The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  For several years, the sloped decking that led up from the front gate to the front door had been getting more and more treacherous. In the early-morning frosts, when Stan left for work, I sometimes heard him slipping and sliding with his briefcase and gym bag. And now that Matthew was temporarily living with us, his negotiation down the path in the mornings with his bicycle that winter had been quite comical. Over the years several friends had been victims of the slippery deck, not all of whom could blame their falls on the amount they had drunk in our company. The denouement came that Christmas when a friend, a solicitor, slipped on the decking after leaving our party and threatened, only half in jest, to sue us.

  With more ice and snow forecast and the Duchess coming to stay, Stan and I decided that the decking would have to go. The problem was that developments in the back garden had been occupying Bob the Brickie, so as soon as he was finished there, we asked him to replace the front path with proper bricks. He laid a beautiful crisscross design that was (hopefully) non-slip, new steps up to the front door and sensible brick edging butting onto the Caledonian pebbles that make up our ground cover in the front.

  I replaced the shabby plants in the tubs either side of the front door with two standard trees. They stood formal and erect like sentries on guard. Underneath I planted deep burgundy heather and some dwarf daffodils. They looked splendid and I stood back when I was finished, smiling at my handiwork. However, it drew attention to the peeling paint on the front door, so Stan announced he would have to paint it. He put a few splotches of colour halfway up the door. After a couple of weeks, trying to choose which one we liked most as we went in and out, and asking visitors, including the postman, we painted the front door and the front gate a duck-egg blue. No doubt this would throw up some other need and I suspected that before the summer was upon us, scaffolding would be up and we would be painting the whole house.

  Designing in four dimensions

  The experience of renovating our London garden brought into focus a remarkable difference between Stan’s approach to design and mine, which hadn’t surfaced in our plans for the Spanish garden. It came to light one spring afternoon when I proudly showed off the sweet-pea wigwam I had built.

  ‘Can’t it be lower?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was taken aback.

  ‘Three feet high rather than six feet?’

  ‘Well, yes it could, I suppose,’ I answered. ‘But once the sweet peas reach the top they would flop over. They need support to grow to their full height.’

  ‘But it looks so… spare.’ He didn’t seem confident that this was the right word, so I pushed him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘So spare. You know – bare. Out of proportion.’

  I reminded him that in six weeks time the sweet peas would be scrambling up the poles and the beds to each side and would have achieved considerable growth, and the potatoes underneath would be 3 feet high. In fact, there would be so much growth by that stage, the wigwam wouldn’t look too tall. It may even be dwarfed by everything else. It was only a matter of time. He conceded reluctantly.

  I puzzled over his response for a few days until it dawned on me why he had asked the question. In a gardener’s world, there are four dimensions. The first three: length, breadth and height, are what most people, even architects, understand as the dimensions to be designed and put in place. But it is the fourth dimension, time, that garden designers can never ignore but that architects rarely need to consider. How disconcerting it would be if, after a building was finished and everyone had gone home, it began to grow upwards and outwards of its own accord. Or if a wing of it decided to die off in the first year, or it expanded and contracted over the course of four seasons. Architects don’t normally have to face such issues. Once it’s done, it’s done. And with minimal maintenance, it should still be the same size and shape in ten years as it was when the builders left for their next project. But a garden designer who ignores the dimension of time commits malpractice.

  True, at that moment my pea and bean wigwam was rather large and lanky, like an adolescent boy. But then I remembered that’s exactly what Stan had looked like when I first met him. So I reminded him that with the passage of time he had turned into a most handsome man. If he were patient, the same would happen with my juvenile vegetable plot.

  The return of winter

  Spring brought more gloom. Nothing was happening on the Spanish front. I kept reminding Stan that no news was good news, but it was weak consolation. Even in London, we were unable to make much progress. It was officially now March, but for several days my thermometer refused to nudge over 4°C and the whole of the British Isles plunged back into winter. The worst winter for fifty years.

  Stan came home early from work one day to find me hiding from the cold in the shed. I had ventured out as usual, full of optimism, thinking I could plant a few peas or erect some more canes or put in my next crop of second early potatoes. But I lasted barely ten minutes before the unkind rain lashing at my face forced me to shelter. How I longed for the sunshine of Spain.

  Once inside my refuge, I tried to think of useful jobs I could do to justify my time and had decided to reorganise my shelves. The brightly coloured woven baskets in which I stored all my knick-knacks had faded and decomposed in the light. So the previous day I’d been to IKEA to buy some of their pigeon boxes. I’m not sure what other gardeners hoard as knick-knacks, but mine were the usual things like cactus gravel, string, seed packets, wire clips, labels, indelible pens, elastic bands. But then I must own up to more useless rubbish like pretty shells collected across the world, bits of glass that I planned to make into wind chimes and pieces of Victorian china I’d dug up in the garden and kept, to remind me of the families who had lived there before. I had happily reorganised my entire small, medium and large plant labels into the pigeon boxes and was about to commence sorting my shell collection into small, medium and large shells when Stan found me. The look on his face when I explained what I was doing was a mixture of pity and incomprehension.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked with genuine curiosity.

