Just as we were coming to the end of our task, Stan found a rope from beside the concrete mixer, thinking to tie himself to it and scale down the scree, scattering seeds lower. By this time I thought he’d gone too far.
‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘It’s dark, you’ll slip and slide down the scree, bringing the cement mixer down on top of you! It’ll crack your head open and you’ll bleed to death in ten minutes before an ambulance can get to you.’
He agreed. So I fetched the trowels and gloves from the car and we found a small space below the pump house. With a couple of buckets of top-soil and water from the puddle near the concrete mound, we planted twenty olive stones in a trench. At least they would get a better start than if we’d flung them in the dark off the top of the mountain. It was our miniature olive grove. We marked it with a few sticks so the builders didn’t use that corner of the plateau as their toilet, and packed up for the day.
‘How long will they take to germinate?’ asked Stan as we drove back up the ridge, our headlights skimming the bush, the dust leaving a red glow in our rear lights.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘In the UK the seeds wouldn’t sprout until spring because the soil is cold.’
‘But does the flesh of the olive dry up and then the root appear? And will the stem sprout up later?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again, feeling lost and ignorant. ‘I haven’t seen one sprout since we put beans in a jam jar in primary school.’
‘A jam jar?’ he replied. ‘We had proper blotting paper and a test tube, so we could see the tap root going down and the stem curling up.’
‘OK, since you’re the expert in bean-sprouting, you tell me what our olives will do.’
He couldn’t. We both smiled, clueless, and drove on to Málaga tired and dirty but satisfied that at least two inexpert foreigners had attempted to heal the scar on our mountain. If none of our twenty olive pips ever germinates, at least we tried.
The Professor
Jennie had been unable to supply us with indigenous seed from Guzmáns, so the next morning we set off northwards for Córdoba for a meeting with her recommended seed merchant. Once in Córdoba we waited, as arranged, by the railway station. I leaned against the hot metal of our black rental car and warmed my body in the Andalusian sun, watching the human traffic saunter by. Despite it being winter, it was still unseasonably warm. Spanish women seem to waste no time in showing off their new season’s wardrobes, and an elegant matriarch in her winter fur coat and new suede boots walked her lap dog towards me in 20° baking sunshine, while a young tourist walked just behind her in a strappy t-shirt and chinos.
The proprietor of the seed company, Señor Candido Gálvez, approached and introduced himself formally, with a slight bow of the head. I don’t think he actually did click his heels together, but he may as well have. He had slightly silver hair, fine, metal-rimmed spectacles and a taut moustache. In fact, he looked a bit like a seed. A caraway maybe. After apologising politely for his poor English, he beckoned to us to follow his 4x4. He drove slowly and purposefully.
Inside his seed store the air was dusty and scented. His company was small, only three employees, who, one has to suspect, were also his family, but his tone with them was formal and professional. He asked for coffee and we sat down.
‘I need to explain our situation,’ I began. ‘My husband and I bought this piece of land last year and decided to lower the platform to make it bigger. We have pushed the soil off the top and it has created an ugly scree down the hillside below.’
He nodded.
‘We want to replace the vegetation quickly and can’t wait for nature to take its course!’
He nodded again.
‘We hoped we’d be able to plant it in a naturalistic way, with plants native to the region but we don’t know how to do it.’
He nodded again. I paused.
‘You have come to the right place. Semillas Silvestres specialises in only indigenous plants. We cultivate seeds that are either natural to our region of Andalusia or a similar climate to North Africa.’
I looked around. There were books on his shelves about native flora, framed certificates on the walls from the University of Córdoba’s faculty of natural sciences, and small sculptures made out of seeds on his desk. Seeds were obviously this man’s passion. I dubbed him ‘The Professor’.
‘Perfect,’ Stan butted in. ‘The design of the house is north African, so if we can repopulate the hillside with anything that will be in keeping with that style, that would be good.’
