Establishing the new beds
Finally, the weather on the last Sunday in January 2012 was tolerable. A lukewarm sun shone feebly from a low angle, excuses were no longer possible. Stan and I had been scraping along the bottom of our relationship that winter. Scarcely communicating, polite but barely affectionate. I needed his help, however, and we donned our wet gear, our fingerless mittens under our gardening gloves and set out to complete the final job in the new garden, to connect up all the remaining pipes that made up the closed loop of our underground irrigation system. It was quite good fun in a Meccano sort of way. We had to identify which pipes went down which bed, how they crossed under the brick paths and whether they needed a T-shaped, L-shaped or I-shaped junction.
By the end, we were as muddy as the beds we had been working in. It had taken us about an hour to dig shallow trenches, connect it all up and bury the pipes. Then we swept the terrace of mud, came inside, showered and went out for a deserved frothy, hot, sweet cappuccino in Islington. It was late morning and warm enough to sit out with our coffees on the pavement. What little heat there was in the sun seemed to have revived the locals. The streets were teeming with people like us, delighted to get out of the house. Kids on scooters, mums with buggies, grandfathers with newspapers under their arms, grandmothers picking up dropped gloves and scarves, dads apologising to other pedestrians for bumping into them.
It was a far cry from previous weeks when, heads down, dashing between shops, surviving the cold winds on Upper Street was the game. The sense of respite from icy temperatures that morning was palpable on the street and we, too, were feeling perky. We joked and chatted like young newlyweds and for the first time in ages, I felt the companionship of shared labour and rest, the bringing together of two souls engaged in a common project. Our garden in Spain was missed - but perhaps the revival of our London garden was taking its place.
The following week, feeling mounting excitement, I tracked down the busy Aussie who had sold us our irrigation system and told him we were ready to turn it on. Could he talk me through it over the phone?
‘It’s all connected,’ I told him. ‘We just need to test it out.’
‘OK,’ he confirmed. He had that slow Aussie way of talking that raises the end of each sentence, making it sound like a question. In another context, I might have felt slightly patronised, but this was an entirely appropriate intonation for what was about to happen.
‘Go to the control panel in the shed and turn the dial to run?’
I did what I was told.
‘Check.’
‘Now go back outside and open the connection to the tap?’
‘Check.’
‘Now set the control panel to manual and give it – say – two minutes of water?’
‘Check.’
‘Do ya hear anything?’
I listened. Nothing. Then, a sudden sound like a deluge. I looked out from the shed. Gallons of water were flooding out from an underground pipe into Bed No. 1 and sloshing across the new soil, making eddies of mud and waves that within ten seconds had created a lake half the size of the bed.
‘Yes,’ I screamed dramatically into my phone. ‘I hear a great flood. There’s water everywhere!’
‘OK, press the stop button,’ he ordered calmly. I did and it stopped.
‘Now we need to work out what’s happening. It could be you didn’t secure the connections with the white insulating tape I left you.’
What white tape? I thought to myself, feeling a rising panic.
‘Check,’ I answered without checking.
‘Or maybe the O-ring inside the main feeder pipe is dislodged?’
‘Check. Umm. I mean yes, possibly.’
‘Or the feeder pipes are not connected securely into the feeder?’
‘Check,’ I said again, not entirely sure what he meant.
‘Will ya check all those things and call me back?’
I made a mental note of what he was telling me and promised to dig it all up and have a proper look when the weather turned more clement. Then I thanked him, sighed in frustration and went on the internet for some retail therapy. It was to be several weeks before the irrigation system was revisited. In the meantime, spring was just on the horizon.
‘The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, and I can tell that something wet, and soft, and cold, and misshapen is about to be born.’ M T Andersen
When Valentine’s Day came around that year, my husband was 3,396 miles away in Dubai. I found I was missing him as if someone had come into my garden at night and dug up a favourite shrub from my best border. He’d left a card with a picture of a London taxi on it saying Sorry I’m not there. Love you lots and lots, which for a man of few words was an entire essay. For the first ten years of our lives together his Valentine’s cards were signed with a simple question mark –? For the next ten years, because I’d kind of figured out who they were from, he just put a kiss – X. Then I started to get his initial, then the whole of his name. Now, more recently, a whole sentence - or even two. If we’re still married in thirty years’ time, which is feasible, he might need a second page.
Romance aside, I had to get on with life when he wasn’t there. There was an important parent–teachers’ meeting at Lottie’s school, so I set out on the morning of 14th February for the Midlands. On the way up, I found I was early and had made good time, so I stopped in at a nondescript nursery on the A1, in the middle of the flat, rich, East Anglian soil, surrounded by fields of cabbages. This nursery sold an unusually large range of everything except products like rose de-thorners and blackcurrant and prune hand balm. This place was the real McCoy. It didn’t have a café. It didn’t have a gift shop. It just had rows and rows of benches selling bedding plants, stacks of reasonably priced compost, tools and anything else the regular gardener needed to work in a regular garden, not to enrich his or her life with pink polka-dot wellies and a Buddha water feature.
