Partner planting
Chapter 11
On a tentatively sunny spring day, I take the train to Oxford and visit Nura. I ask her to be my Best Woman because I’m going to marry Bob. She knows all about having rather large trust issues. Speaking though tight lips I try to explain, “I’m fed up with always being poised ready to leave. It’s like half sitting down in case the chair breaks. But maybe it’s a good chair and I could relax into it, you know, lean back.” I’m crying now, “It might be alright with Bob because he listens and we work things out. But what if he changes?” Nura “Hmmm”s thoughtfully, “You’ve been together for eight years now, that’s a reasonable trial period. He seems to me like a pretty sturdy sort of chair. ”
Jessie The Healer says “It can be the opposite to your first wedding.” She’s heard about the first one when I was married at seventeen in navy and disgrace with a largish bulge at the front. None of my friends were allowed to come but my parents had asked a growing crowd of business and social acquaintances of their own. Jessie giggles, “You could just invite people that you like. And, here’s the twist, make them all dress in navy and be in disgrace.” I think that the final twist, though clever, might rather cloud the atmosphere.
My old friend Maya is a professional seamstress as well as playing a mean djembe drum. She makes me an ivory silk frock with big puffed sleeves and an even bigger puffed skirt. She trims the neckline with handmade rosebuds and stitches seed pearls randomly all over everything. There is even a surprise matching bag with a silk stole lined with shimmering gauze “In case it gets chilly, it’ll be June but I know your English so-called summers.” She says.
On the day Maya helps me to dress as if I’m a princess. Bob, my prince in a beautiful new suit, drives the two us to the registry office in my pink Morris Minor, with the soft top rolled down. The neighbours have decorated it with flowers and ribbons and we sweep through the town with passers by waving at us. Only my children and our close friends are invited to the ceremony. I can’t remember what is said, only that when we’ve finished our promises and turn round, we can see that everyone is beaming and quite a lot of them are crying too, including the registrar.
Back at our home, friends mill about on the patio and top lawn carrying plates of food from the buffet and admiring the view. Although it’s June there’s a cold wind though the sunshine and a fleeting rain shower. Fortunately, being British, we just use it as another topic of conversation. Richard from next door has volunteered to run a bar from his front porch. He’s dressed himself smartly as a waiter with a black bow tie. Then he complains when a guest casually orders “One red wine and a white wine for my friend”. “Just as if I was a waiter” says Richard, offended. As requested everyone leaves by 6pm because I know that I’ll be totally peopled out by then.
“I’m starving” I say to Bob, “I was too excited to eat earlier. Let’s see what’s left over from the buffet.” In the kitchen it is immaculately clean and every scrap of the buffet has been taken away by the caterers. We sit on the wooden lounge floor in our finery eating cornflakes and opening wedding presents. My husband and I.
The desert of brown dead grass is now ready for planting. The soil is a challenging mixture of clay and house brick. Sometimes several house bricks are welded together with mortar. This is when I discover that the previous building on the site had been bulldozered over the slope into the front garden, to make way for our house. A few inches of clay soil had been thrown over the top of the rubble. Possibly including a mix of blackberry and couch grass seeds.
My impatience to get on is both a boon because I get a lot done and a curse because in hindsight I made so many mistakes by not thinking things through. That second summer I wanted to have lots of flowers and I wanted the colour palette to be different in each border. This plan was taking some inspiration from Vita Sackville West’s different coloured “Rooms” in her huge garden at Sissinghurst. Although I’d never seen it, I could visualise the shades of pink all together, and then the shades of blue somewhere else. So on one side of the zigzag path I planted pale and deeper pink potentillas and lots of other pink stuff that I can’t remember now. On the other side of the path I planted lavenders, there wasn’t much choice in varieties in those days but the haze of deep and pale blue lavender that bloomed amongst the clumps of cornflowers squeezed in between, looked beautiful.
