20 February 2006
CdP
Without a doubt, the two most satisfying moments in creating a garden are (1) getting the levels right and (2) planting trees. This isn't, I have to admit, an original thought – a friend and colleague said it to me today – but if I'd tried, I guess I could have thought it for myself because it is so overwhelmingly, obviously true.
Like so many things in life – novels, buildings, relationships – a garden has to have a skeleton which has its own organic wholeness; which stands up to the strain of intermediary bits changing or shifting or growing or dying off; which can frame a succession of colours and textures dictated over time by your changing tastes and whims; which is, ideally, elegant in its simplicity because the fewer complicated parts a thing has, the less likely it is to go wrong. Or so we hope. And it has to please, even if it is left standing stark, without the padding.
I don't mind the fact that non-gardening friends who visit look at my scrubby land and say "I see you haven't started on the garden yet." Of course I've started on the garden. I've been planning it for the last four years. Ever since the builders moved out, I've lavished affection, thought, time and funds on it. My still-plantless layers are the result of days and days of patient soil-shifting, bank-making, level-staking. Each irregular swath has been carefully engineered to sit well with the other. The main strip of lawn (where my poor grass is still struggling to take hold) down from the bottom car park is just wide enough to get a vehicle along in an emergency; the chicane between main house and chicken house will allow that emergency vehicle to drop down either towards the back door (steep but possible) or towards the fields. My steps cut down to the front door across level paths which ensure that there is no point that a wheelbarrow can't reach... though some routes, admittedly, are circuitous, but that's in the nature of a property clinging to the side of a steep hill. If the artifice behind my layers is invisible to the untrained eye, that's fine. That's my aim. I have a skeleton which not only works but which seems natural. (It did surprise me, I must say, when the "I see you haven't..." comment was made the other day by an architect, and an architect, moreover, who dabbles in gardens too. Can this person possibly be so insensitive to land movements?)
Over the past few days of glorious solitude up here, I have begun to turn my thoughts to trees. It's not the first time. There were those long hot hours during the summer of 2004 when L and I sweated through the elm forest, to leave only a very few selected plants standing. So incensed was I with the invasive things and their omnipresent sprouting roots, that I was sorely tempted to rip them all out. But reason prevailed (thanks partly to L's greater sense of restraint, and partly to another architect, a true garden-lover of an architect, who looked at the neat triangle of three elms perched above where the caravan stands and said "you just can't..."). Other tree interventions prior to that were all in the negative. I have been trying to remember where our great piles of firewood originated from. We must have cut down many trees when we first arrived, but where? I remember the incongruous, towering fir that obscured our view of the oak tree beyond the vegetable garden. That came down pretty fast. And of course, there were the massive fig trees growing into and entwined through the walls of the house, front and back. But there's not much fig in our wood piles. Who knows where the supply originated? Anyway, the time has come, finally, to focus not on negative tree management, but on planting.
I love the passage in Russell Page's The Education of a Gardener where he describes stalking around a field with long stakes, hammering them in and viewing them from all angles to get an idea of how trees should be arranged, how they should relate to each other and to their surroundings. Is it sheer laziness on my part that my stakes are rarely longer than 30cm long? That I use the same kind for distributing my theoretical roses (if only Lucia from the nursery would produce the plants I ordered from her three months ago) as I do for placing fruit trees? Or does my imagination in my garden function so accurately that I can see the whole tree, however diminutive the stake? It sounds like a feeble excuse, but I think there is an element of this.
In fact, in my mind's eye I see the whole garden now as it will be in five years' time. For me it's all planted and lush and there's not a single protruding stone or weak, struggling blade of grass in sight. I don't even notice the tattered fleece which is still flapping over the bank right outside the front door, pinned there months ago to hold the topsoil in place during heavy rain, and still doing its job admirably... at least in those points where it hasn't disintegrated. I suppose it isn't really very attractive. People do comment on it. For me, it's just a very dim part of the scenery, all-but-concealed already by the sea of Felicia roses which one day will swamp that bank.
So when I began doing the rounds of local nurseries looking for suitable fruit trees, the diminutive things that I was buying were fully-grown, abundantly-producing plants, superbly happy in the impeccably-chosen spots I had assigned to them.
My new policy, I decided when I came up here earlier in the week, is to start at the top and work down. Now that we have a road, we need to make an entrance worthy of the title. I had already planted dozens of bare-root rugosa roses – sad, bristly little twigs – to divide top parking area from top orchard area... that bumpy patch of scrub around the well. This, I decided, would be my apple and pear garden. Except that then I added a beautiful apricot slap bang in the middle. A pippin and an old-fashioned limoncella apple are now incorporated into the rose hedge. There's a gala, too, for some modern crunch. My pears are rather predictable Abates and Williams. Most difficult of all to fulfil was my craving for mulberries. I had mulled for weeks over what I wanted to flank the drive at that point where the rose hedge turns the corner and heads for the gate. Or would do if we had a gate. (At least we no longer have orange plastic netting fence, another of those things that were so much a part of the scenery that they no longer existed in my mind's eye; yesterday I replaced it with wooden trellises.) In the end, I decided a fruit would be most in keeping; but a beautiful, elegant tree; with unusual, old-world fruits; fast-growing; un-obvious; foliage of an uplifting colour. At the overlapping centre of my mental Venn diagram sat a mulberry. When I went to find my trees, however, there wasn't a single Morus nigra to be had in the vicinity for love nor money. Everyone claimed to have just sold out. They had Morus alba. Or Morus platanifolia. But what's the point of mulberries if they're not black? I suspect that, far from having sold out, nurseries no longer stock them, because finicky people who care more for cars and drives than plants don't like the stains that the fallen fruit makes. For me, that's part of the experience. Or it would be were it not for the fact that I'm planning to eat all my fruit before it hits the ground.
Because I found my trees at last, and they're monsters. On a whim I pulled in at the saddest, most down-at-heel nursery you've ever seen, right by the motorway exit. The rather pleasant, somewhat hang-dog owner was off to Pistoia, home to Italy's largest plant producers, the following day. I explained what I wanted, and what I wanted it for. He said he'd keep an eye out. I said I wanted something impressive. He took me at my word. When I got down to the nursery to pick up my trees on Sunday morning, the place was transformed: no longer deserted and dotted with moribund specimens but seething with customers who clearly know that this man is someone to be trusted with commissions. Driving back up the hill, I had as much tree bouncing outside the open back hatch door of the car as I had inside. Construction of our vertical garden skeleton is well under way.