The man who ran this nursery used to be a market gardener, so the conversation went something like…
‘Hello.’
‘Mornin’.’
‘I was wondering if you had any really good compost I could lay on my new vegetable patch.’
‘What sort of soil have you got?’
‘Well, it’s London clay, basically, but I’ve already laid some good-quality Norfolk top soil onto it and spread around some well-rotted compost from my own heap.’
‘So what do you want more for?’
Pause.
‘Well, I was just wondering…’
‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you.’
‘You wouldn’t?’
‘Nope.’
‘Oh.’
Another long pause.
‘What are you growing?’
‘Oh, potatoes, carrots, beetroot, salads, herbs. You know, the usual…’
‘You grown vegetables before?’
He looked at me through one eye.
‘Yes. Well, I’ve had a go…’
Another pause; this time from him.
‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll sell you some organic food for your leafy salads and spinach, but don’t put it on your root vegetables or they won’t develop. And I’m not selling you any more compost or you’ll only get top growth. Now, you’ll be needing…’
And with that he turned away and went to find me a box of bone meal. I was completely hooked. Anyone who could turn down the sale of ten bags of compost for an excellent reason secured my trust.
‘What else?’ he said, slapping the bone meal down next to the till.
‘Onion sets?’ I asked. ‘Potatoes?’
‘Come with me.’
We trudged off to benches stacked with loose items for weighing.
‘I don’t sell ’em pre-wrapped any more,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair on pensioners who only want one or two. They just fill their own paper bags.’
Fifteen minutes lat
er I loaded up the car with onions, shallots, potatoes, seeds, bulbs and several other items I had no intention of buying before I went in. But each item came with the accumulated wisdom of a man who’d had twenty-five years experience of market gardening: when to plant, where to grow, when to harvest. Of course, his calendar was two to three weeks later than mine in London, as it was two or three degrees colder, but he agreed cautiously to what I was planning as a father might agree cautiously to his teenage daughter’s plans for her first weekend away from home. He’d read me like a book.
‘Impatient, aren’t you?’ he remarked as he helped me load up the car.
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘Had much snow down there?’
‘Quite a bit.’
‘Not much point getting out yet,’ he said. ‘Too cold.’
‘I’m keen to get on, though, as it’s a new veg’ patch,’ I blurted.
‘Mmm.’
He looked at me sideways, handed me the last bag and warned, ‘Second week in April for the Charlottes. Don’t forget.’
Then he turned away with a sly grin and said, ‘Though I’ll bet you’ll put them in as soon as you get home, won’t you?’
We laughed and I went on my way.
A week later and there was still no let-up. The thermometer outside the shed door hadn’t risen above 5°C for about two weeks. It fell to zero quickly each evening and only poked its head above freezing at around 10am the next day. When it wasn’t raining, it was sleeting. When it wasn’t sleeting, it was doing nothing. Just grey and dark and wet and relentlessly cold. A constant reminder of why we wanted the heat and light of Spain.
Finally, I could stand it no longer. I stood in the kitchen one morning for fifteen minutes looking out of the window, itching to get started but dreading the cold. I took myself in hand, threw on a gilet, rummaged through the downstairs outdoor sock box for some big, thick, dark ones and ventured out into the cold in my Crocs feeling like a naughty schoolgirl out in the playground during lessons. I have to say, regrettably, I managed only fifteen minutes. I threw some violas into the kitchen window boxes, sprinkled the trays of sweet pea in the shed with some water and tidied up the firewood stack that had collapsed. But the old enemy struck: the cold. Mild Raynaud’s disease means that very quickly the blood withdraws from the tips of my fingers and they begin to look like old, hard chewing gum. They hurt like hell, particularly when they’re thawing out. I decided to wait another week.
The weather didn’t improve for a fortnight. So in desperation I grabbed a wheezy old fan-heater from the guest bedroom and went out to the shed. Within five minutes on turbo-charge speed three, I was catalyzed into action. I tidied the seed drawers, washed the seed trays, threw out the broken tray lids, cut open the bags of seed compost I had bought, filled the seed trays with compost. But no matter how many times I read and reread the instructions on the back of the packets of vegetable seed, they still said plant in March.
‘I know it’s February, but I’m ready,’ I told myself. ‘Where would be the harm in getting a little bit ahead?’
‘But the nice man on the A1 warned you to wait,’ I replied to myself.
‘Oh yes, I know he did, but that’s just East Anglian caution. It may be February up there but here in London it’s definitely March.’
‘That’s funny, because I just looked at the calendar and it said…’
‘Anyway, my garden is so much warmer and milder than everywhere else because it has its own microclimate, it’s walled and sunny and I can go ahead. So there.’
‘Fine. Be it on your own head.’
