9 May 2005
CdP
I think it was divine retribution for my having resorted to noxious chemicals rather than brewing up garlicky concoctions or trying with old soap. Of course, I couldnÕt really have brewed up anything much, having dismantled the kitchen in order to treat the floor. Now the contents of our kitchen are spread between laundry and that half of the living room where the floor is lustrous, and dangerously slippery should you do anything so foolhardy as place the carpet specially bought with that area in mind on its shiny surface.
The moment I started pumping my little pump to lay low all the munching beasts attacking my roses Ð Cocktails, the ones growing up the east wall of the chicken house and already sporting three gaudy red-and-yellow blooms, the brave little things Ð the noxious chemicals came spurting outÉ from the spout, yes, but also from around the screw-top, and, most alarmingly, from the bottom of the handle. Why are there certain plastics that mice love? Why do they nibble some and not others? I remember the lawn-mower we kept in the basement beneath the house in Spain, with its handle almost gnawed away by famished mice. No, rats: these were massive creatures that left spine-chilling teeth marks. How they managed to get up the handle then balance while chomping on the very, slippery, thing that they were consuming is anybodyÕs guess. Our Pieve mice are much more delicate things. (I know: I upset one on Sunday when I pulled the plaster-dusted piece of cardboard off an old palette in the lean-to, then moved the palette, destroying a mouse nest and sending the inhabitant scuttling off into the woodpile.) They had nibbled daintily at the very end of the pump handle, making such a small hole that I hadnÕt even noticed it. (This must have been after they had gorged themselves upstairs on the plastic box that L keeps his nail and rawl plug collection in.) No vacuum, no squirt. The stuff coming out of the nozzle turned into a leaky dribble and the stuff coming out everywhere else a gushing torrent.
I say that my roses are starting to bloom bravely. Brave, perhaps, because every time I stand admiring them I wonder what possessed me to put them against an east-facing wall. And to put those ones in particular there. They do get sun of course. Quite a few hours of it now. But IÕm sure theyÕd be much happier in many other sunnier spots. And other, less sun-demanding varieties Ð a rambling Alberic Barbier with its creamy blooms, for instance, or an blowsy, perfumed Zephirine Drouhin Ð might have been so much more content there.
How many of my choices have been dictated by (a) forlorn individuals I spot in nurseries, just crying out to be taken home and nurtured and (b) having to restrict myself to those hidden corners of the land around the house where the builders were unlikely to stash or dump any of their tools or materials. A fatal combination, this. And one that I am no doubt going to regret. Like the straggly twigs of Syringa vulgaris that I stuck back where they had been after the bulldozer had rearranged the levels immediately above the house to my liking. I mean ÔstuckÕ quite literally: in some cases I didnÕt even dig a hole: just shoved them into the ground in which they had been so happy for so manyÉ what? years? decades? generations? Now I find that many have miraculously survived. Nay, that theyÕre sprouting and even flowering. Will I ever find the courage to root them out when I finally get down to planning that bit of the garden properly and realise that they have no real role there?
One particular sloping triangle of land, just by the caravan, I officially designated The Graveyard right from the start. That rocky bit of uninviting territory overshadowed by a misshapen peach tree, I decided, was where I would put survivors from my Rome balcony Ð put them willy-nilly and see what happened. The first thing that happened was that I suddenly felt it looked sad and threadbare and went out and bought two forsythias which, I felt, would at least lend a bit of early spring cheer. But what happened next, annoyingly, is that The Graveyard turned into a charming corner of my would-be garden, with its odd combination of Jasminum officinale (what, growing here, in the shade of a peach which, in turn, is in the shade of the big oak, and happily riding out a vicious winter?) and Vinca major and thriving colony of chives with their lilac pompoms already breaking out and Ceratostigma plumbaginoides breaking back through the earth after its hibernation and even Ð ridiculously Ð a miniature pomegranate. All doing just fine, despite about as little attention as they ever got on the balcony. No, not trueÉ at least they are on the receiving end of my rather over-ambitious watering system, which will be downsized just as soon as I get my act together.
Given the meteorological complications of CdP, it never ceases to amaze me that anything can be persuaded to grow there: so hot and dry for so many months in summer; hail-attacks in spring and autumn carefully timed to remove your buds first and your mature fruits later; and, this winter at least, ground frozen for six weeks solid through Ð admittedly Ð the worst winter for decades. Sparse and lush by turns, the area has a far richer diversity of vegetation than it would seem to deserve. Right now, the poppy explosion is happening Ð great heaps of them bursting into their scarlet glory, punctuated with the hot yellow of Sinapis arvensis.
And all around me, roses are doing that old Umbrian trick of putting on as generous a show as any wild flower. Because though my Cocktails are ÔbraveÕ, theyÕre no more so, if IÕm forced to tell the truth, than any number of glorious specimens thriving in all kinds of unlikely situations all over our rose-heaven corner of Umbria.
Gracing the bank outside the kitchen are the Partridge ground-coverers that I bought myself for Christmas from the wonderful little Apuldram rose nursery (http://www.apuldramroses.co.uk/) near Chichester. I abandoned them in their bare-rooted state in my father-in-lawÕs garage for a week, then toted them to London and around, trying to remember to water them but in fact treating them fairly cavalierly. Then an epic journey to Standsted and Rome, thence to Umbria and finally into that bank to ride out the harsh, harsh winter with no attention from me beyond an absent-minded sprinkling of manure. The miracle here in not so much that theyÕve survived and even grown, but how many of them there are. I know for a fact that I planted eight roses there. But now I have seven healthy plants, one struggling one and a dead one. That, by my calculations, makes nine. And not even rose-friendly Umbrian soil can do that. Can it?