Stan pulled a piece of paper from his bag and began drawing. Sr. Gálvez watched patiently as Stan sketched out the whole site, then the hillside, both in plan and in elevation. The seed specialist brought his fingertips together like a judge and sat frowning for a few seconds. The building specialist looked back at him, his pen hesitating above the paper.
‘How big is the gradient here?’ Sr. Gálvez pointed to the scree.
‘Forty degrees,’ Stan answered.
He didn’t flinch but his eyebrows flickered, registering that it was steep and going to need securing quickly.
‘Do you have water?’ he asked.
‘Some,’ replied Stan.
‘But at forty degrees you will have run-off.’
‘And we’re not on site enough to constantly be watering by hose, so…’
‘So, it cannot be trees,’ interrupted Sr. Gálvez. ‘Trees need much water to help them establish in their first two years. You want grasses,’ he stated. ‘And sruvs.’
‘Sruvs?’
Stan and I looked at each other, perplexed. A few seconds passed.
‘Shrubs!’ I replied.
‘Yes, sruvs,’ he smiled apologetically.
‘OK,’ said Stan, ‘what kind of shrubs?’ And we were off again.
‘First,’ Sr. Gálvez began, turning over a new piece of paper, ‘we plant all over with a mixture of strong grasses and bio-matter.’
‘Bio-matter? What’s that?’
‘It is seeds of plants which grow for only one or two years but leave behind rich nutrients in the soil to help all the other plants establish.’
‘Like a natural compost?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Then you plant seeds across the mountain to match what was there before and maybe add some extra interest for colour in spring.’
‘Like a meadow?’
‘Yes, for some colour. Nature will do it her way but you will just give her a good start.’
‘And can we have something that will attract butterflies and bees?’ asked Stan, getting all excited.
‘Of course,’ he nodded sagely. ‘Don’t worry.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘I will propose to you a special mix of indigenous plants of Andalusia that will grow quickly on your dry hillside.’
This was authority without any formal power; simply his experience, expertise, his calm academic manner and his extensive knowledge being applied to a new client’s specification. As the conversation continued, he got more information from us about square meterage to be covered, the chain-link netting we were laying, the method we would use when scaling down the netting to plant. Stan fetched his laptop from the car and showed Sr. Gálvez photos of the plants that were already on the hillside so that we could match them. Finally, when he had calculated all necessary quantities, Stan began asking him about the planting scheme.
‘You mean the design?’
‘Yes, which plants go where, how to mix the colours and textures…’
He shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
‘This is gardening,’ he said with little interest. ‘It’s for you to decide. Only one thing I tell you – put the small plants at the top of the area and the bigger plants at the bottom, the rest is your design.’
‘Maybe swathes of different colours…’ Stan began drawing wavy lines over his sketch of the mountain.
‘Now, the price,’ Sr. Gálvez announced, bored already by the artistry that excites my husband. He calculated a few price
s using a desk calculator then left the room to find some more information.
‘How much do you think all this will be?’ I whispered to Stan, terrified of the number of calculations I had just witnessed.
‘About €1,300,’ Stan replied without hesitation as Sr. Gálvez re-entered the room.
He sat down again opposite us, punched a few more buttons on his calculator, leaned back in his chair and said, ‘€1,300.’
‘How did you know that?’ I said to Stan
‘But this is too much,’ the Professor went on, re-examining the figures and punching a few more buttons. ‘Price per square metre you have to cover seems too expensive. Maybe we can get it down.’
Together we cut down some of the quantities, re-examined the ingredients in the mix and eventually agreed on €1,090. There would be three different varieties of thyme up at the top and Santolina rosmarinifolia, both fragrant, so the westerly wind would blow the scent up towards us lying on the deck beside the pool. Below that there would be swathes of Genista umbellata, rather like Angelica, standing erect and scratchy, interspersed with Brachypodium phoenicoides and Papaver rhoeas for colour. Then towards the bottom would come darker structures: Retama sphaerocarpa, a dark broom-like bush (shrub), which was already on site, and whatever olives we could transplant from the modest plantation we’d established the previous night.