I sighed, thought better of it, put the packets back in their drawer and looked for something I could usefully do. Then I remembered.
The problem of labelling
While waiting for the year to turn, I had occupied myself with the business of labelling. Try as I might, visiting this garden centre and that, walking around flower beds in public gardens all over the world, I hadn’t come across a labelling system that was cheap, permanent, legible and pleasing to the eye. So I thought the time had come to design one.
I’d tried metal ones, bamboo, wood, ceramic, terracotta - the lot. What I’d found is that if you wanted something cheap, you were stuck with those ghastly yellow, white and red lollipop sticks that don’t decompose and seem to breed in compost heaps despite our strongest attempts to root them out. Although I rarely bought new packets of lollipop stick labels, they seemed to breed in my shed. I noticed over Christmas that it was a veritable knocking shop for lollipop stick labels. They could conceive, give birth and raise baby lollipop sticks to maturity in less than eight hours. I could turn off the light in my shed in the evening after saying goodnight to two hundred coloured plastic sticks only to find that when I came in again at 8am there were four hundred of the blighters. So I took the problem to my brilliant, problem-solving husband.
‘I want some nice-looking plant labels for my new vegetable patch.’
‘Mmmm?’
‘You know, stylish labels that don’t cost the earth like those posh ceramic ones, or look cheap and tacky like the plastic lollipop ones or are difficult to write on like the bamboo ones or illegible after half an hour in the rain like the wooden ones.’
‘What labels do the botanical gardens use?’
‘They stamp pieces of anodised aluminium.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Apart from being ridiculously expensive, I was wanting something a bit more… you know… contemporary.’
The next day, he arrived home with some black plastic fibre-board, the stuff that’s corrugated like cardboard but made from sturdy plastic, the stuff estate agents use as sign boards. He handed them to me with a white ink marker pen.
‘You wanted contemporary,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about those gastro pub blackboards – you know, those ones that are beautifully handwritten in chalk with the specials of the day.’
I looked up at him.
‘Just cut these boards into strips,’ he said to me as if I was nine years old, ‘and write the names of your plants onto the labels with the permanent pen.’
Thanks for telling me, I thought to myself. If you hadn’t been so clear I might have put them all in the blender and added shoe dye and toothpaste.
But he was right. It was a perfect solution. So I spent the entire day in the shed cutting up the black plastic sheets of fibre-board into strips and writing the names of plants with the thick white ink pen. I tried different sizes of labels and different ways of writing the names and shoved them into the soil as a test to see which would weather best over several days. I felt like an under-gardener at Wisley taking on her first trials. But I have to say, they all looked splendid. It was a simple, stunning solution; typical of the design genius I had married. Even my writing was legible from several feet away. That was it, then. We would be adopting this labelling style in the Grindleford Road gardens in the forthcoming season.
It is so tempting, when stress levels are peaking in a marriage, when one is gardening at high altitude, to see only the weaknesses in those gardening alongside. But here was another example of Stan’s uncanny ability to solve problems. I needed to remember that this was how he dealt with life, by solving problems, not by talking about them. In fact, whenever I asked him to open up, he always said: A problem shared is a problem doubled.
Thinking back to the previous five years, what I had learned - when seeing him faced with adversity - was a lesson in perseverance, deep thought and creativity. His ideas of lowering the platform to make me a garden, of digging the trenches to save most of the slippage, of throwing a mesh across to stabilise the mountain, all of these solutions worked. Now he had found an answer to my labelling problem.
People come as a package. We can’t pick and choose which bits we like and which bits we don’t. That spring, although irked by his taciturnity, I was very grateful for his logical, practical approach to life, for it enabled me to move on towards spring. That season whe
n the tensions of nature begin to pull apart the hard earth.
‘Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What is it like?
‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…’
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Kick-starting spring
Eventually, the Business Gods conspired to keep me at home in London with a British client and deliver some settled weather. By mid-March, my shed thermometer was reading 10°C, the sun was no longer pale and weak, there were stacks of jobs to be done and I had only local work assignments until May, so we were off! Spring was finally here.
On my first day I had:
cleared all the beds of weeds
moved the magnolia grandiflora to a more sheltered spot
built a pea and bean frame (that Stan would eventually approve)
planted onions, shallots, garlic
labeled almost everything in the garden that stood still
swept the terrace
scratched the decking with a stout yard brush to remove moss
planted up tomato-seed trays
prepared the tomato tubs with new compost and tall canes in anticipation of 4 foot of growth this year.
Finally, I made notes in my garden notebook of what was planted where and when, so if I forgot, I could refer to the proper name, date and location and avoid grubbing up the precious seedlings I mistook for weeds.
That was it, then. The hard work on the back garden with its new terraced vegetable patch and two new herbaceous borders was finished. I could sit back and watch as it began to provide us with pleasure and sustenance. But what now? Our garden surrounded the house on three sides. Surely we couldn’t stop there? We had a front garden too.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 22
