One thing that may determine how farmers landscape their land is how steep their incline is. On flat land they can divide it any way they want, as long as they honour legal strictures. In Britain these have included various enclosure acts and anti-enclosure acts, the grazing rights of commoners, ancient rights of way and by-laws. But farming on flat land is relatively easy. On rolling hills the marks farmers make seem to depend, in addition, on the machinery used. Things are slightly trickier and need specialist equipment. But on very steep inclines, farmers shape the land to stop soil and water running downhill. In other words, to save the very land itself. So it was with us. On our plateau, the flat land, we were able to lay out the quadripartite Persian garden exactly as we wanted. On the slopes just below the plateau we made terraces with a small machine, gentle and wide enough to walk between the olive and almond trees and step only half a metre down to the next terrace. It was trickier, but not dangerous. But below, on the steeper hillside, where we had done nothing except shove scree, the dangers had become all too evident, and now we needed to stabilise the earth.
Marriages can suffer the same fate. On the flat, when everything is going well, there’s enough time for each other, enough money to live comfortably, enough space for two, you can design your lives more or less as you want. But when the inclines are a little steeper - aging parents, job loss, or teenage kids going off the rails, you need to shape your lives with more care. You may rely more on your friends and family to help, and work within safety limits, aware of the possibility that something could, at any time, blow. But on the very steep inclines of a marriage, when both are tested, the only consideration is the marriage itself. It’s not about ‘me’ or ‘him,’ it’s about ‘us’. Having the courage to put partite concerns aside and to deal with the survival of the common entity is crucial.
On our mountain - though not yet in our marriage - Stan and I were dangerously close to farming on the highest slopes. We were attempting to create something few individuals had done before in this part of Andalusia, scraping off the top of a plateau, messing with the mountain. Of course, professional engineers who build dams and cut railway viaducts do this every day. Stan works with civil engineers who know exactly how to flatten a mountain. But although Stan had done the correct calculations and put in the dykes to mitigate the risk of overspill onto the land below, those witnessing our actions in Spain – Muscle Manuel, the diggers, the neighbours, those used to nothing more than laying a small concrete foundation and putting up four simple walls and a roof – must have thought our domestic project far too ambitious. We were being accused of behaving dangerously, causing damage, threatened with legal action, and the strain started to tell on us. Stan bottled it up. I remained silent, watching. These were the highest slopes, literally and metaphorically, and how we handled each other through this time would test our marriage to the limit.
The highest slopes in North Vietnam
Around this time I took a short holiday with a friend to North Vietnam. We followed the usual tourist trail, starting in Hanoi, then out to Halong Bay, sailing on a junk, up by sleeper train to the mountains in Sapa near the Chinese border and then down to the ancient capital of Hué. But we used private guides who, if pushed, were prepared to take us off the beaten track and away from the other tourists. My travelling companion was an architect and, during this week, in a quiet, reassuring way, she nuzzled me back towards understanding what Stan must have been going through in the building nightmare we endured.
Unlike him, she works almost exclusively with private individuals rather than commercial clients. The stories she told me of pressures from clients to cut corners, stretch engineering tolerances, ignore building regulations, risk safety, argue responsibilities, lie about what they said or didn’t say, avoid paying her, threats of legal action and so on, made my hair curl. This was the territory in which we were trying to build our home in Spain. Cowboy country. After hearing of our trials, she commiserated.
‘Poor Stan. But it sounds awfully familiar.’
A more unexpected source of solace was the Red Dao tribe of the northern mountains. These people provided a profound inspiration for my flagging spirits because they live and die on the highest slopes. They are the sweat on the brow of Vietnam and an example to anyone looking over a precipice. Although most of the population of Vietnam is indigenous, 15 per cent come from ethnic minorities and the Black and Red Dao, so called because of the colour of their headdresses, are amongst the newest arrivals, having crossed the Chinese border into the northern mountains in the mid-eighteenth century. Now, here’s a problem for the Dao, and any immigrant, really. If you’re going to live more than a subsistence life, you’ll need to farm rice. And if you’re going to farm rice, you’ll need paddy fields. The best paddy fields, the big flat ones with good silty soil, are on the middle or lower slopes. But all of those were claimed by the minorities who arrived centuries before, such as the Tay and Thai tribes.
Arriving much later, the Red and Black Dao and their neighbours, the Hmong, were left with slopes higher up, where there are boulders as big as containers, soil that is constantly washed down the hillside, an incline so steep that only a buffalo can plough it, and planting and harvesting that will either break your back or kill you. No tractors can reach these paddy fields and the nearest market is two hours away by motorcycle, a day’s trek by buffalo. On the lower plains the Tay and Thai are able to grow two rice crops a year because it’s warmer, and transport it to the city markets by truck.
But higher up the mountain, the Dao have to wait until later in the season and, if they’re lucky, harvest one crop quickly before the winter sets in again. It’s a hard life. Each family grows enough rice for themselves to get through the winter, which they store on the second storey of their timber houses. Any rice left over might be fermented into wine or, possibly, sold. The chickens, hogs and dogs will get some rice too, for they need to fatten up if they are to feed the family all year round. The buffalo, the most important animal in each economic unit, will eat corn and grass, for it needs to be strong enough to pull a plough and carry a load. A buffalo costs a whopping $1000 - the same as a motorbike.
