19 July 2005

CdP

I have decided to give up on gardening. In my garden at least. The few, paltry plants that I have have come so close to giving up the ghost in this hot dry summer – I'm pretty sure that the last rain that fell was the deluge the day I went to La Scarzuola (2 June 2005) – and that was a long long time ago. Since then we have shuttled between Rome and CdP, with a brief hiatus in Spain, relying far too heavily on a very dodgy watering system. The result of which has been frantic late evenings brandishing a hose in the general direction of wilting, brown-tinged plants with a definitely resentful air to them.

At some point, I realise, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and have a pump installed to channel our well water out of its underground storage tank and to those bits of garden which are far too close to the source for the water to build up any kind of pressure. I have long deluded myself into believing that free-falling water is one of the big advantages of a property clinging to the side of a steep hill, especially if you were wise like us and had your ridiculously deep well dug right at the top of your sloping land. But the vegetable garden (incipient, in that it is now totally free of all builders' equipment, is no longer hidden behind a mountain of builders' garbage, and has been strimmed so that you can more or less make out where it's going to be) must be all of 30cm lower than the tank: what comes out of the hose there is a risible dribble and probably not even enough to force itself through the skinniest of drip pipes. Even down behind the caravan can't be a drop of much more than three metres, and then I compound my grief by trying to persuade the tubes to work uphill from that tap. What I am going to do when I start planting – as I intend to do in September – my lush orchard and glorious front hedge of rugosa roses above the water tank? Some kind of serious rethink is definitely needed.

So I'm concentrating, instead, on getting the house painted, which has the added advantage of being something I can do in the deep cool of this wonderful building. Walls half a metre thick certainly have a positive effect as far as heat-stopping goes. Modern Italian wisdom – the type that goes with city apartment blocks or '60s eyesores – says that in order to keep from suffering heat exhaustion in the comfort of your own home, you must keep shutters closed, and windows too if the sun happens to be beating straight down on them. It's counter-intuitive, and difficult to get the hang of at first: throwing everything open to catch any passing breeze would seem more logical. But in the city, it works. Dark is cool. Well, cooler. Then when evening comes, and the air is less scorched, you can throw everything open and breath a little again. Having accustomed myself to this way of doing things, it seems strange, therefore, to keep this house deliciously fresh by opening everything. It may have something to do with our stone floors, or it may simply be the thickness of the walls (I try not to think that the damp which will no doubt return to try us as soon as the rain resumes has anything to do with this phenomenon). But that's the way it is: even with sun streaming in, Casa Galeotta remains the kind of temperature where you can still sit down for a cup of tea without feeling like you've done an hour in a sauna, and where a very light duvet at night is welcome (which beats sweating, naked, under a whizzing fan in Rome).

I have, to tell the truth, suspended my painting just briefly while Giuseppe performs his bulldozer magic around the house. All around the house is a concrete platform. A pavement, I think, is required by local by-law. Most people around here make it of bricks, which is fine when they go to the trouble and expense of finding old bricks to match the ones in their house but generally fairly horrible if they use new, modern bricks. Some people prefer to use stone. In either case, it requires cementing them in. But for some reason (and it was a good reason, though I can’t remember what it was now) I decided at an early stage that I didn't want any of those things: I wanted well-worn bricks with grass (and thyme and camomile daisies) growing between them. So the real pavement – by which I mean the thing that's technically important to keep the damp away from the walls (hahaha, our damp passes way beneath) – is a concrete strip which also helps to consolidate the bottom of the walls which stood for so long without any foundations or drainage. And above that, bedded in sand and soil, are our bricks with lovely wide spaces between them for vegetation. A chatty, full-of-wordly wisdom old local with a heart condition laid the path, carting great barrow-loads of sand and bricks and cracking fall-flat jokes about attacks and seizures. After which the pavement stood isolated for weeks, towering anything up to 30cm above the surrounding void where the topsoil had been moved or carted away during the building works and where a flourishing crop of the nastiest weeds was holding sway. My problem was finding something to use as topsoil. Or more to the point, given the immense quantities I needed – 40 cubic metres at a conservative guess – something that I could afford to use as topsoil. Which ruled out real topsoil, for which I would have had to take out a mortgage. My nurserywoman recommended three parts tufo sand to one part compost or manure; Giuseppe the bulldozer boy said the same. My nurserywoman said there was a mushroom grower near Castiglione del Lago who would sell me compost. Giuseppe threw up his hands in horror: he has worked there, and knows what goes into their compost: vegetation, yes, but also dead animals, fish and all that animal meal which can no longer be fed to livestock since it was definitely linked to foot and mouth disease. I didn't go there. And I will never be eating cultivated mushrooms again. Instead I went to my nurserywoman's other suggestion, a soil and compost specialist in Vitorchiano, a wonderful character who at an almost reasonable price has provided me with a huge mound of what he called 'letame sterilizzato' by which I presume he means heat-treated manure. 'It doesn't smell at all!' he assured me, which was not quite true in that it does smell fairly dreadful but it doesn't smell like manure and it certainly isn't swarming with flies, even after a week sitting out in the sun. And once it's mixed with tufo and spread, the smell really does seem to go.

So, Giuseppe is mixing and spreading, and bringing the level of what will be my lawn up to the level of my pavement. This, I think, finally may be the stage that makes the house look like it’s nearing completion. First there was all the builders' rubbish that made it look like an abandoned construction site. I hoped that the addition of our brick path would make the house look kind of finished, but the combination of stranded pavement and weed forest made it look more forlorn than ever. Will this tufo-and-muck-spreading be the stage that finally makes the house look whole? So far, it's looking good. But it's still not looking perfect. For that to happen, I guess I'll need to plant some grass seeds. In midsummer? With a non-functioning water system? Am I crazy? I foresee some patchy painting as I leap from my ladder every few minutes to move the sprinklers.

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