But first we had to tear open these sturdily bound sacks. When I was a poor student, I took on a number of summer jobs that involved varying degrees of physical labour. My favourite was a couple of months spent at Silver Springs Chicken Farm all alone in a clearing in a forest in County Wicklow with sole charge of four thousand chickens. I loved them. And I suspect, delusional though this may sound, that they loved me. If they didn’t, they were damned selfish, for I fed, watered, tended and protected them as if I had borne them all myself. The job had its gruesome side. The least pleasant of my tasks included extracting terminally injured chickens from the machinery and wringing their necks, and occasionally slapping a paintbrush full of tar on their anuses so other chickens wouldn’t peck them to death, enticed by the blood (strange animals, chickens).
But it had a surprisingly æsthetic side too, the most pleasant task being to pull the string off the sacks of chicken feed. Most sacks of grain, feed or seed are sown across the top by machine in a simple looped stitch. If you unpick the correct side on the correct end, you can pull the whole seam away with one satisfying, long piece of string. Muscle Manuel, being a man of the campo, knew how to do this, and George showed some expertise too, but the townie architects were impressed as I opened the sacks of seed from Semillas Silvestres with one efficient but elegant tug.
In the courtyard, a red, encrusted cement mixer was turning sand. We emptied the bags of seed into the sand one by one to create a slightly wetter, heavier mixture that would fly further out of our hands. Then we emptied each mixture into sacks, which Muscle Manuel showed us how to string across our shoulders, leaving an open end to dig in for a handful. Then he demonstrated the perfect arc, a flowing arm, seed falling freely across the target area, evenly distributed. I was reminded of The Sower by van Gogh, showing the rough gait of a farmer striding across his field, flailing arm and counterbalanced leg in perfect synchronicity. With the demonstration over, everyone looked at everyone else as if to say, ‘OK, who’s going first?’
Stan crept towards the edge and contemplated stepping onto the wire mesh that now clung to the mountain, fixed and stitched together by Muscle Manuel, making a perfect net carpet. The load on his shoulders was heavy, shifting and likely to unbalance him. If he lost his footing, he would be gone, sliding down the netting like a toddler slipping down a high snowdrift.
‘No, no!’ Muscle Manuel indicated for Stan to wait. He scampered across the site, rummaged under some Retama bushes and came back with two of the oddest-looking implements I had ever seen. They were fashioned in iron at cruel angles and would have kept Saint Sebastian in agony for a further century had he been made to wear them. Muscle-man put a hand on Stan’s shoulder and fitted one of these things over his shoe, then over his other shoe. They were, in effect, a pair of crampons he had fashioned from the steel wire on site. He’d welded them into a curve to fit over the toes and heels of his boots. Once on they were kept tight with wire shoelaces. The spikes weren’t long, maybe an inch and a half, a bit like early mountain climbers who wore woolly jumpers and bobble hats would have used, but sufficient to adhere to the shale.
‘These are a bit small. Have you got any in a size eleven?’ Stan grinned, not expecting an answer. Muscle Manuel went back to his little hideaway under the Retama to look. He’d made six pairs for his team so they could do the fencing job, and indeed came back with a larger pair!
All day as the sun rose above our heads and then down the other side of the mountain, we mixed, bagged and scattered seed to cover the ugly scar the scree had created. On the west side, no ropes were needed, as Stan found he could dig the toes of his boots into the link fencing and grab it with his fingers. It was still difficult, though, and he muttered something about being an office softie, unused to physical work harder than leaning over a drawing board. When the clouds lined up across the horizon, the fading sun shot her final rays through them to anoint chosen fields on the hillside to the southwest. We packed away our kit and headed for the Colmenar tapas emporium with George to toast the fertility of our seeds.
‘What do you say we drive up to the other side of the valley to look at what we’ve done?’
‘We won’t be able to see it from there will we?’
‘Bet we will.’
