15 September 2005
Rome
Two months with few interruptions in Umbria made returning to Rome very difficult indeed. We had to come back, of course, to get my sister who had descended upon us with her two children back to the airport in time. But after they had left, and the dust had settled from that whirlwind that small children create, I felt a distinct, nagging emptiness. This, I know, is when I should be up there, starting work on the garden that is so much still a figment of my imagination. But IÕm stuck here, with jobs on the horizon but nothing in particular to fill my time, wishing that I were there and planting.
Of course had I been there last week, I probably wouldnÕt have been able to do much more than dash out every now and then to re-dig our storm channels. Then dry myself off while watching anxiously from the windows as rain washed topsoil away. Instead I was here, waking up at night to the sound of hammering downpours and wondering what was left of my landscaping up there. The storm that hit Rome last Friday evening, for example, was so hard that I couldnÕt see along to the end of the road. Streets in much of the city were wheel-deep in water, IÕm told. (I stayed inside, with shutters shut.) And when the clouds rolled away, there was an ominous end-of-the-world orange glow over Rome Š just to compound the feeling of empty forboding.
Funny, then, that I should have spent such a frantic last couple of days in the country, under a withering sun, trying to get a new bit of watering system up and running. I was worrying about the beautiful pomegranate that my neighbour had given me as a house warming presentÉ a huge bush, taller already than me. I planted it at the house end of the level in front of the chicken house. IÕm planning to put other fruit trees there Š a continuation of the orchard which will begin up by the well and continue down to the level where the hammock hangs. And the trees will stand in a lawn. Pointless, then, to take water to the pomegranate, I thought, without thinking of how that lawn Š and the lawn below, flanking the front path which I spent so much time making Š would be irrigated. So on the hottest day since July, I took my pick and started hacking a trench in which to put a pipe with pop-up sprinklers. Had I known how hard the ground was going to be, I might have thought twice. In fact, I wouldnÕt even have embarked on the project. I seemed to remember having put a layer of topsoil up there too. But as I started digging, I realised that if I had, it was either extremely thin or extremely washed away. I hacked and hacked until I managed to make a groove deep enough for that pipe. Then turned my attention to the other ramification of the system from that tap. And realised that I simply didnÕt have the energy to excavate in what was unquestionably a much less demanding area of garden. So now I have an unattractive bit of black tubing stretched across the level behind the caravan Š where, incidently, anything resembling proper grass refuses to grow in an area earmarked as Ōa nice bit of lawnÕ in my mental garden plans. And IÕm perfectly happy for it to stay that way. For the time being.
I returned to my stony plot last weekend to continue my modular grass seeding. It was a flying visit, hardly more than 24 hours. I raked the top layer of stones from half of the pomegranate layer. It took me hours. And I covered my grass seed with a very thin layer of topsoil. Will it be enough to encourage the seeds to sprout? I also seeded a tiny patch on the valley side of the house, a patch where no watering system reaches. As I sowed both, I was concerned about what the ants might do to my efforts without me there armed with powdered poison. The effrontery of the ants during the summer shocked me. Not only did they swarm in their millions to steal my seeds. They kept coming back and back; when the seeds they had missed began to sprout, they didnÕt miss a beat. At times, whole clumps were moving as ants hiked the seed complete with grass seedlings Š some of them a couple of inches high Š onto their backs and staggered back to the nest. Last weekend, ant activity in general seemed to have died down. I mean, there must be a high season for ants, mustnÕt there? I did a preventative search for nests, squirting my powder into several holes. But that did little to calm my lurking terror that as soon as I left, theyÕd be out there in orderly battalions. Now IÕm wondering why I was so bothered about insect life. Much more threatening to my glorious lawn is the lack of rain. After the downpours of the past couple of weeks (which up there, Mario informed me, had not been torrential but blessedly restrained, if frequent) it never occurred to me that planting seed in unirrigated ground might be a silly move. Why, IÕm wondering now during day after day of cloudless blue weather, didnÕt I simply do the other half of the rocky pomegranate patch?