  ‘I don’t know, really. I just thought I needed to sort out my shell collection.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Stan had probably spent the day making multimillion-pound decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of people. And I had sorted my shell collection.

  ‘You were pottering, weren’t you?’ he teased. Pottering was the term he used to describe anything I did that was ineffective or time wasting. It was a habit I was indulging in more as I got older. I preferred the dictionary definition: To potter (chiefly British): to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely or casual manner.

  He changed the subject.

  ‘I saw that English lawyer today. You know the one who specialises in Spanish planning problems?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He doesn’t know what we should do either.’

  ‘What did he think of the idea of suing Marcel when this is all over?’

  ‘He didn’t think much of it, to be honest. He asked where it would get us, except for a feeling of satisfaction, a sort of revenge. All we can really accuse Marcel of is being uncommunicative and that’s not against the law.’

  We both stood in silence.

  ‘It’s going nowhere - yes?’ He knew what I meant.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Stan stared at the pile of old, faded woven baskets on the floor that I was throwing out.

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Oh, just some old stuff. Time to move on.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he replied.

  At that moment something significant may have occurred in our pursuit of the Grand Design. Perhaps it was time to move on.

  I opened the shed door and contemplated a swift dash through the rain back to the house for a gin and tonic.

  ‘Race ya!’ he said, and ran in front of me.

  Finally, some results

  Throughout the remainder of
spring, Stan and I hardly spoke about the house in Spain. Not surprisingly, I was occupied with the vegetables and he seemed to be able to put it to the back of his mind. The weather had picked up and I was able to abandon my pottering for something a little more productive. By mid-April, the forecast had predicted four or five days of rising temperatures – up to 13°–17°C – and unbroken sunshine. That may just be enough, I was thinking, to kick-start the reluctant seedlings sitting in their trays. The aubergines had refused to germinate and would need accelerating if we were to have any fruits at all by Christmas. There was only one thing for it; I would have to cheat. So I went to the nursery and bought some aubergine plants 6–7 inches high, mature enough to withstand being put outside. By the end of that week I had done my bit. I had prepared the soil, transplanted all the seedlings I’d grown into the right places and added the right ingredients: water, warmth, light, nutrients. I had spent that week working to give everything the best start. Now it was up to Mother Nature. I’d done what I could. It was her turn.

  Except that I knew I probably couldn’t let her get on with it alone. I would carry on racing out there in my Crocs and dressing gown each morning, clutching my mug of tea. I would put it down frequently in order to tie something in or urge something along or clear a path for something to grow upwards rather than sideways. My impatience for spring to arrive had simply transformed into an impatience for nature to do her stuff, fulfill her role, just GET ON WITH IT.

  Gardens are supposed to slow you down, make you feel calmer, to help you relax, stop wanting to organise everything. That was not my experience. Gardens are simply a reflection of the gardener, a form of autobiography, according to Sydney Eddison. Some are highly controlled, tidy, shaped; others are free and loose and Bohemian.

  There is a street just a couple of blocks away from here that I walk down most days. It is an ordinary north London street, part of the Victorian landscape adopted by families and singles who need somewhere to live close to decent shops, good schools, commutable by bus and tube into town and not too expensive. The houses are large, two or three storeys, joined together in long stucco-fronted terraces with red bricks, white bays, ornate plaster surrounds, stained-glass paneled doors and patterned quarry-tiled paths; the kind of houses that define north London.

  For many years I have enjoyed watching a peach tree blossom and fruit outside number 42 on the south-facing side of this street. During cold winters I have worried about it for the following season, in the good summers I have wanted to open their gate, walk in and gather the rotting peaches on the concrete drive beneath the tree, lest fungus breeds. The people who moved into number 53 left their north-facing front garden empty for a year, not really sure what would grow in so little light. Eventually, they planted rows of Euphorbia characias, which are thriving, but they interspersed them with tall daffodils that flop over mid-April after reaching up too thinly for some light. I wanted to knock on their door and suggest grape hyacinths or dwarf daffodils, but refrained. None of this is my business, of course, and I would deserve any rebuff I got, but I can’t help wanting to nudge it all along.

  By May we were finally getting the days we had pined for. Perhaps a dull morning, but very little breeze, a slight chill in the air, warming slowly and, by lunch-time, big fluffy pillow clouds parting to reveal a bright blue sky through which the sun pierced and lit up the garden. By mid-afternoon everything began to hum. The sweet peas made a squeaking noise as they curled onto the netting I had strung up and twined around the canes. The broad beans burst up through the soil like mini-explosions and the potatoes squished their dark, fat, round leaves through the soil, like balloons being twisted as they pushed upwards. Everything was busy doing something… growing, basically. At last. I could hear them creaking and groaning and pushing and breathing heavily.

  In fact, our front garden looked so lovely, too, that I was not surprised when our postman – who never made eye contact, never talked to anyone, never took his headphones off – stopped at our gate after delivering the post, took the left earphone out and turned to tell me, ‘I really like this now. Your brick path. I nearly killed myself on your slippy decking this winter. It’s much better.’ With that, he put his earphone back in and went on his way. My goodness. An entire monologue. So it was not just the plants that were making sounds that spring.

