New Beginnings

Chapter 16

“Am I swearing like Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski when I put my knickers on?” I ask the bedroom when I get dressed in the morning. “No, I am not! To the tune of Happy Birthday To You, I sing “Lots of lovely drugs for me, with my breakfast, lunch, and tea,” as I inch down the stairs. “You might not want to use those lyrics when the grand children are around” says Bob.

The pain killing medication has opened a world of pleasure in moving about. In moving at all. “So have you thought about my idea to get the garden remodelled?” I ask Bob, now that he’s had time to sleep on it. His eyes light up. I can almost hear the rattle of slope stability calculations whizzing through his brain.

It’s early autumn and after a busy summer turning itself into a jungle, the garden is now lazily squeezing out a few rose blooms and seed heads. The long grass is yellowing and dry, festooning the shrubs like straggling, out of condition hair. And just like when I can’t stand my hair any longer and book a haircut, now that I’ve decided to re-style the garden, it immediately looks beautifully sun-bleached and tousled and perfect as it is.

As I shuffle through the terraces, I’m mentally taking it apart and replanning it. Not going near the big pond which I fell into last year and it wasn’t funny because I couldn’t get out. “I love this garden just as it is” I say to my friend Jean, ignoring all the times I’ve cursed the pressure of holding back the army of dandelions, docks, creeping buttercup, bindweed, brambles, thistles, and more dandelions. “I want to be able to work like I used to. And I’m so lucky to be able to move again, I feel like a spoilt brat for moaning.” Jean is also a keen gardener and is adapting to physical limitations herself. She makes kind noises and we have a bit more cake. “If”, I say through tight lips, “We get someone to cut right into the steep bank and throw loads of it away, they could make two raised beds with wide paths between them. As a starting point.”

That evening, in the twilight with a blackbird’s song nearby, I sway on the swing seat, glimpsing from afar the big pond that Bob and I dug over twenty years ago. From underneath my angry resentment, tears come. These changes will mark the end of an era. I hadn’t known how deeply I’d given my heart and body to the love of working in this garden. I’ve been as much rooted in its soil as any one of its plants.

Bob and I decide to go ahead with some radical alterations which will help me get around without falling and give me access to dig and plant relatively easily with a trowel, in a couple of narrow, raised borders. It takes a while to find a landscaper who will listen to what we want done and who will also have the engineering skill to carry out the massive earth moving operation on the steep bank.

During the waiting period I spot a “Wanted” advert on a Freecycle site. A young woman is looking for plants and shrubs to fill her new garden which is a reclaimed building site. She arrives with her small daughter and a stout spade. Whilst the mother digs up roses, lilies, potentillas, geums, and other shrubs and low growers that I’ve forgotten the names of, I attempt to keep the child amused.

I begin by reading one of my grandchildren’s old books and as the child loses interest and becomes bored, I read faster and faster, which is always a mistake. ‘What’s Mummy doing? I want to go home. NOW”. She rushes down to the small pond and begins hopping around the cramped space. By the time I get down there she’s running along the narrow path beside a steep drop. “Careful Dear, look where you’re going” I shout as she dashes along some steps apparently staring at the sky. By now I’ve made myself responsible for her safety and don’t want to lose her on My Watch.

Like a hunting dog she tracks down her parent. She repeats firmly that she wants to go home NOW. I’d also like her to go home now. My complete failure to entertain her is embarrassing me. Then I notice what her mother has done. “Oh wow, you have been busy” I say. She has done exactly what I invited her to do. The centre of the garden is a mess of bare soil, great holes and stones. The young woman is covered in sweat and mud with a radiant smile shining through. A few weeks later she sends me a photo of the migrants flourishing in her garden. It gives me a warm glow to see they are thriving in new homes.

Then we wait ages until the landscaper has time to do the job. After weeping so bitterly at the thought of changing our garden layout, by the time he and his team start work, I just want them to get on with it. They begin in the middle of May. “Where do you want the lawn put?” asks one of the guys cheerfully. “There’s a lot of it.” Ah, hadn’t thought about that. As they rip up strips of lawn, in an inspired moment I direct them to various old grassy paths that are, as always, sloping sideways down the hill. They build up the sinking side with the turf strips. The lawn is replaced with a wide gravel area stepping down onto a flat deck where the old swing seat will be placed again but with more room in front of it for friends and family to gather round. Before, they’d had to sit in a row on the narrow grass terrace. Another shallow step leads down to a gravelled area towards the greenhouse. Bob will no longer struggle to mow a terrace with an uphill and a sideways slope.