The challenge of growing rice at this altitude is eased by cooperative effort. Everyone helps out. Vietnam is one of the few remaining single-party states and the Communist regime is still pretty evident and, it has to be said, necessary under such harsh conditions. In winter, rice seeds are sown in the village nurseries and then, when the seedlings are 8 inches high and the weather clement enough, the villagers set out en masse to ‘get the rice in’. The Communist party decides who will plant what fields and for how many years before they rotate. If you’re lucky enough to be allocated good fields, you could live for years on bumper harvests. The edicts written on the village wall declare who will be planting what types of seedlings in which fields on which days. All planned out. It seems to work. As we stood looking at one such wall a tannoy played martial music, announced the local news and broadcast public messages such as the importance of limiting population growth and how glorious is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
To farm these steep slopes requires careful husbandry. The terraces are tiny, carved by hand, shored up with walls of mud and stone and filled with clay and water. Before transplanting seedlings, the farmer will take his wooden plough and buffalo into each enclosure and plough each one four times: once to dig up all the boulders that will have fallen into it, once to dig up the winter weeds and leaves that have turned slimy, once to stir up the clay so it lies flat 4 inches below the surface of the water, and once to create a fine tilth for the seedlings. No mean feat.
As I watched these Dao farmers struggle to make the best of this land, I realized how few of them succeeded. Their days seemed exhausting, they were poor, many preferred to beg, few persisted and some of them smoked a lot of heroin. But those who put in the effort on the inhospitable higher slopes received a payoff. Their houses were larger, their children plumper, and some of them had rice
through the whole winter.
In my high-altitude marriage, facing the difficulties of a withdrawn, stressed husband, a lengthy building project, an uncertain future with the planners, I could have taken to the urban equivalent of begging or heroin. I could have got fed up with him giving me the silent treatment and started laying down the law, nagging him, demanding attention, wanting some semblance of normality. There were times when I thought that the whole project in Spain might not be worth it, that we had been stupid to embark upon such a ludicrous piece of work, that he was pathetic to get so stressed out by it and we should jack it all in. I would take up with an easy lover, one who didn’t push the limits of possibility all the time, and he would – well, I don’t know what he would do, but it would entail a different path. But you know what? Once again, I couldn’t face it. Giving up sounded so lame and ungrateful. Like those Red Dao farmers who produce a decent crop of rice each year in the most arduous of conditions, I needed to carry on with him. I wanted to. Whether the wind is at your back or in your face, this is life at high altitude. So I adopted their position: if you’re lucky enough to have a paddy field, don’t wilt. Farm it.
Re-seeding the hillside
With the steel mesh ordered and Muscle Manuel ready to start laying it across the mountain as soon as the weather improved, we both thought the slippage problem almost solved. Just put the hairnet across the scree and it should hold in place like a bun. We weren’t planning on moving any more earth, the dykes had settled and would catch any further rock falls, and the steel mesh would soon be covered in whatever plants the land threw up through its grid.
But one cold evening after a long, fraught day at work, I came home and caught Stan frowning at my seed catalogue. He was lying on top of the bed, scrutinising a photo. I know his frown well. It usually forms when he feels a fusion of concentration and disbelief. When Stan does something, he concentrates 110 per cent, to the degree that it is often difficult to get his attention. I love it because it means he can sink deeply to where he needs to be, but I hate it because he can’t take me with him. Disbelief is often the result of scrutinising whatever is in focus and deciding, as he is a natural skeptic, that it cannot be. It is here, in that noman’s land between engagement and mistrust, that he becomes dangerous.
He looked tense. I slipped up beside him and looked over his shoulder. The open page showed a glorious field of English wildflowers, resplendent with campion, knapweed, oxeye daisies, sorrel and foxgloves, tossed by a soft light and a wispy wind.
‘Oooh, what are you looking at there?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t that glorious? What a beautiful picture. So, are you thinking of planting a meadow in Spain or something?’
He shut the catalogue with emphatic force and looked at me as if I had suggested we put up an umbrella in a hurricane. I raised my eyebrows, expecting a reply, but he said nothing, so I moved to the dressing table, sat down and waited.
‘Well, don’t you think we should plant up the hillside we’ve made such a mess of?’ he snapped.
Wow. Where did that come from? This was classic passive-aggressive behaviour; an explosion from nowhere. I gathered myself.
‘Yes,’ I replied cautiously. ‘But I thought the mesh was supposed to stabilise it.’
‘That won’t work alone,’ he said. We need to colonise the hillside so the soil binds together.’
That made sense.
‘OK,’ I responded, trying to sound reasonable. ‘But not these ones,’ I moved back to the bed and picked up the catalogue. ‘These are English plants. We don’t know if they’ll grow in Spain.’
‘Of course they will. It’s warmer and better weather, they’re bound to grow.’