  Like many part-time gardeners, my afternoons usually began with a modest thought, such as I’ll just pop out for a few minutes and see if the lettuce seedlings need thinning, ending up three hours later with dirty white socks, a sore lower back and fingernails caked with soil. I hardly noticed the afternoons run away, absorbed as I was in thinning out, potting on, tying in, hardening off, earthing up, hosing down, bringing on. (Do gardeners ever do anything that isn’t followed by a preposition?)

  Throughout the lost hours of early summer, my gaze kept wandering over to what I hoped would be the first salad serving of the year. By six o’clock one Saturday evening, with Stan and Matthew due back from their game of tennis in an hour, I could stand it no longer. The salad bed seduced me. So I sidled over to pinch out the baby leaves of mustard leaf, lollo rosso, parsley, rocket and anything else in the salad bed that was large enough to handle. This was not a time for thinnings though; I needed something sturdier. I took the leaves indoors, washed them carefully and laid them in a white porcelain bowl for all to admire. No more than a fistful and needing to be supplemented with some watercress from a bag in the fridge - but they were mine. I decided against a truffle oil - too heavy - and chose a light almond oil instead to present them to the family at dinner. The consensus was ‘turgid’, and ‘crisp’; adjectives not usually used to compliment a packet of mixed Italian leaves from Waitrose.

  As I said, it is for afternoons like that and adjectives like those that make gardeners like us pine all through winter. But such rewards are not always forthcoming. There was a particular day I remember in late May, when exhausting effort brought little reward. The sun had acquired the habit of shining boldly for several hours by then and, experiencing an interlude between client assignments, I had lots of time on my hands. So I stripped off my hoodie and took to the garden, hoping to tan my winter-white arms and complete a few jobs that had been awaiting my attention. That glorious blackcurrant that Stan had bought me in the farmers’ market off Marylebone High Street needed to be planted, but I’d run out of blood, fish and bone meal. Several polystyrene strips of deep-violet petunias had been sitting waiting for me to choose their destination. Some runner beans had been stretching upwards in the shed into oblivion and had fallen over, so needed to be put onto canes. And there was the dry, south-facing bed, which I’d seeded with antirrhinums, sunflowers and cosmos, which were doing absolutely nothing and needed an examination and diagnosis. So after a quick trip to the nursery for the necessaries and, needless to say, some unnecessaries that I couldn’t resist, I began at 12 o’clock.

  By half-past six I had achieved all the jobs on my list and stepped back to look. Do you know, I couldn’t see any difference. There were a few minor tweaks here and there, but no substantial improvement for the six-and-a-half hours of manual labour. My body was aching from head to toe, I hadn’t stopped – well, once for a cup of tea and a second time for a pee, but otherwise, I’d been solidly at it – and what did I have to show for it?

  Sometimes we make great strides and move forward in leaps and bounds. Over that winter in London I suppose we had been leaping and bounding like a hunting beagle’s bollocks.

  We had created a whole new vegetable patch in the back garden, two new herbaceous borders, various pots and new trees in the front. The speed with which we’d created it all had me expecting transformation rather than evolution - rather like those instant garden makeovers. Now that it had all been made over, I was required only to tend it, watch it, nurture it, water it, weed it and generally just keep it ticking along at its own pace - the jobs that bore me. But these I had done. For six-and-a-half hours! And the only difference I could see fo
r all that hard labour was a quarter of an inch of growth at most from the beans, a more upright posture from the spring onions and a pert look in the lobelia’s eye.

  As consolation, I reminded myself that much of the work was going on underground anyway. But I’d quite like a bit of recognition for my efforts from time to time, to be able to see some gain for my pain, to hear someone say, ‘Well done, it’s looking great.’ Perhaps I could adopt the habit of dragging passers-by in to admire the back garden. Or maybe I should refuse to feed the family until they had completed the obligatory round of inspection, nodding and expostulating at the right moments.

  But I guess that’s the game of gardening. We’re not in it for the glory, are we? It’s not about winning a war or impressing an audience. It’s more subtle than that. The gratification is delayed, in some cases by years, so we get used to waiting. The rewards come from noticing more earthworms year after year, and from waiting six months to savour the feel of our own black, crumbly compost between our fingers, and from smelling that scented jasmine behind the back door we planted five years ago and from peeking under the tray covers after a fortnight to find thirty seedlings bristling with vigour. For some of us, the greatest reward of all is feeding our families with food we know is fresh, organic and grown lovingly with hours of our own time and care. So I reminded myself not to complain or feel unrecognised. My rewards would come, if not in heaven, then in the hot bath I was about to run to soak away the six-and-a-half hours of tiring effort.

  CHAPTER NINE: HARVESTING

  IT was in Texas that I rediscovered oaks and vowed to plant them in abundance on our hillside in Spain. There was already one solitary oak tree on our land, a stately spread with long, low limbs and a good nature, and I had asked Stan to bury me beneath it.