The new deck is made of very expensive recycled plastic and it looks just like faded wood. But we won’t have to watch it slowly decay and fall to pieces over the next ten years and it won’t be slippery. The landscapers cut holes in it so that the Rose and the Honeysuckle can continue to grow in the soil on either side of the swing seat. I didn’t want completely bare decking or the work of watering more tubs.

The surrounding areas are topped with mustard coloured self-binding gravel on top of a permeable liner so that rain can drain through. Weeds are already popping through here and there in a homely way.

The steep slope in front of the swing seat terrace has been changed out of all recognition. A narrow flower bed runs along in front of the deck. The far side of the flower bed is supported by old railway sleepers. These make a metre high wall with a wide footpath at the bottom. Then a lower and wider flower bed runs parallel with its own metre high retaining railway sleeper wall linking to the lower, now widened garden path. This raised bed winds like a snake right along and past the small pond. The landscapers have widened the path around the pond so that I’m less likely to fall in again. I may not have mentioned that last summer I fell into this pond as well.

One evening after the team have gone home for the day, Bob and I christen the new decking by sitting on the re-installed swing seat with wine and a bowl of crisps. “It reminds me of an infinity pool”, says Bob, addressing the newly created bed in front of us, “With just the bare soil, there’s nothing to see until your eye meets the other side of the valley.” He sounds pleased about this and I am too. With this image in mind I decide to keep the planting of this bed pretty low except for iris spikes here and there. The irises have beautiful grey blue striped leaves and they came from Bob’s mum’s garden. We dug some up when she died, and the house was sold. They’re real gypsies and have gaily moved from Derbyshire to Oxford and then to Worcester.

I’m doing all the planting. Yes me! Because both flower beds are raised on one side like steps, I can reach to do it all without bending. It’s a joy to be rummaging around in bags of homemade compost. Then mixing the compost with our clay soil and some grit. The greenhouse shelving is stacked at waist height, on one side with the bags of grit, farm-manure and compost, so that I can just trowel it all forward into a bucket held in my arms, without having to bend. Then I go down to the raised beds which lead off a few shallow steps. Beside the steps, posts have been driven in with a rope rail fastened along the top. These prevent me from falling down the steep grassy bank beyond and are also useful to pull myself up the steps.

At the end of the landscaping work and the hot dry summer, I walk slowly past the new raised beds. The lower one which leads to the little pond has veils of tall stems. Spindly scabious and other things, with delicate pale flowers of blue or cream crowning them, sway gently in the breeze. Indulging my pleasure in a bit of weeding, I tease out a budding dandelion. Rock roses dotted with orange or peach flowers are beginning to settle in and spread themselves over the edge of the sleepers.

The new raised flower beds are not planted with a view of the plants developing over many years. It’s my area to poke and weed and pull out and change things without long term goals. This means that some plants may only stay for one summer. Plants that aren’t thriving, or ones that I’ve decided I don’t like, get passed on to friends. If no one wants them, they are going to get transplanted into my new Sink Or Swim flower bed. The one that used to contain the rhubarb patch which was always too dry and never recovered after the muntjacs chewed all the leaves off. Well, now the rhubarb is surrounded by leaky hose in the raspberry cage and has replaced the early raspberries which never did much. Rhubarb, honestly, why is any plant which likes lots of water, daft enough to grow its own umbrella?

The Sink Or Swim flower bed experiment is interesting to me because it’s a hotch-potch of random plants, and I’d like to know if I begin to find the whole thing attractive. It will then of course, make a nonsense of all the painstaking aesthetic decisions that I’ve made, about the plants elsewhere in the garden. Mirabel Osler, who is one of my favourite gardening writers, wrote a chapter called “Growing To Love The Plants I Hate”, in her book A Breath From Elsewhere. In it she tries out planting schemes for all the plants she dislikes, just to see if she can make them attractive to herself. I always loved the fact that when her husband who had been her gardening partner for many years, eventually died, she moved house and began another completely different garden.

A toad has already moved into the space under the new decking and comes out for a potter when it’s dark. It doesn’t seem to mind the gravel area under its soft webbed feet. The centre of the garden is now transformed and the pale gravel brings light and a sort of desert meets zen look. If all around the edges is chaotic and wild, somehow I’m okay with that. Me and the rest of nature living side by side.

And it’s still my sanctuary, wrapped by tall trees standing shoulder to shoulder and stretching back into the woodland like gentle sentinels.

I love it.