Stan and I once discovered that it is not possible to have a quick drink with Muscle Manuel and his wife. First there were his wife’s olives, then some home-cured jamón, their own wine - some brandy. It was 1am before George and Andy got away, although I’m sure they weren’t helpless prisoners for the entire evening. The next morning, Manuel turned up on site to say that the ninety missing granite curbstones had been found. He gave no explanation. George didn’t ask.
This simple stone-laying project, so well thought-out, ought to have progressed according to the drawn plans. The plants were already placed where they had been shown in the drawings and were growing nicely. The paths simply needed to be laid around them. But as we gardeners know, once living things colonise a garden, they tend to take off in their own direction, and after two years of enjoying no hard landscaping to curb their growth, these plants had acquired their freedom. With hindsight, we should have paved the garden first and left holes for the planting, but the pragmatists in us said, ‘No, get the plants in as soon as you can, before you lay the granite, then they can be growing to maturity sooner. Also, if you have to bring the heavy trees in with small cranes or diggers over the laid paths, you could damage the granite.’
But once the plan to lay the pre-cut slabs met the haphazard planting arrangement, things started to go awry. As in life, when hard meets soft, when accurate meets approximate, when formal meets casual, when architect meets nature, conflict and casualties are inevitable. In this case, the orange trees had been placed a little outside their parameters and had grown even more so, so that when George came to lay the granite paths around them, they were butted right up against the curbs, instead of being positioned in the centre of square holes.
What to do? Uproot the trees and move them half a metre to where they should be? Cut the slabs to give the trees more room? I’m happy to report that the problem brought to Stan’s attention by George and then to me for consultation ended in victory for the living over the inert. The orange trees were left where they were and an ingenious new design was executed with half slabs.
As work progressed, George sent pictures showing it all taking shape. It looked beautiful. I phoned him to say how thrilled I was.
The day I first saw the completed hard landscaping for myself, George squatted down proudly and ran his rough, dry hand over the joints like a vet runs his hands over the hind legs of a dog placed on his table.
‘See this, Kaz?’ he said. ‘Beautiful granite, well cut, sharp edges.’
‘Smooth enough for a two year old’s Dinky car?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Look at that sparkle in the stone,’ he went on.
‘Mmm,’ I nodded appreciatively.
‘Beautiful granite.’
‘Mmm.’
‘But fuckin’ heavy,’ he said, standing up wearily.
We laughed and I grabbed his hands.
‘Don’t ever imagine, George, that your sore hands and tired back are not appreciated. Everyone who walks on these paths for the next two thousand years will admire your hard work.’
‘Two thousand years?’
‘That’s how long I want them to last.’
‘Blimey.’
‘So you’d better have laid them to withstand an earthquake.’
‘We’ll see, Kaz. We’ll see.’
‘Oh, I hope not’ I said. ‘I couldn’t stand any more movement.’
A boutique hotel?
During our next visit, we spoke for over an hour with Marcel about the difficult position we were in. When the town hall had decided to hand over responsibility for a decision about our lack of an earth moving permit to the Environment Agency, they thought they had us. But when the Environment Agency came back and said it was nothing to do with them, that it was a town hall problem, the town hall were running out of ways to stall us. It seemed that we had limited options.
Option 1: It was more than three years since we’d begun building. The conventions were hazy, but it seemed that we could sit tight for a little longer and convert our almacén into a dwelling by kitting it out with a bathroom and kitchen. Sufficient time would have elapsed for us to be given permission and receive our much longed for Certificate of First Occupation. This was not an option since, apparently, we were on protected land next to a natural park and they don’t allow the four year conversion rule under these circumstances.
Option 2: We go ahead and convert it to a home anyway. To hell with permission. But we would always be illegal, looking over our shoulder and never able to sell the property.
Option 3: We apply for some other permission, such as building a small rural hotel. This one, interestingly, was suggested not by us but by the town hall themselves. Ostensibly, they approached us with this idea because the global recession had hit Spain particularly badly and that’s what Andalusia was now looking for: to boost tourism, to bring some employment to the area, to offer cultural holidays, bird watching, hunting, bee-keeping, cooking, knitting, writing. But my suspicions were that they favoured this route because the decisions about hotels are taken by the state council, the junta. The town hall would therefore be cleared of their responsibilities. Or perhaps it was a ruse to fob us off, chasing an improbable planning opportunity that would get us off their backs for another two years. But the idea was attractive. We wouldn’t have to be a hotel for the whole year, just the summer season. It could be ours for the rest of the time. An application for planning permission to turn our almacén into a hotel would, according to the town hall, be seen favourably - and any permission granted by the junta is rubber-stamped by the town hall.
So, this glorious bit of land, which I thought would be ours to raise our grandchildren, share with our wider families and friends, might yet be so, but for only half the year. The other half, we could be hoteliers!
Apart from this one interesting development, everything seemed difficult around that time and both Stan and I retreated into a kind of denial. Months could go by and neither of us would mention our project. If there was any news, he reported it to me in matter-of-fact tones. ‘George says the road needs resurfacing,’ or ‘the town hall wants more information.’ It was as if our dream was slowly dying. Our relationship too, buoyed, as I had hoped, by joint involvement in a project, seemed to be wilting again.
