaries or borders, just dotted plantings: olive groves, almond trees, citrus orchards.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 11
