The reason I was bothered about them moving the day was far more personal. St Patrick’s Day in Ireland, you see, has always been the day when roses were pruned and potatoes were planted. This immovable feast in the calendar enabled me and other absent-minded gardeners to get on with these jobs on the third day of the third week of the third month. Forget the actual weather on that day or the temptation to get pruning and planting over with months before, in the autumn. Leave your roses, whatever their condition, we were always told, until 17th March. You can deadhead before then, of course, but the serious pruning and planting should happen on St Patrick’s Day, the day sodden bunches of shamrock get pinned, glued or mashed onto lapels, children’s muddy faces get cleaned with spit on a handkerchief and dads and granddads shuffle off to Mass before retiring to the pub for the rest of the day. Then ma’s and grandmas in disintegrating slippers, aprons and overcoats scurry out in the cold wind, scarves tied under their chins, secateurs in their crinkly red fingers to cut rose stems, joints, nodules and strip off hopeful shoots - and then to bend over with their sciatica in full throttle to plant a whole field of potatoes.
After my fraught few days, I did manage to pack some clean knickers and before you could say ‘Sláinte’, we were toasting my patron saint in the Kasbah above Tangiers with a glass of white French wine on a terrace overlooking the port. It was a soft, warm night and the ships silently glided in and out of Tangiers. Beneath us, floodlights drenched the marina and the port’s defences, odd-shaped concrete blocks which acted as wave-breakers but also provided helpful shadows for the desperate Africans trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar as stowaways in tiny, dangerous craft. A few kilometres across the water, tantalisingly close, tiny lights twinkled in the distance, defining the shores of Spain like the intricate embroidered hems of djellabas.
We had come to Tangiers to be inspired. But in truth we needed repair. The plan was to shop. Although we weren’t ready to buy anything for our house in Colmenar, if we were to continue the Moorish theme, then perhaps some interesting furniture might catch our eye, in keeping with the contemporary north-African style which we had been told could easily be shipped across to Spain and driven up to Colmenar for storage until the house was ready. At least that’s what I thought we were there for.
So the next morning we hunted for treasures and found them. Magnificent chests inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with secret flaps and drawers to hide love letters; carved doors and windows to be flung open to welcome the day; beaten nickel bowls for washbasins; brass lamps and enormous mirrors that could stand at the end of a corridor announcing your approach to yourself. In the vast, labyrinthine Aladdin’s caves in Tangiers’ teeming streets, some of them on four or five levels, piled floor to ceiling with musty antiques sitting alongside cheap painted chipboard reproductions, you can lose yourself in space and time. So we did.
‘Wow, look at this!’
‘My God… what are these?’
I fell in love with a bronze bust that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any English country house, except that it was draped in dusty amber jewelry and sported a faded red felt headdress from the Tuareg. Thinking it would look magical in an alcove, I asked the price.
‘Altogether, around 150,000 dirhams’, the owner told me, after consulting on the phone with his brother, who, he later admitted, was the real owner.
‘That’s €15,000, or £10,000!’
‘Yes’ he answered. ‘Museum piece.’
I turned to leave, stumbled backwards and narrowly avoided bashing two 5ft-high ceramic pots with my handbag. The journey to the door was an obstacle course of Byzantine complexity - knocking myself unconscious on the hanging lamps was a real and present danger. I got out in one piece, but adjusted my mental budget and purchasing hopes.
After two or three hours of browsing, we’d had it and headed back to our riad with a kilo of strawberries the size of fists. Up on the terrace, we settled into vast comfy white cushions and drank thé de menthe.
‘What do you think, then?’
‘About what?’
‘See anything you’d like to buy?’
‘Not yet. Not really. The problem is,’ Stan said, ‘we haven’t really got wall space where we can stick a piece of furniture or hang a large painting. The carved panels covering the openings fold back onto the walls, so we need to keep them clear.’
‘You mean you tricked me into coming here on the pretence of shopping for stuff when really you knew we couldn’t?’
‘Yep. But it’s fun looking, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you haven’t enjoyed yourself.’
Of course I had. Our disagreement over the right approach to the hillside was over. We seemed to be moving forward to a place where we would instigate action, try to control events as far as we could, and, where we couldn’t, accept nature’s greater plan. The main thing was, Stan had relaxed a little more. He loves the sun and as it seeped into his bones, he became physically and mentally looser.
The imam began his call, a ritual bidding the faithful to afternoon prayer, and the rest of us to note the passage of the day, rather like our cuckoo clock at home in London punctuates the hours.
Later, as the sun was setting, we mustered our remaining energy and walked from the Kasbah back down into town to collect the large cotton bedspreads we had bought
‘Come back this evening,’ the man had said earlier. ‘I will have one in the size and colour you require.’
Normally, when they say that, they mean that their brother-in-law, who has the shop down the road, will ask his uncle’s first cousin to get on his moped and go downtown to another friend’s shop, where he thinks he remembers them saying they have one that size and in that colour. But this was different.