By the time we had our final list, the morning had evaporated and everyone had left for lunch and wouldn’t return until 4.30pm. Our flight left Málaga at 8.20pm, so we couldn’t wait for the seeds to be mixed and bagged up that day. Sr. Gálvez asked who he should ship the seeds to. I didn’t think the Cossack in the post office would welcome twenty sacks of seed on her floor. So as Muscle Manuel was the only person we knew with an address, we gave the Professor Manuel’s details and said goodbye.
We climbed back into the car and headed for the nearest bar in downtown Córdoba to celebrate. Stan felt pleased with what we had accomplished and reminded me, not for the first time this trip, that if you want anything done, you have to do it yourself. I held back from pointing out the obvious… that he couldn’t possibly do everything himself, certainly not from a distance, but allowed him a moment of self-congratulation.
People who feel the need to control often do so because they care more about things than the rest of us. They see their constant interventions as essential, and the more they intervene, the more we let them. The more we let them, the more they complain that we leave everything up to them. It creates a vicious cycle that can only be stopped by helping the perpetrator let go. I’d been saying this for over twenty five years. So, as he’d been awake the previous night since 2am, I refrained from having another go. I offered to drive back to Málaga so he could relax. He navigated me out of Córdoba and fell asleep as soon as we hit the motorway.
It gave me a chance to admire the dramatic landscape and the attempts being made by the contractors on this route, as they forged the motorway and the high-speed railway line into the hills, to make good the scars they were creating. I was delighted to see that all along the verges, especially where sections of motorway were being widened, the contractors were growing plants. In some places, it looked like an allotment. It seemed that rather than destroy the olive and almond trees in their way, they had moved them into makeshift nurseries on the verges and at junctions so they could be temporarily nursed into sprouting again. My spirits were raised as kilometre after kilometre, I noticed scarred landscapes being restored, possibly by seeds from our own Sr. Candido Gálvez at Semillas Silvestres. It felt good to be part of a movement to reinstate the natural flora of the region rather than swaddle the mountains with vulgar imports.
But now that we’d ordered the seed, how were we supposed to sow it on a steep incline? I suppose we could ask a mountaineering club to abseil down the side with sacks of seed over their shoulders. Or we could hire a helicopter. Or we could just do it ourselves. And that’s what we decided to do.
CHAPTER SIX: PLANTING
STAN and I were impatient to stabilise the hillside because the longer we drifted into this unpredictable winter, the greater the risk that heavy rains would sweep more debris down the mountain. We sat on the edge of our marital bed planning our big seed-planting trip as if it were an expedition to the Himalayas. In the spirit of Sir Edmund Hillary, we made lists.
‘Big heavy boots.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thick leather gloves.’
‘Thick leather gloves…’
‘Buckets.’
‘Lots of buckets.’
‘Crampons.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Then Stan got a piece of paper and started to draw swathes across the hillside.
‘The smallest up at the top, remember.’ I read them out in order.
‘Thyme and Santolina nearest the plateau, then the Genista, then Pachypodium and poppies and Retama at the bottom. And don’t forget the bio-matter everywhere.’
‘The bio-matter?’
‘The mixture of these two plants that nourish the soil and die. Medi-something or other.’ I looked them up.
‘Medicago sativa and Agropyron cristatum!’
‘They’re the ones!’
He drew coloured swathes across the hillside like Christo might have wrapped fabric over a mountain, tenderly covering the contours with colour. Then he pushed the finished drawing across the bed and jumped out to go and do whatever it is he does on mornings like these.
I punched holes in the lists and planting plans and put them in the file, meaning to take the whole file with us. But later on, when I was packing, I remembered the weight limit for hand luggage, and removed just those pages we’d need. Into the bag had to go gloves, socks, trowels. We’d have to wear our boots on the plane, and have to buy buckets over there. After a few fraught moments weighing my hand luggage on the bathroom scales, I needed to restore my sanity, so I went to Alexandra Palace garden centre and treated myself to 75 litres of bark and a sad but cheap amaryllis that I could love and nurse back to health. (That was five years ago. Last January it produced four flower spikes with blossoms so large and brassy they could have swallowed a real trumpet. I consider it reward for my perseverance).