I looked at him, puzzled, trying to work out what he was saying. And then it dawned on me. He must have thought that all a plant needed was heat and light. He had heard me sounding off for years about my English gardens not getting enough heat and light, so he must have concluded that in the benevolent conditions of the Mediterranean, everything would grow. Where could he have got such a simplistic notion? How could he be so wrong?
‘No, some plants would hate it up there. Most English plants like cold, damp and not too much light.’
Now it was my turn to make him feel like an idiot. He looked at me dagger-eyed, as if I was just inventing excuses.
‘We’ve got to plant this fucking hillside to keep it from slipping and we’ve got exactly three weeks before we go out there again to organise seeds! What are you doing about it? Huh?’
‘But now may not be the best time to plant these! Some plants have to wait until spring. It’s December!’
‘We can’t wait. Anyway, why wait, when with a bit of simple planning we can progress things now?’ His voice was rising.
‘But if we scatter seeds all over the mountain, and they’re not due to germinate until spring, the birds will just eat them.’
‘But the birds will be hibernating!’
‘Hibernating?’ What was he talking about? ‘Birds don’t hibernate,’ I told him.
Where did he get such a ludicrous idea? We went on like this, bickering over the best way to do something that neither of us knew anything about. We were just throwing specious arguments at each other. It was late, he was anxious and tired. Besides, we both knew we weren’t really talking about seeds and plants and birds. This was not an argument about the hillside. It was an argument about us. He was really saying, You’d never do anything about this bloody garden if I didn’t get on your back once in a while. He was worried that it would never be finished and he was blaming me for not being worried, for just sitting back and thinking he’d do it or somehow it would all get done. And I wasn’t talking about the hillside either! I was really saying, Get off my case, I’ll do this, just talk to me nicely about it. You criticise me all the time!
He took off his dressing gown and stepped backwards into bed so he didn’t have to face me. Then he read for fifteen minutes without saying a word, turned off his light and went to sleep. I turned away and fought back the tears. When he woke the next morning, he reached across the bed to take my hand. He said nothing, nor did I. Words were less significant than gestures at that moment.
Later in the day he looked up from his newspaper as I bustled around the kitchen.
‘You know how worried I am about the slippage.’
I nodded.
‘That’s why we’ve got to stabilise the mountain.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘If we don’t get it planted soon I’m worried that more rain through the winter, and especially in the spring, will set those rocks tumbling again and they’ll kill someone.’
‘I know.’
‘I haven’t a clue what’s going on on-site. No one returns my calls or my emails. It’s as if it doesn’t really matter.’
I nodded.
‘No one has a sense of urgency about any of this. Half the hillside could shift downwards and we’d be responsible.’
I nodded again. He stood up, folded the newspaper and stuffed it in the paper-recycling bin.
‘No sense of urgency at all,’ he muttered, putting the kettle on.
I wiped the worktop near him with a tea towel. It was clean but I just needed to look occupied. As the architect, he shouldered all responsibility and it weighed heavily on him. He spent much of his professional life ensuring that tall buildings wouldn’t collapse onto the public and paths and bridges weren’t going to give way, so he knew the extent of his obligations and the burden of his liability. But whereas in London he could talk to the civil engineers and get his team to check and double-check every detail and manage every risk, in Spain he couldn’t. This great project of ours was out of his control: for a start it was happening a thousand miles away, - Marcel wasn’t returning his calls, Muscle Manuel seemed to be on the side of the enemy, we didn’t speak Spanish, they didn’t speak English, we felt we were being taken for a ride, and we hadn’t a clue what plants would bind the soil on our hill. Stan was used to being the direc
tor, but found himself cast as an extra in his own film.
He sighed.
‘I suppose we could talk to Jennie about what will grow up there,’ he suggested, ‘and maybe look at buying some indigenous seeds.’
‘OK.’
‘Or even plant some small ground cover that will bind the soil quickly and cover the wire mesh.’
‘Mmm,’ I replied. ‘I’ll get onto those grasses people we met at Chelsea who had lots of ideas.’
‘Ground cover all over wouldn’t look brilliant, so we could intersperse it with clumps of things,’ he ventured.
‘What, like Phormium or something structural? Or do we want some swathes, or feathery colours across the hillside, like Piet Oudolf…’
‘Yeah, maybe…’
He grabbed a piece of paper and suddenly we were designing again, planning our garden, only this time it was the side of the mountain that we hadn’t intended on doing anything with. We had always imagined that this west-facing hillside would look after itself, reverting to natural landscape after the scree had settled and been colonised by native plants. But the scree hadn’t settled, that was the problem. So we were forced to take back some control to make good the slippage we had caused. The healing process was underway, both for us and for our mountain.
As he sketched out a new planting scheme in our London kitchen, we forgot our spat of the previous evening and set about looking forward, healing our scars, filling our bare patch, making good our errors. That’s gardening for you. It requires faith in the future. You have to get over your mistakes: all those seeds that didn’t germinate, the seedlings that didn’t survive the slugs, the plants that collapsed, the flowers that failed to pollinate and the fruits that grew wet and tasteless. You have to look forward all the time to the next season. Try again, stay positive, be inventive, remind yourself of the final vision of what you want it to be. As with a marriage.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 12