We’d been exploring the artisans’ workshops in the converted fondaq, or old Arabic hotel. In small rooms off a large central atrium, dimly lit by one or two light bulbs, old, toothless men sat cramped behind large looms, weaving giant cloths. Others sat cross-legged under the spinning wheels, tying frayed ends into fringes. Many of them looked half-blind and half-dead.
‘It’s not quite ready,’ he said. ‘Still tying the fringe.’
‘Can we see?’ we asked, excited that our linen was being handmade personally to our specification. He led us to the loom as the craftsman was finishing our bedspread, made to measure and to order from the finest Moroccan cotton, 2 by 2.4 metres, to fit our marital bed in Colemenar (as yet unbought).
‘We’ll sleep well under that,’ said Stan, pleased with his first and possibly only commission for the house.
As we paid, I couldn’t help worrying that we might be exploiting these craftsmen, buying their work so cheaply. Yet the fact is, they were doing paid work and their products were fetching a market price. I guess they wouldn’t work if they didn’t think the money reasonable, and we wouldn’t buy their linen if we thought it overpriced. So, I dealt with my guilt, Stan slung the bedspread over his shoulder and we walked for the last time back up to the Kasbah, with a sense that some healing had taken place.
Remaining in control
We returned to Spain the next day to leave behind our purchases from Tangiers locked away in the empty shell of our building. The wind that had blown during our previous visit had disappeared. Not a leaf stirred, not a speck of dust so much as lifted; everything was still, as if asleep. The dogs barking on the eastern hillside sounded as if they were right there in our courtyard, and when the neighbours who were building something 500 metres up on the road above us, spoke to each other, we could hear every word. If we had understood what they were saying, we could have joined in their conversation without raising our voices. But we were longing for silence. Eventually it came and in the stillness, I began to imagine future times on our hillside when not a sound would be heard, not a noise except for the movement of the mountain as she sighed like a drowsy woman rolling over on to her side and reaching her arm down to pluck a flower.
I circumnavigated the edge of the platform and notice
d down in the valley on the north-west side that the old ruin looked different, the land around it seemed to have been scraped, as if to prepare it for the arrival of machines, maybe more earth moving equipment to demolish the ruin perhaps, or to build alongside it, who knows? Certainly not us. The workings of the local planning department remained a closed book. The space around the old ruin had been cleared of vegetation and the road to it flattened and reinforced. I told Stan.
‘Well, that’s good,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope they build something nice down there, as we’ll have to look at it for years.’
I was thinking, Let’s hope they just leave it as a ruin. But then, we could hardly complain if they developed it. We couldn’t expect to build our heaven and deny everyone else the chance of building theirs.
It’s an interesting thought: that we don’t really have the choice either to develop land or leave it be. As human beings, we are both blessed and plagued by our need to meddle with nature. For some of us, this need is almost pathological. In choosing to be gardeners we have clearly made our decision. We have to meddle. We cannot be content to leave nature to her annual cycle without interference. Come on, how easy would it be for any of you to stay indoors, watching out of the window throughout an entire year? To watch the weeds come up in spring and not want to rush out and pull them triumphantly up out of the wet soil? To see heavy plants fall over in mid-summer without staking them securely? To leave dead heads on through winter and not need to slip outside, sidle up and wrench the offenders off? I defy you to ignore it for a week. Some of you wouldn’t last a day.
Because Stan and I struggle constantly with the balance of control and laissez-faire, I had decided the previous spring, when I was visiting the Duchess in Ireland, to drag her off to Mount Usher gardens (not that she needed dragging; she has an almost childlike excitement about natural beauty and can stand spellbound in front of a shrub newly in leaf or a pile of fallen bark) to investigate what chaos ensues when gardeners leave things to chance.
The Mount Usher gardens in Ashford, County Wicklow, were first conceived in 1868. For over a hundred years, through the good husbandry of several generations of the Walpole family, Mount Usher was stocked with a large variety of both native and exotic specimens and then, in a reaction against Victorian prudery fashionable at the time, the garden was left to get on with it.
It was all the fault of William Robinson (1838–1935) from Waterford, who railed against the neat, clipped style Italian statuary and heated greenhouses so beloved of the Victorians. A rebel by nature, he moved to Glasnevin Botanical Gardens in Dublin, then to Regent’s Park in London, where he developed his ideas of naturalised drifts of native plants, perennials that need little upkeep, under-plantings that leave no bare soil, with alpines in nooks and crannies. He was friends with Gertrude Jekyll, amongst others, from the Arts and Crafts movement - worked as a garden journalist with The Times, was sponsored by Charles Darwin at the Linnean Society, and became an advocate of cremation. He even designed the gardens at the Golders Green Crematorium. Through his magazine, The Garden, and his bestseller, The Wild Garden, Robinson’s views were promulgated throughout the Western world and revolutionised garden design. He is usually acknowledged as the originator of many of our twenty-first-century gardening orthodoxies: the herbaceous border, naturalised planting, the English cottage-garden style, and good old weed-suppressant ground cover. Robinson’s influence can be felt these days in Piet Oudolf’s grassy borders and his book Planting the Natural Garden, and in Irish-American writer Jane Powers’ The Living Garden: a Place that Works with Nature.
