The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  All the gardening books on my shelf agreed on the basics for designing a new herbaceous border: prepare the soil, plant up contrasting textures, shapes and colours, underfill with bulbs, cover with a mulch and wait for it all to mature into something that looked as if the hand of God was involved. Except that I knew I was quite inept and mine would probably look like the leg of Dog was involved. At least that’s how I felt as I stood staring out of the shed door at the mud patch, mug of tea in my dirty fingers, the cold, wet collar against the back of my neck. What to put where? How to balance the contrasting shapes and textures? Where did I start?

  But then, gardening teaches us about our weaknesses in ways that few other occupations do (except perhaps dangerous sports) and my weakness, when faced with the redesign of a manageable vegetable patch in suburbia or an enormous hilltop in Andalusia, is the same. I panic.

  Fortunately, two garden-designer friends of mine both offered to come round the next morning and tell me exactly what to do with the smaller challenge. I had drawn a rough sketch of the two herbaceous borders. The first, helpfully labeled Bed 1, was the larger. It sat alongside the coach house, roughly 6m by 3m and was already filled by a 40ft-high Gingko tree, an ageing and rather bald elder tree, my large Dicksonia antarctica, a sizeable Choisya, mature Garrya elliptica, a bay tree, Euonymous, Clematis, two large pheasant grasses and a spreading Phormium. There was not much room for anything else. I had overpopulated – again. The second bed, ingeneously titled Bed 2, was 4.4m by 1.3m and empty. That’s because it hadn’t been created yet. It was part of Bob the Brickie’s remodeling, and offered slightly more potential.

  Into these two beds I could place anywhere I wanted the numerous plants that sat patiently in pots on the terrace: two more Phormiums (one purple, one light green), a large scarlet peony, an even larger hydrangea, an enormous Japanese anemone (pink), two Stipa gigantea, a hebe, two delicious hellebores I had bought in Beth Chatto’s garden and an Anthurium. That’s why I needed help. Squeezing plants in together would only delay the overcrowding problem until next season. Throwing them out would feel wasteful. Giving them away to friends was not an option, as no one I knew had any room in their similarly overcrowded London gardens.

  In addition, I had to decide what to do with the five black bin bags of box plants I had dug up and laid on the terrace alongside the pots. What to do with these? I could make up lots of little beds, each with different soil to nurture different types of vegetables. Or I could create a knot garden? On the other hand, that might be overdoing it. Francis Bacon wrote in his highly personal Of Gardens in 1625:

  ‘As for the making of knots or figures, with divers coloured earths, that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side which the garden stands, they be but toys; you may see as good sights, many times, in tarts.’

  I could see his point.

  The weather had taken a severe turn for the worse. Winter had arrived. In fact, let me be more specific: it had come screaming through the frame of the north-facing window in our bedroom the previous morning, whinnying and whooshing so loudly that I couldn’t hear the 7am news. Rain lashed against this exposed corner of the house, smattering the windowpanes so hard I thought they would break. The roller blind inside the window danced about in the gale, reminding me that I had failed to put strips of insulating foam around the cracks as I usually do before winter sets in.

  My two garden-designer girlfriends duly came and went and had both been helpful. So, following their visits in the third week of November, I thought I had a plan and was actually feeling quite confident. But the weather had kept the builders away for a considerable part of that week. They’d managed half the job and I was hoping they would return to carry on, but there was no sign of them. I suspected they had taken the opportunity to start some yummy mummy’s kitchen refit where they’d be warm and spoiled with coffee and freshly baked muffins, so tempting them back into the wind and rain of my north-facing patch of mud wasn’t going to be easy.

  They were builders, after all, not landscape gardeners. So they were not at all used to the challenges of working in a garden. They hadn’t removed the old stepping-stones and brick paths under the new flower beds, thinking that they could just throw bags of soil over and so long as no one could see them these remnants wouldn’t be a problem. What they failed to grasp was that most of the business in a garden goes on underground, whereas with any luck, nothing should move underground in a kitchen or a bathroom, so it doesn’t matter what rubble is behind the skirting boards or under the bath. I suppose they’d never dug over a potato plot before and felt that sharp kick back from the spade as it hit buried concrete.