So on our way to the airport, we diverted across to the other side of the valley, about 3km away where there is a good view of our house and the west hillside below. Having drunk a few glasses of tinto I was a bit giggly but Stan was sensibly sober. We parked and got out of the car with our camera. He was right. Even at that distance, in the dimming light, our handiwork was clearly visible. We could just make out Muscle Manuel’s excellent job securing the netting in strips and Stan’s seed scatter patterns where the white sand we’d mixed them with had landed. There was no doubt that we had made a valiant effort to restore the flora of Andalusia where we had destroyed it. Our carbon footprint had been improved too. Over 100 trees planted, 4,000 square metres seeded with indigenous stock. I felt slightly less guilty about the oil-guzzling plane ride we were about to take. With legs so weary that we had to instruct them to walk, we returned to the car.
‘Good job Kaz,’ said Stan, and my heart swelled.
Not all of our hard work was visible, but this is how we’d planted our hillside in evenly spaced swathes to produce bands of colour. From the top down:
Thymus zygis gracilis
Thymus mastichina
Thymbra capitata
Santolina rosmarinifolia
Genista umbellata
Papaver rhoeas
Retama sphaerocarpa (All over)
Agropyron cristatum sativa
Brachypodium phoenicoides
‘Mission accomplished,’ said Stan, walking back to the car.
Nothing growing
Oh, how wrong he was. Several weeks later, Stan went back to site to meet the team. The night before, we had sat in the kitchen and counted the weeks since we’d scattered the hillside with our seed. We were expectant, like parents wanting to see how their offspring were doing.
‘So that’s eight, nine weeks,’ said Stan. ‘That’s long enough for germination. Something must be growing up there by now.’
‘But what if there’s been little rain?’ I asked.
‘Well, the dew, apparently, is enough at this time of year to get germination going, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Jennie told us?’
We weren’t sure, but anyway, all those weeks of alternating dew, sunshine, dew, sunshine, was surely going to get some of the seeds sprouting. We expected at least a green fuzz across the hillside.
‘Will you call me as soon as you get there and tell me what it looks like?’ I asked. He left, promising to phone me as soon as he arrived.
All day I pottered around the house, looking forward to his call. I hoped he would phone saying, ‘God, this is amazing, you should see this. Burst of bright green growth everywhere, colour starting to peek through the wire mesh, different species beginning to shape the patchwork we’d planned.’
The phone rang late in the afternoon.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean, “nothing?”’
‘Well, nothing much has happened,’ he answered. ‘Just a few blotches here and there and tiny amounts of growth: an inch, maybe less – nothing tall enough to poke through the mesh.’
‘What, everywhere?’
‘Yeah. Nothing.’
‘On the whole of the west side?’
‘Nothing Kaz. It just looks the same as before.’
‘Even round the corners on the north side?’
‘Well, there’s a vague haze of something green maybe, happening in patches, out of the sun, but otherwise nothing.’
‘What’s the weather been like?’
‘Muscle Manuel says there was rain several weeks ago, but remember, when it rains here, it rains heavy. I think what may have happened is that the seeds got washed down into the nooks and crannies and got all bunched up
together, just as Jennie said they would.’
His voice was flat and disappointed. His well-thought out plan had not worked. There was a long silence. All that time spent clinging perilously to the hillside, scattering the different species according to where they would look best and then the rain comes and washes everything down into one coagulated mess between the rocks and boulders and down into the trenches.
‘Let’s talk about it when you get home.’
He hung up.
But he was delayed and by the time he got home I had left London for business in Hamburg, so he went to bed alone, nursing his disappointment.