We would spend a whole week hardly seeing each other. He would be in bed when I came in late or vice versa, and he left so early in the morning that conversation was unlikely. We didn’t make the effort to schedule a meal together. We wrote curt notes to each other if something needed to be said. Our project, the enterprise that would keep us united and thriving, had been depleted of hope.
I thought hard during those months about what to do. How resilient was I, really? How many more setbacks could I take? Where was our purpose in being together? We were no longer creating anything: not our family, our careers, our dream home and garden. We were in the very state I had dreaded.
Our options to rise above this state were the same as before; we could respond as a plant does by closing over its stoma, the sweat cells, to conserve water. This meant refraining from talking about the problem, muddling along, ignoring the fact that it was happening. Or we could dig deeper for water, searching, diving, making every effort, no matter how strenuous, to revive our sagging relationship. I’m ashamed to say that my energy levels allowed for the former. And we sank into turpitude again.
Hamburg
Visiting other gardens during my travels used to offer some solace, but I found that often they simply exacerbated my depression. I was in Hamburg to attend a memorial service for a friend’s father who was a well-known avant-garde theatre director, a Jew who fled Germany in 1938, but returned when the war was over. Feeling depressed, I had set out that morning from my hotel with some positive intent and walked for fifteen minutes in the weak sunshine towards the TV tower to the Japanese Garden and what is referred to as the Old Botanic Garden, laid out beneath it. Although it was Oct
ober, it could have been spring for the cacophony of colour that greeted me inside the gates. My heart rose when I was met by a magnificent bed of hostas, not the pert hostas of spring, but mature, floppy, perforated hostas, yellowing around their fat margins. They sat untidily next to a crammed bed of flashy bergonias, postbox red and viridian green spilling out of every leaf, as if splodged onto an artist’s palette.
The influence of the prairie style is ubiquitous across Europe and we must be careful not to become jaded by the spectacle of long, winding swathes of daisies, asters and crowning grasses at this time of year. They are a true spectacle and have done much to reconstitute our thinking about what herbaceous borders should contain. Even in northern Germany, with its long, cold, wet winters, the staff at the Botanic Gardens in Hamburg seemed to have remained perkily optimistic about the longevity of their summer plantings. Remnants of summer were everywhere: a sea of 5ft-high yellow and white Daturas planted in sturdy pots under a canopy of Virginia creeper, turned burgundy but not yet fallen - summer hanging on till the very last minute as autumn darkens impatiently above it.
Asters are kings for this couple of weeks in October, and while everything else is dying, asters turn the autumn garden blue, as blue as bluebells in a spring wood - their defiance laudable.
A fleeting moment of sadness passed as I caught sight of an Irish yew, browning at the edges, droopy and forlorn, its hopeful red berries dropping onto a damp pine bed. Yew is symbolic of death, and when encouraged to its natural stature, tall and proud and dense, like the magnificent yew trees in the churchyard at Painswick, they are a denial of death; an affirmation of eternal life. But this small, weak specimen cast my spirits down again. I’m pleased to report that they were revived half an hour later by a visit to the Beatlemania Museum on the Reeperbahn. What is it about those early Beatles albums like Revolver and Beatles for Sale that get the stiff limbs of baby boomers jiving shamelessly in public places? I boogied to ‘Baby You Can Drive My Car’ with an equally shameless American couple I happened upon in the museum corridor - my spirits soaring again.
CHAPTER EIGHT: NURTURING
‘There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.’ Alfred Austin
BECAUSE our developments in Spain were still bogged down, we turned our attention that autumn to our London garden. Well, I say ‘we’, but really it was Stan who was getting itchy and wanted to do something.
I would have been content to let everything plod along, occasionally thinking about a new plant here or there, taking up a shrub to open up a dark corner perhaps, but generally letting the garden have her head. I was not averse to directing her with the secateurs on occasions, encouraging her intentions in a different direction, just so that she didn’t spoil the effect I was trying to achieve. But a sensible gardener knows when her work is done and lays down her tools to watch as greater forces take over. However, this reserve could be tiresome to those I live with and interpreted as laziness or neglect.
As you know, Stan, when he takes it upon himself to ‘redo something’, razes it to the ground, digs up everything that’s there, flattens, then reshapes the earth, and transforms it utterly beyond recognition. I suppose that’s what being an architect does to you. It leads you to the belief that the environment is there to be shaped by human hand to some greater beauty. After nearly thirty years in the architecture business, he had the certainty that it could be done and the confidence to do it.
The vegetable patch
The ‘something’ he had taken upon himself to ‘redo’ was my higgledy-piggledy, rather amateurish vegetable plot. At the beginning of that season, I had been occupied with extending the area, growing more salads and herbs than usual, even filling gaps with potatoes and, when I ran out of space, planting up wine boxes obtained for nothing from The Sampler, a generous off-licence in Islington, to produce even more. The fruits, so to speak, of my labours had been enjoyed all summer by my extended family and friends. I counted it a great success. But my dear husband, while delighting in freshly picked produce, and even taking the best of the tomato crop for himself whenever I was away with the lame excuse that they wouldn’t keep (excuse me? We’ve got a fridge!) regarded the vegetable plot as an eyesore. Not that he actually used that word to my face, but underneath his diplomatic words I knew that was what he meant.