When I returned Lottie was up and about, so for the rest of the day my mind was focused on getting her ready for return to boarding school. It’s a trip we had grown to hate, and Sunday evenings felt like we were wrenching our own lungs out and leaving them up in Rutland. We usually drove home without talking, lit a fire, ate a light supper, read the Sunday papers and listened to the Thomas Tallis singers. When the children were younger, in the chaos of busy family life, we would crave peaceful evenings like these. Now the Lent term stretched out like a long white finger before us and notched upon it like knuckles were plenty of lonely Sunday nights. That’s why we needed our project in Spain so much; to bring warmth and comfort back into our lives.
Scaling great heights
The next morning we set out following the usual routine: 5.30 leave the house, 6.30 check in, 7.30 take off, 10.30 arrival local time, 11.00 pick up hired car, 11.30 drive up into the mountains, 11.35 gasp and say, ‘Wow! Oh my God, I just love it… I can’t believe we’re really here. Isn’t it beautiful?’
It was early January, so there were no spectacular almond blossoms yet, no spring meadows full of colour, no cloudless azure-blue skies of summer, but it was beautiful nonetheless. A bare, brown beauty. As we rounded the dusty hairpin bend on our way up to the site, we stopped, as we usually do, to gaze across and look down onto our plateau. This time we could see surrounding our house what I dreamed would someday emerge… a garden. Even from a distance, there were visible green patches and lines of plants and some order and shape beginning to form, and conical piles of compost and top-soil.
Once up on site, Stan engaged quickly in conversation with Muscle Manuel, Marcel and George about rendering brickwork, all translated with impressive precision by Eleanor, our lovely English interpreter, who h
ad the good sense to have married a builder and knew what she was talking about. So I walked through the courtyard to inspect our new Persian garden. There she was: the paradise on earth promised in the Quran – olives, pomegranates, figs and citrus, soon to be gushing, flowing water – soon to be rivers of honey, wine, water and milk. We had introduced her to this place. Should she wish to make this her home, we would be so grateful.
This garden was still young, raw and gangly, but slowly taking shape the way a lump of dough begins to puff, strengthen and even burst its own skin as it proves. The trees had been planted by Antonio the Plant (one of Jennie’s recommendations) in wide holes with loads of horse manure, so the aroma was strong and earthy. Around the trunk of each tree was a circle of rubber irrigation tube. It looked ugly. Brown rings sitting awkwardly on the uneven ground, the connections standing up, valves here and there and an occasional small pump or stopcock. None of it yet buried. It wasn’t beautiful but it was utilitarian, enough to nourish these trees through infancy.
Surrounding the Persian garden was a small but stout hedge of myrtle. I scraped a few leaves off their stems, crushed them between my fingers and inhaled deeply as my mother had done in Granada. Instantly, my senses kicked in and my brain came alive. This was the recreational drug of the ancients; one sniff and you’re transported to Arcadia. All was well on the plateau. But we had come to repair the hillside.
‘Manuel?’ I asked in my most polite schoolgirl Spanish, looking round for the sacks of seeds we had come to plant.
‘Dónde están las semillas?’
Muscle Manuel grinned and took me round the corner to where he had been hiding them. There they were. Twelve hessian sacks of dusty brown grains with Semillas Silvestres’ logo on the outside and his name and address handwritten on the labels; nothing to look at, really. But inside each grain, tightly packed and lying dormant, were strands of DNA wound around each other into a double helix, a tiny miracle that with a drop of rain and some sun would become a fleshy green carpet that would bind the soil together and stop this mountain from slipping and injuring people - a miracle of spectacular colour to be seen from miles away; flowers that would attract insects and pollinators from the valleys below, creating honey for toast. At €1,090, nothing short of a bargain.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 14
