I started gardening alongside my father….the long garden put down to vegetables in those post war years. The potatoes, early, mid season and late…..the lettuce…..carrots – never a success in our clay soil- beans both broad and french, but the top of the tops…sprouting broccoli, that true harbinger of spring. You needed to have sown this a year ahead to get your crop but it was well worth its place in the garden.
I still miss the excitement of the seed catalogues arriving in the dark of the year, to be consulted at the table by the fire while the rain thrashed against the windows….father dismissing novelties with his view that if they remained in the catalogue for three more years they might be worth looking at, me wondering if it would please the heavens to spare us curly kale this year – the heavens never relented and the kale was always with us.
I was allowed to choose some flower seed…the same choice every year – sweet peas of a new colour to go with the seeds already collected from the crops of previous years.
But better than the excitement of the seed catalogues, the sheer peace of gardening itself, when actions repeated in rhythm cleared the mind, untangled the knots of the day and left in their place tranquility. That was a great gift to have given a child who was often unhappy.
Keble‘s ‘trivial round, the common task’ may well furnish all we ought to ask……but give me gardening for fulfillment and for real quiet delight.
When we lived in Surrey, mother and her sisters were addicted to the Sunday outing in the chocolate and yellow coaches of Surrey Motors, usually to visit country houses where the portraits of the ancestors peered down upon the hoi polloi invading their marble halls and said hoi polloi wondered how the families of the portraits managed to wangle out of tax by giving their property over to the National Trust and still keep living there.
There were always gardens to admire too and I discovered that there was more to gardening life than kale. There was design…vistas, gardens within gardens, contrasting colours and shapes….and there was form……an Italian cypress punctuating a parterre, blowsy roses adorning a wall….and sometimes there were little lead labels to tell you what you were looking at. In Latin.
‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ was on the radio each week where one of the panellists was bound to say the ‘the answer lies in the soil’, which started new lines of enquiry as to what could be grown where, aided by an absolutely super book for kids showing the original source of plants and how they came to Britain, where the latin names were explained as coming from Linnaeus‘ method of classification.
I loved that book….but, like ‘les neiges d’antan, it has gone…gathered up in the all too regular raids on my possessions for which I was held to be ‘too old now’ and circulated among younger members of the extended family.
Like my red train. I still bear a grudge in respect of that train.
Wonderfully, the hand knitted scratchy heather mixture tops and skirts never seemed to be surplus to requirements. I classed them with kale and looked forward to emancipation.
And emancipation came. I could buy plants, from catalogues or direct from the nursery, I could experiment with my green spaces, I could gain inspiration from Christopher Lloyd‘s books, but I still had my veg garden where I could enjoy the rhythms of digging, raking, dibbling and hoeing and this continued when meeting Leo, who felt about gardening as I did myself.
Gardening in France was initially back breaking. It was clear that waste management was in its infancy from the plethora of tin cans, twisted metal and broken pottery upon which the spade would jar at every stroke, not to speak of the ‘cadeaux empoisonnes’ left under larger shrubs – relics of the mix of cement made up just before lunch and found to be rock hard on returning from same, which would be tipped out where it was hoped it would not be spotted.
There was a mushroom growing business in the limestone caves south of the Loire, and the compost was free for the taking so the poor car came to know the route very well as we turned rock hard soil into something worth working with and later managed to preserve British phlegm as French friends would say ‘ ah, but you have good soil at least…’ as it was all too clear that British gardening was inferior to that of France because everything was not in dead straight lines kept clear by an armoury of poisons worthy of the cabinet of Catherine de Medici. If one of their garden sheds had gone up in flames people would have been wearing gasmasks in a radius of one hundred kilometers.
Buying plants at local outlets could have its moments. Either you were barred from the premises as not being professional landscapers – in the same way in which you could not buy a plumbing fitting because you were not a plumber – or you were not, but you took the plant label as an indication rather than authentication. You would work out a planting scheme only to discover when it came to fruition that what was supposed to be pale pink was in fact distinctly puce. Complain? Demand a refund? The shrug told you that the nursery had had your money and was both sticking to it and sticking your complaint where the sun did not shine.
And here, in Costa Rica, another world of gardening.
We had bought a cafetal… a finca producing coffee. Though not given ideal conditions, the boom in coffee in the seventies had led to widespread clearance of woodland round here, neatly timed so that the first coffee crops coincided with a fall in the coffee price. We kept the coffee for a while, but the expense of artificial fertilizer – and a distaste for using it – backed up by my intense dislike of being clad from head to toe in a reversed bin bag against the rain while balancing precariously on a narrow terrace picking ripe berries from wands six foot high -made us decide to abandon it and grub up the roots.
We have sugar cane and fodder grass for the sheep, and with the help of Danilo, who knew the finca as a boy, we are replanting with the trees that used to grow here with a view to maintaining the water supply and providing food for the birds and beasts which are gradually returning.
All I can say is that itf you plant something here and it will grow…it does. In spades.
Trees planted five years ago tower over us and the buildings. From our house, one hundred and twenty metres above the lower part of the finca, we can see the slope filled with the many shades of green and the differing shapes of the trees.
Up here at the top, we have a small garden…palms both large and small, brugmansia, ground cover…..and agaves. Enough to enjoy.
But do we miss the physical side of gardening that was so satisfying and positive?
Of course we do, but we can now accept our physical shortcomings and still find the tranquility we love under the shade of trees we have planted and tended while we wait for the passion flower to fruit and the papaya and mango to yield up their riches.
You might like to read Marvell’s poem on ‘The Garden’.
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crown’d from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flow’rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walk’d without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
The Venomous Bead 