I could see his point, to a degree. It was rather ramshackle. There were salvaged bits of wood, not quite the right length, holding back the raised beds. Everything was at a different height and angle. The paths were too narrow. Some old Victorian tiles that I’d laid between two beds as stepping-stones had cracked and none of the plants were the right size for their little corner. Each year I built wigwams and trellises out of odd canes and tied them together with pieces of string, which tended to fall apart towards autumn.
Personally, I thought this lent the garden great charm, a charm that would not be out of place on an allotment, but Stan claimed it looked like a cottage garden, not one with neat symmetry and tidy husbandry but the mad, eccentric, topsy-turvy cottage garden of a middle-aged woman partial to a nip of gin. Besides, he pointed out, this was our family garden, not an allotment or a horticultural utility, and we had to look at it from our windows of our house every day. Cottagey was just not the right style. Despite my feeble protests, it was to be ‘redone’ that coming winter with proper terraced levels, brick steps and paths, raised beds and box hedging.
I wouldn’t describe the words we had concerning this development as ‘words’. Nor would I say that my feeble protests fell on deaf ears. He certainly listened. But his mind was made up, so I stepped aside. If there was one thing I had learned in my marriage of twenty-five years, it was that when Stan decided on something, it would happen. But his drive to execute makes him both the end result and the tool used to get there. He is at the same time the beautiful new vegetable garden and the bulldozer that shaped it.
In anticipation of a November start, I had planted one last row of Chinese mustard leaves, cos lettuce, wild rocket and cress, hoping they would see us through the autumn. Furthermore, in the spirit of planning unnatural to me, but learned from my nearest and dearest, I asked Stan to take down the height of the bamboo hedge that divided us from the coach house at the end of the garden, adding the proviso ‘just a little’. He climbed up the ladder with the hedge trimmer in his hands and took off about 4 feet. When I saw what he had done, I had to catch my lower jaw in both hands and reset it into my chin. The effect was dramatic. Suddenly the vegetable plot was bathed in late-afternoon westerly sunshine and would remain so through the winter. How daft that we hadn’t done this before. It meant that the final few tomatoes would ripen on the vine, the new salads would mature until November and I would be able to see just how much light spread across my plot so I could plan what to sow and where. So – planning is important.
The autumn drew on. There was no news from Spain. Increasingly, the gloom settled upon Britain as the days shortened and the temperatures dropped. The long-term forecast was not good either. I spent one whole morning in November in the garden in the pouring rain, trying frantically to finish the jobs before the builders arrived. Despite wearing my old waxed jacket, the thin leggings I had donned that morning stuck to my thighs, my socks were also sodden because I’d started gardening in my Crocs and then couldn’t be bothered to change into my wellies when it began chucking it down, and the worst thing was, the hat I had put on as I went out of the door proved totally useless. Standing erect and admiring myself in the hall mirror, I thought, that should keep the rain off my face. But of course, as it was a rather fetching baseball cap, the rain couldn’t get at my face, but hit the back of my head as soon as I bent down. Within minutes, my neck was as cold and wet as a kitten rescued from drowning. I retreated to the shed.
Thank God for my thoughtful children who, on noticing I was spending more time in the shed as I grew older and less time actually in
the garden, bought me first a wind-up radio, which I broke by over-winding, then a conventional transistor radio, which I also broke, this time by over-pulling the flex out of the socket, and then I borrowed a rather smart digital radio from Stan to see me through the winter. It was quite a relief to stay under cover that November day, and I managed to catch up with most of The Archers omnibus.
The following day was drier but just as cold. I strode out with my spade and began digging up plants because, as well as getting a new vegetable garden, I was getting two new herbaceous borders. Stan had artfully managed to manoeuvre a bit of extra space by cutting several square metres out of the basketball terrace that the children no longer needed.
‘We might as well remodel the borders at the same time as building the new veggie patch…’ A typical refrain from Stan, being the bolder of the two of us.
Truthfully, I have never liked herbaceous borders; not since I saw Her Majesty’s at Buckingham Palace. It could be that my judgment was marred by being a staunch Republican (as well as noticing that the tuna sandwiches at her garden party had started to curl) but I thought her borders were frightful and vowed, before being ushered out by her flunkies, never to go down that road.
I was about to eat my words.
Determined not to buy anything new for my borders, I was on an economy drive that recession. No, that’s not true. My economy drive was nothing to do with the recession. I really didn’t need any new plants. There. I’ve said it. My name is Karen and I’m a plantaholic. My garden was full of plants. They were just in the wrong places. So there I was in the pouring rain, digging them up from where they should never have been in the first place, squeezing them temporarily into plastic pots and placing them on the terrace to decide where they should go in the new grand scheme of things. If I had lined all these pots up and labeled them, my terrace would have passed for the local nursery.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 20