Turbulence
When I arrived at Heathrow, I found that my flight had been delayed. The storms that had been battering our southwestern coasts that week had moved east right into our flight path to Hamburg. We took off OK and made it across to northern Germany, but it was a turbulent flight and our young and rather inexperienced BA captain found it all a bit too much. After two attempts to land in Hamburg, including a second one where we were only 20ft off the ground and were hit by crosswinds and gusts that nearly tipped our wing into the grass, he throttled back and aborted landing. Those of us only a few miles from a warm bed abandoned our hopes of being asleep by midnight. He informed us that air traffic control was diverting us to Amsterdam. A groan came up from the weary, tossed passengers and cabin crew alike as everyone started to re-plan their routes from Amsterdam back to their original destinations. Trains were a possibility for me, or perhaps I could stay over and catch the first flight out from Amsterdam to Hamburg. Worse was to come.
When we landed in Amsterdam, the captain informed us that we were not going to be allowed to disembark. By this time several passengers, most of them Rangers fans who’d been drinking heavily all day and were keen to get to a fixture somewhere in northern Germany had been scuffling with each other at the back of the plane. Scuffling turned into barging and then a throng of cursing Scotsmen headed up towards the front of the plane, determined to disembark. As they pushed into business class, polite attempts by a passenger in row three to defuse the situation were not well met and some punches were thrown, one of which narrowly missed me. To cut the story short, several passengers mutinied, police were called, the captain declared he was off back to Heathrow with whoever wanted to come with him, although we had only forty minutes before it closed for the night. We turned around at the speed of light and I found myself back in London in the early hours, tired and wired.
Stan was awake when I crept into the bedroom at 2.30am. Surprised to see me, he began to talk about his trip and the saga of our continually slipping hillside and our vain attempts to reseed it. But at that hour of the morning, every action is a disaster and every attempt to ameliorate it is in vain. I should have known better than to have been lured into the conversation. As I sat on the edge of the bed, all I was attempting to do was offer Stan reassurance and comfort and help him relax about the hillside and not worry. All he was attempting to do was to stop the situation slipping out of control. Our approaches came into opposition as sure as day confronts night and black confronts white. Stan, of course, wanted to try and fix it; I wanted to let nature take its course.
‘Well, we’ve done our best,’ I offered. ‘We followed advice, did exactly what we were told, bought the right seeds, in the right amounts, scattered them at the right time, waited for them to germinate, we can’t do any more.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Stan said, on the attack, desperately seeking a cause for our failure. ‘You don’t think ahead, you abdicate.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do? I can’t make it rain!’
‘No, but it’s always left up to me. I have to do everything.’
‘No you don’t.’
Here we go again.
‘You can’t make it rain either, you know,’ I said. ‘You’re not God!’
‘At least I try.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Why is it always me who has to think up what you’re supposed to do? You’ve got ideas, you’re the goddamn gardener – you think of something!’
He lay down, pulled the duvet over his tired body and ended the argument. I too lay down and tried to think of something but as I fought back the tears, my only thoughts were how unjust his attack on me had been.
My style of working, I told myself, wasn’t wrong, it was just different. I don’t need to control things, to shape, to form like he does. I don’t need to always be determining the events around me, getting people to do what I want them to do. This is not in my nature. I’m more inclined to put things in place, provide the resources, the substrata, the wherewithal and let events unfold, see what happens. If I make plan A, and B results instead, then that’s fine. With nature, as with people, you have to let things evolve.
But this was a lame defence. Sometimes this inclination to let go got me into trouble leading a team, I admit. My business partner would despair sometimes at my lack of follow-up with people.
‘You can’t just delegate and then leave them to get on with things,’ he’d say. ‘You need to give them support, monitor what they’re doing…’
‘But that’s micro-managing.’
‘No it’s not, it’s being there for them…’ And so we’d go on.
The truth is, I do tend to hope they’ll just get on with it and not need to come running to me. I’m not a great monitor. In fact, even the word monitor makes me want to run for the door. And so it is with my gardens. I’ll plan for A and then see what happens. If B wants to occur, I’ll watch B evolve with keen interest and delight. Then there’s always C.