  ‘No, you’ll have to dig all those bricks up, yes and the concrete. The beds should just be for soil. Sorry guys,’ I moaned, when I discovered their error.

  ‘Everything has to go. I need at least three feet of good deep soil here, because I’m going to grow green gold.’

  Bob the Brickie looked at me as if I was mad, sighed and turned away to find his pickaxe. I slunk off to make him coffee and fresh muffins.

  A Christmas interlude

  By late December 2011 the builders had finished, but I was getting desperate. Several events had prevented me from getting out into the garden and putting everything back in place. The first was an unusual amount of work, which took me to Munich on a very intensive week. On my return I had neither the energy nor the will to venture out into the freezing temperatures and begin the back-breaking work of putting in the box hedging, which had sat obediently on the terrace waiting to be transplanted for almost two months. The next excuse was that I had only been back one day when I was asked at very short notice to return to Rome to chair a two-day event at the United Nations World Food Programme, which again seemed to drain me. I was like a rag doll for a couple of days after that. I was worked off my feet in Rome, the pace broken only by two minutes of clear breathing space at the hotel, when I ventured into the garden and happened to look upwards.

  Above me soared nature’s most affable partners: the Mediterranean cypress and the Mediterranean pine. One reached upwards, richly verdant into the blue sky - compact, slightly rough - the other across the sky like a spreading fist. Made for each other. To see them together is to approve nature’s design aesthetic.

  I digress.

  The third impediment to progress in my London garden was obviously Christmas, which, even though I was not hosting the traditional family feast on Christmas day that year, still seemed to require days of work to prepare. There was our annual party for sixty-odd (and I mean odd) friends on the Saturday before Christmas. There were the various trips to the ballet, panto’ and the usual carol services, which seem to take half a day each. There were presents to buy, airport trips to collect various family members, dishes to be cooked and taken to whoever’s house we’d been invited to and the endless work that everyone underestimates at Christmas.

  In addition, Matthew was back at home for the festivities. He alone was a full-time job, being a very hungry vegan who required continuous, thoughtful food preparation. With him around I needed to be particularly vigilant regarding what was to be bought, made, frozen, defrosted and served. Labels needed to be read for the fine print, since manufacturers often claim suitable for vegetarians but fail to tell you they’re not suitable for vegans. Many products are laced with milk solids or other dairy additives. Indeed, any foodstuff that has exploited an animal in its manufacture was banned by Matthew. There were times that Christmas, during lapses of concentration, when I might have read a label rather too hastily in the supermarket, thrown it into the trolley, brought it home, served it to Matthew, only to find him reading the label later in the kitchen and announcing it had honey in it. ‘Honey, Mother! How could you!’ There were even times, God forgive me, when I read a label in horror just before I was about to serve up, and lied.

  There was another reason I’d not ventured into the garden that December: the layers of snow, ice and frost that had sat on top of my n
ewly finished vegetable beds and borders for almost a fortnight, preventing me from even seeing what I’d got out there, let alone working on it. A duvet of white snow inches thick obscured everything in the garden into indecipherable mounds. You will know how frustrating that can be when you’re pining to get out there. However, I was blessed with several gardening books as Christmas presents that year, the most useful of which turned out to be Nigel Slater’s Tender. Subtitled A cook and his vegetable patch. It could have been written for me. I wasn’t a cook, of course, at least not like him. But I knew we shared the same gardening challenges because, I had been told, he lived not far from me in north London. So clay soils, slugs, city foxes and wet winters bonded us. Nigel and I became firm friends through that winter.