Robinson’s legacy is tangible and visible in Mount Usher gardens. Old trees are left where they have fallen, self seeders are allowed to colonise and perennials rule. Not much annual effort is given to tidying up, nature is trusted to create a far better informal arrangement than can be achieved by the intervention of man. But I suspected that this trust may be misplaced. In the Mount Usher Gardens, I was proved right. As a result, in springtime vast acres of undergrowth are in the thrall of one plant alone - wild garlic. It is everywhere, overwhelming the few remaining bluebells in the shady wood, springing up between the clumps of brave perennials, carpeting the banks down to the river, drowning out the fragile filigree of wood anemone. I adore wild garlic. I find the flowers and leaves of wild garlic very fine and they remind me of my teenage years courting in the medieval woods of Wicklow. But their numbers have been allowed to increase; the smell is overpowering and the view monotonous. The feeling that one is supposed to be in a lilac garden in temperate Ireland, but is actually in a Sicilian kitchen while supper is being prepared is disconcerting. Such a juxtaposition of aroma throws one ‘off the scent’ so to speak.
And that’s the point. What Mount Usher gardens shows us is that this ‘Robinsonian’ approach to allowing a garden a certain degree of freedom is all very well, but is an artifice, one that can mislead the visitor. If you leave a garden to its own devices, it will naturalise (in Mount Usher’s case, into a dominant riot of garlic) so we intervene to make it look as if we haven’t, when we all know we have. I almost enjoy the honest control-freakery of the new Victorians of Dubai, where they plant, water, mulch and control their gardens because they know that, left to their own devices, these gardens would revert back to sand dunes within months.
Which brings us back to our gardens in Spain and London. In trying to decide how much to cultivate and how much to leave to nature, Stan and I argued endlessly. He maintains that a garden, by its very nature, is unnatural. He’s even stated emphatically that ‘gardening is just farming on a smaller scale’. The trick is to balance the degree of control. Too much cultivation and it looks contrived, too little and it looks unloved, too much chemical control and it is polluted, too little and the slugs take over, too much order and it seems regimented, too little and it seems anarchic. I’m not arguing for a perfect balance between control and lack of it. There cannot be such a thing, in the same way there cannot be a perfect person. We are all different and that diversity leads to the emergence of different styles, new movements, and revolutions against previous orthodoxies. I’m not arguing for more or less balance; rather for an end to arguing about it. For if we carried on like this, we would get nowhere. It felt like we were two parties who have reluctantly signed a peace agreement, only to keep breaking it.
Ultimately, I am attracted to the pragmatism of gardeners everywhere who do a bit up near the house and then let the garden further away take more care of itself. To be driven by convenience seems eminently sensible to me, and this, at least, we have agreed on. So we will cultivate our London garden remorselessly, for it is all within convenient reach. And we will cultivate our Persian garden close to the house, but ask a farmer to look after our hillside, farm the olives and almonds and seed our scars – and let the remainder be its own wilderness.
So it is with our marriage. The house will be his, the garden will be mine. But they reside inexorably side-by-side. I need him, and he needs me. The matters that concern us both, those in the garden but close to the house, we will deal with. Like the children, for example, and the mortgage. But it was time to let go of things further away - stressing over minutiae like which airline to use, when to put away the barbecue in autumn, etc, etc. They were wearing and had caused us to wilt.
Progress on the hillside
Stan made a lightning trip to Spain. He phoned me excitedly from the site.
‘Well? Any news?’
‘The Strelitzia are being shredded by the wind, so I’ve asked Muscle Manuel to move them.’
‘Fine’ I said. ‘But…’
‘The other palms are starting to recover from the bad start, but slowly.’
‘Good,’ I responded. But most importantly, ‘How’s the hillside? Is it covered?’
‘Yes. Completely.’
‘What?’
‘You should see it, Kaz. It’s incredible. Absolutely full of poppies.’
‘Poppies?’ I was stunned.
‘We didn’t sow any poppies up there.’
‘Yes we did. Poppies. Loads of them.’
I couldn’t remember sowing poppies.
‘You know something? Poppy seeds are very common and when you work the soil over they wake up from dormancy and germinate. It’s why you see poppies on building sites and battlefields.’
‘Mmm. Well, there’s more growth, too. Other things coming up where we didn’t sow.’
‘Maybe the wind took the seeds up the hill?’
‘Maybe it did.’
There was a long silence, then Stan said, ‘It’s like you always told me. Nature will sort it out the way she wants to.’
‘Wow,’ I said. Then he became his rational self again.
‘So I think what’s happened is that the rain washed some seeds downwards between the rocks and the wind blew other seeds upwards onto the platform.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Muscle Manuel was saying that all our planting hadn’t worked and it was just the local flowers that were growing. What he didn’t realise is that we had planted all the indigenous species to hurry it all along. Our planting was just more of the local stuff. So it worked, Kaz, it worked!’
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 16