Stan is trained never to leave things to chance. You can’t do that when you’re building a construction that others have paid for. Architects have agreed a plan with their clients and need to build it. Otherwise we’d still be living in caves. And Stan was right. My laissez-faire style has its moments. But this wasn’t one of them. If there was something we could do to stop all the work on our hillside coming to nothing, we should at least try. I could see his point. So I lay there racking my brains for a solution. Then it occurred to me. The professor.
‘I’ll phone Semillas Silvestres tomorrow,’ I said aloud into the dark, knowing Stan would still be awake, ‘and tell the Professor that nothing has happened and see what he says.’
Stan didn’t reply.
‘Maybe he’ll just tell us to wait another few weeks. Maybe March and April are when things tend to germinate…’
‘And maybe the rain will never come in March or April…’ Stan interjected, throwing the covers off and sitting up again furious.
The touch paper was relit. We needed to put out this fire.
‘Well, that’s fine. We’ll just let nature take its course.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he blurted. ‘We’re just going to have to ask Muscle Manuel to water the hillside.’
‘What?’ So then I sat up too. ‘I thought the whole idea was that we’d let it happen organically.’
‘Water’s organic. Besides, if we can speed things up, or give nature a hand, then shouldn’t we?’
This garden was supposed to mend our marriage, not cause an even bigger schism to open between us.
‘Look, I have to be back at Heathrow at 7am,’ I said, having had enough. ‘That gives me precisely two hours sleep!’ I rolled over and closed my eyes.
It had been a busy week and there was still much to do. Not only was my mind full of all the things I needed for my long meeting in Hamburg that day, but I knew I had to rise at 4am the day after, fly back to London, race back to the house, phone the Professor about the seeds, get to a morning hospital appointment for a mammogram, invoice three clients, drive 100 miles up to Lottie’s school for a teachers’ meeting then get home to unpack and repack to leave at 5am the following morning to go to Morocco with Stan for the short break we’d planned. It was just one of those weeks that happen from time to time, which left no space between trips to pack a few pairs of clea
n knickers.
The worst of it was lying here, listening to my husband’s restlessness, and I had not managed to speak to our daughter. She was leaving directly from school the next morning for a week in Iceland on a geography trip. Normally we’d talk every day. But with all my to-ing and fro-ing, we hadn’t managed more than text and voice messages. We’d spoken two days before after her ‘horrific’ saxophone grade five exam, which she walked out of crying, but then nothing. Silence. So unlike her. Oh well, I thought, maybe I’ll bump into her at the airport - ships passing in the night.
Someone I met recently asked me where I lived and I found myself replying ‘Heathrow Terminal 5’. A slipping hillside is pressure enough, but compound it with angry words from Stan, a busier-than-usual schedule, radio silence from our daughter, and the dreadful possibility of marital meltdown on the high slopes moved closer. I knew he loved me, but he too was tired and helpless. Cross words exchanged in the dead of night are more injurious than we intend. By morning the spat was over, but not forgotten.
Respite in Tangiers
Our trip to Morocco was well timed. It was to coincide with St Patrick’s Day when I, according to family folklore, become a sentimental Irish slob. To be away together on St Patrick’s Day would either be good for our relationship or its ruination.
That year, apparently, the Catholic Church in Ireland had decided that St Patrick’s Day would be celebrated on the 15th, and not 17th March, as it had been for hundreds of years. The earlier date suited everyone better, it seemed – something to do with keeping the pubs open on St Patrick’s Day and avoiding having a day of drunken debauchery being too close to Holy Week in a year when Easter was early. You see, that’s what I love about the Catholic Church in Ireland. It’s so pragmatic – some might say hypocritical. If the publicans can’t open enough hours to serve the St Patrick’s Day revelers, don’t bother the government by asking to extend the licensing laws, just ask the Catholic Church to move the feast day. Oh, the Catholic Church. Ever accommodating, ever understanding. If an event is mistimed – move it; if a truth is inconvenient – ignore it; if a sin becomes the social norm – forgive it.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 15