  On the last day of the year the temperature rose for the first time above zero and I managed to get quite a lot done, including breaking my fork; you know, one of those implements that’s supposed to be unbreakable and comes with a lifetime’s guarantee? I was digging a trench along the perimeter of Bed 1 to replant the box hedging, when the new sloping concrete edge proved too much for the effort and either the concrete or the fork had to relent. I struggled on with two prongs and planted most of the box that day. I had to grub up lots of stubborn bamboo roots which, if you have ever attempted this job, you will know are as heavy as lead pipes, solid as iron bars and have thorns on them like knuckle-dusters. They tore my toughest gloves and ripped through my refuse sacks, spilling everything and leaving a trail of debris across the garden that took far longer to put back in the sack than it took to fall out. These sacks, full of bamboo, would no doubt be refused at the Hornsey dump, but I couldn’t think of where else to put them.

  Wearily, I stood back to look at the new box edging my beds. Enthusiasm to get it in before it died in its black plastic bags on the terrace had outweighed the warnings I had read concerning where to put it. In addition to Francis Bacon’s warning about tarts, Nigel Slater described his regret at having edged his vegetable patch with box because that’s where the rampaging slugs tended to hang out. I could just imagine them, boogying out from the box at night to party on my lettuces and then returning drunk at dawn to a hidden slumber in the hedge. Oh dear. Too late. It was done. Besides, there was nowhere else to put it and I was not going to throw it out.

  The following morning I went to the Alexandra Palace garden centre to replace my broken fork and to ask if their potatoes had arrived yet. Now if I were a man, (a hunter rather than a gatherer) and I were to treat this quick visit as a purely rational exchange between me and the retailer, it should have taken about ten minutes, cost about £40 for the fork and informed me about expected delivery dates of new early potatoes.

  However, I’m a woman. And when I got there, the sale was on. So after a considerable time spent browsing and putting plastic pots in and out of my basket and holding them up and asking other customers what they thought, I ended up pushing a fully laden trolley up to the till. How easy they have made it to buy stuff in these places. They give you a trolley that takes stuff that’s large, heavy and floppy and other stuff that’s delicate and all the accoutrements that you need to grow them, including a lower platform for sacks of more stuff, like soil-enhancer and weed-suppressor. The miracle of it all is that it’s still easy to push when fully laden. Not like supermarket trolleys, which can dislocate a shoulder between whole-foods and gluten-free. Garden centre trolleys are a marvel of modern engineering.

  The lady at the till looked at me, hesitated and leaned forward. I thought she might be going to say, ‘I’m sorry but you’re Karen, you’re a plantaholic and you’re only allowed two plants per visit.’

  But instead she whispered, ‘Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind, but are you by any chance over fifty? Because if you are, you can get a ten per cent discount on Wednesdays.’

  I nearly kissed her; first, because she had saved me a lot of money and second, because she’d had to ask my age. Perhaps it wasn’t as obvious to the rest of the world as it was to me and my bathroom mirror. In all the excitement, I totally forgot to ask when their potatoes would be in. So in total, this gatherer’s visit to Alexander Palace Garden Centre actually took thirty-five minutes, cost £92.50, and gifted me with a senior persons’ discount card for Wednesdays. But I was still in the dark about the potatoes.

  I went home to punish myself by putting in the remaining box hedging. On waking the next morning and surveying my handiwork from an upstairs window, I realised that I had done exactly as Bacon had warned and had made my garden look like a plate of jam tarts. Oh well.

  The cold snap continued. According to records, it was officially the coldest winter for decades and several people died of hypothermia in the UK. The government rationed grit and the salt mines were working twenty-four hours a day. The over-eighties were given £400 each to help with their heating bills, and British Airways cancelled forty flights at Heathrow one morning when I was trying to get out of the country. I had little opportunity even to inspect the damage in the garden. It served me right for being so cocky about my ‘warm, sheltered London garden, my microclimate’ and my boasts about being ‘able to grow any Mediterranean plants I fancy’. I could guess who my casualties would be; all the remaining Aeoniums (too fleshy), the papyrus (too pretty), the Strelitzia (too sensitive), most of the soft flabby herbaceous stuff that remained in pots on the terrace awaiting a transplant to my new herbaceous border, my Dicksonia antarctica, whose crown I had stuffed with a hessian sack to prevent ice forming in the hollow. Then there was the olive tree, and, if the temperature were to fall any lower, the calla lilies that were in leaf. The six long troughs of lavender that had sat with a white cap of snow for nearly a week were also in danger, and possibly the fig and kumquat trees that were designed for a less harsh climate. I was resigned to loss.