The scorching sun faded the potentilla flowers to a blinding white, memo to self, don’t plant flowers that fade in sunshine on a sunny slope unless you don’t mind them turning white. Then the winter that followed was very wet and the next spring most of the young lavenders had died, not being good swimmers. I replaced them with moisture loving plants and I’m sure that you can guess what happened in the following summer drought.
It seems to me that once stuff has been in the ground for a while, if it’s the sensitive type it will slowly dwindle or thrive according to the weather. The more stoical plants just plod on whatever, and the excessive ones romp everywhere. Being inclined to introversion, I slightly disapprove of the rompers which act like those people on a dance floor who fling themselves around and don’t seem to be aware of the slaps and squashed toes that they are dishing out to their neighbouring dancers.
Poring through my expanding library of gardening books for advice about how to garden on a steep hill I found only one “Steep slope” in an index. Rushing to the page listed I read all about how to add height and interest in a flat garden by building a hillock of car tyres and pouring soil over them.
I didn’t really know how to design for such a big area. At a quarter of an acre it was at least five times bigger than any garden I’d had before. The other gardens I’d planned, at Oxford, and preceding that, the gasworks garden, had both been long and thin. And flat.
The area that I’m tackling now is basically three steep slopes interspersed with two narrow grassed terraces for walking or sitting on. Being at the end of the row of houses it’s much wider than the garden next door to us, or anything I’d worked in before.
The mixture of clay and builders’ rubble plus bright sun contrasting with deep shade cast by the slopes as the sun moved around, makes no sense when selecting plants. This eventually stands me in good stead. I learn to mostly stick things where I fancy and see what happens.
By now, as well as getting married, we’ve made our new home comfy and the colours that I like. In the kitchen, we’ve chipped off all the wall to wall hideous tiles, an aubergine, a mug and a blob thing printed on each tile. A nosy pheasant watched the job through the open back door, despite the deafening noise of smashing tiles. The kitchen is now a soft lilac with favourite postcards and snippets of painted paper, pasted on here and there. The bathroom shower cubicle is bright pink with a mural of an orange cat holding an umbrella, painted on the inside wall. The water pipes no longer rattle thunderously throughout the house when someone flushes the downstairs loo.
Bob has completed the installation of the summer house. I’ve finished digging the zig-zag path through the first steep slope down to the first grassed terrace. Barry the Builder has put four steps in at the top of the zigzag path and another one at the bottom so that no sliding on the bum at the beginning or leaping off at the end, is required. Walking down is safer but a little dull. Barry also noticed me struggling to dig out a forest of sedge grass below the small pond. It had grown over one of the streams which seasonally pop out of the hill. He used an axe to clear them with no apparent effort. I bought myself an axe and quickly found that hacking is harder than it looks. It was quite a relief when the axe head flew off.
Gone are the days when I pottered around the shops looking for something new to wear. Nurseries and the increasingly common garden centres are my new consumer habit and my greed is insatiable. Unfortunately as the summer ends, so does the supply of plants for sale. It’s the nineteen nineties and all-year-round garden goodies are still in the future.
We’re in autumn again, never a good time for depression. I’m trying to do a walk every morning before I start work. The damp chill fingers me down my neck. Between the thick jacket and the boots, the cold quickly penetrates my leggings. I brace myself against the prickle of goose bumps all over. It’s been raining for days so going through the steep woods I’m either slipping and sliding on the mud or sinking down into it on the flatter parts of the so-called path. The trees say nothing. Even they are sulking.
“Bloody trees”, I mutter, picking my way through the shade of the wood, in my muddy boots. I miss having Jessie The Healer across the road. I want to be near to Nura, back in Oxford. Coming out of the wood and into the water meadow, rabbits scatter and dash into the hedges. “Stupid rabbits”, I scowl. My heart weighs a ton. Crossing the tangled grass of the meadow and heading towards the river, I look back. The sun is rising just above the dense woodland. In the mist the pale light gleams and shimmers above and through the treetops. Silence.
“Oh”. Everything stops. Awe and unbelievable joy. “This is why I’m here” comes unbidden into my chest. The experience is over in moments. But I’m left broken open. This is why I’m here.
I don’t know what this means but something has changed.