  On the other hand, I had confessed to the sin of over-stocking, so maybe this was nature’s way of telling me to cut down on the number of plants and, by not replacing what I lost, give the rest a chance to grow into their own space.

  After two days perusing the Organic Gardening catalogue and matching it to Nigel Slater’s recommended vegetable varieties favoured in his London garden, I sent off my order for seeds in early January. Isn’t it amazing how little paper packets containing fifty tiny black dots and costing only £1.64 can excite us so much? Am I the only one who sits up in bed in January looking at pictures of big fat squishy purplish aubergines glowing and proud, wondering how fifty little black dots in a thin paper packet could be responsible?

  Isn’t it also amazing how lots of little packets at £1.64 each can suddenly add up to over £100? The A5 order form torn from the centre pages of the seed catalogue only had space to order ten items and suggested helpfully to ‘continue on a separate sheet if necessary’. My order ran to three pages of A4. Of course, I would probably not use the seeds all in one year and vowed to store them somewhere cool rather than leave odd packets lying around to decay in the killer sunshine of my glass-roofed shed.

  I calculated that this large seed investment might stretch across maybe another three years, but there was no way this was ever going to give me a financial return. Perhaps for some people with allotments, those who share seed, transplant bushes of berries from roadside verges and bulk up their yields with care and attention, perhaps for them gardening has an economic argument. But for me it’s a terribly expensive hobby. To sum it all up, I’d spent over £100 on seeds, over £1,000 on the underground irrigation system, and God knows what Stan spent on Bob the Brickie (he wouldn’t tell me), plus all the £50 trips to Ally Pally. If I were to work it out, the coming summer’s vegetable yield would probably come to £4 per shallot, £5 for each potato, maybe £2 for a handful of chives. But I didn’t care. These foods were mine, only eaten in season and grown organically without transportation. My carbon footprint was impressive, even if my accounts were farcical.

  Back to practical matters. Now that the major remodeling had been done and most of the remainin
g plants had been put in place, I could turn my attention to more mundane matters. To get my unused packets of seeds through the hot summer in my shed, I was definitely going to need a small fridge, just enough for fifty packets of seed and, of course, six bottles of Belgium’s finest beer. This wasn’t difficult. A quick look at the Argos website and a dash down to Wood Green to collect the dinky little thing did the trick. I was thrilled with it. But the other mundane necessity required a little more thought. I needed a new garden radio. The one that Stan had lent me was required back in his study. So one cold evening I headed out for the comforting lights of John Lewis on Oxford Street and straight for the electrical department. There I found an enormously helpful man who listened while I told him what I wanted.

  ‘I want something I can listen to in the shed on a long cold winter day that I can plug into the mains and that will recharge a battery so I can take it outside and it will work for longer than thirty minutes without me having to bring it back into the shed again to charge or wind it up.’

  Breath.

  ‘It has to be able to pick up good quality FM radio for Gardeners’ Question Time on Radio 4 and any time I’m feeling I need a cultural fix from Radio 3 - and medium wave for Radio 5, Live sport and Classic FM.’

  Breath.

  ‘And I want big buttons that I can hit with my gloves on, a handle so I can carry it round the garden and it has to look cute and not too retro.’

  Breath.

  ‘Oh yes, and I want to be able to wipe it clean, and it has to be rainproof and OK to get muddy.’

  The man looked delighted with the challenge and gave me a tour of suitable appliances. We settled for a small Roberts DAB, which met all a gardener’s criteria and was solar powered into the bargain, so it could be recharged without a trip back to the shed. I brought it home and installed it next to my fridge and was ‘good to go’ as Americans say, or like a ‘pig in shit’, as the Irish would have it.