15 February 2007

It has taken me a while to come round to my stone garden. L has long been telling me that I have to embrace our stones. Not literally of course. And of course, he’s teasing. But my garden-making exploits (here, and in other gardens for other people) have, from the start, been a battle against the stoniness of the local terrain. They’re rather lovely stones: smooth and river-washed. They’re the stones that our house is built of, ploughed up out of fields and recycled into habitation. But they are everywhere – wherever you plunge afork or spade, wherever you want to knock a stake in; in some places – such as the still-stark bank right outside the front door – they are a solid wall. All right, the soil between them isn’t too bad. But once the stones are removed, there’s not all that much of it left. I try not to admit this to vivaisti when they’re planting gardens for me. Loud lamentations from them about having to work with ground like that meet with a stony resistance from me: each rock removed is, if you think about it, a ready-made planting hole, just waiting to be filled with compost. At least that’s what I tell them. It doesn’t stop me cursing my own stones.
But I’ve decided to take L at his word and make a rock bed. Not a rockery, mind you: that would be too awfully predictable. But a tiny corner of my garden which is a homage to our stones. Above, the poor woody cherry tree; japonica will emerge from stone-level, as will the huge old tea rose with the pretty-party-dress-pink flowers that I hacked out of what is now the car park when we first bought the property and stuck – for want of anywhere better – here and forgot about. Then I’ve placed three of the big terracotta pots with deep borders that I bought so long ago at the wonderful Asti e Fallimenti (Auctions and Bankruptcies) down the motorway at Attigliano around the trunk of the first cherry tree. And I’ve put put one of those old battered zinc basins I found lying around at the corner of the bed, where the car park meets the path down to the house. It all looks quite ridiculous for now. The basin and pots are empty and the stones are still in an ugly pile against the chicken house, many metres away from where I eventually intend to move them to form a stark ground-cover. But the general framework is there. Now, what to put in the pots? And what to plant on that little slope as a buffer between my stone garden and the buddleia-and-caryopteris bed beyond… though here, I think, it’s a straight competition between hostas and periwinkle, tucked in there under the cherry trees. I may have to toss a coin.
Having not finished my stone garden, I moved on to not finishing my vegetable garden. This summer, I so want to have an orto. I have all my seeds ready, ordered from the wonderful Organic Gardening Catalogue (www.organiccatalog.com) which I pored over with delight for nights on end before selecting just what I wanted. Now, at great expense and as a birthday present to myself, I have ordered some super-dooper pigeon-proof root-trainer-propagators to sit on the balcony in Rome. Rather than doing my usual trick of pouring a whole packet of seeds hastily into a drill as I rev up the car ready to head back down the motorway to Rome of a Sunday evening, I shall (if all goes to plan) have a wonderful rolling system of periodic planting, with perfect seedlings – just enough to meet our vegetable needs – ready to transplant into my beautiful raised beds as needed. In my mind, it is all simple perfection. In reality, it’s some bits of green twine and a few stakes. Actually, even less useful than that: I realised that the natural obstacles – the compost bins, the immense pile of nice earth dumped months ago in the proto-veggie patch by Giuseppe the bulldozer boy which will eventually find its way into the raised beds – were hampering my scientific efforts to measure out my beds to such an extent that I just measured the periphery (basically a rectangle, but hopelessly skewed) and sat down at the computer to work out lengths and details electronically. But not before I had spent many an hour, beneath a persistant English-style drizzle, working towards the inevitable conclusion that I was wasting my time.
I also, in a fit of enthusiasm, popped into the woodyard down in Fabro where I shall probably buy the wherewithal to make not only my raised beds, but to edge the carpark with a low wooden barrier. The ‘creep’ – that inexorable march of unwanted grass into the carpark gravel – will never ever stop, I realise, unless it knows where it’s not wanted. Well, when I say stop, what I really mean is slow down because I strongly suspect that nothing will ever stop it. I don’t want railway sleepers along there: too bulky, not to mention too expensive. L doesn’t want the usual round chestnut logs that people use. So I guess it will have to be 7x7cm square-section chestnut planks – two of them, one on top of the other should do – and I shall order them from Fabro on Monday in the hope that thery’ll be there are ready to put into place next time I’m up. (There was pine too - cheaper, according to the wood-cutter Stefano with whom I discussed the finer details of my hardscaping, "but I wouldn't guarantee that for more than ten years: if you want it to last forever, you'll have to go for the castagno.") Naturally, as I was measuring up I realised that what seems like a fairly straight line along the edges of the carpark is in fact full of little bends and curves which will have to be dug and straightened out. But that’s not such a problem.
Much more of a problem is what to use for my raised beds. The great thing about the Fabro wood is that it’s cut right there on the premises, and not treated. (I certainly wouldn’t want the wood for my raised beds laced with arsenic or any of the other nasties that they use to pressure-treat lumber seeping into the soil and thence into my vegetables.) The downside is that it seems to be frighteningly expensive and what initially seemed like a rather humble little project now appears terribly major. Already the natural wood protection product that I’ve bought – a soaking solution by the Italian company Durga (www.prakriti.it) – has set me back a fair bit, though I’m told that it’s great. I haven’t even begun to calculate what the wood is going to cost me. Mostly because I don’t know what to use. Down there in Fabro they have so many types – oak and chestnut, and cut in so many ways. Ideally, I’d like to make a patchwork of their offcuts, but how long would this take me to put together? I’d have to go through the great pile he showed me, piece by piece, trying to fit it into the complex pattern of my hopelessly regular-irregular beds. I expect that in the end I’ll bite the bullet and go for the obvious/easiest: neatly-sawn 20cm widths, neatly nailed into place. If I don’t, then my orto may never materialise.

	CdP 15 February 2007
	The problem with having too much time on your hands, is that you don’t get much done. Well, I guess I shouldn’t generalise in that way. But personally, I always find, in the rare moments when I get to be up in the country for any extended period, I get so excited about the possibilities stretching out before me that in the end, I conclude nothing. I must say though, in my own defence, that in my five wonderful days up there last week – L at the Berlin Film Festival, C off skiing with her friends – I did start a lot. Oh, and I concluded a couple of almost-finished things: a mirror hung in the guest room, a chest of drawers given its final coat of paint… that kind of thing. And I even finished pruning my roses and fruit trees – though I realise now, with dismay, that despite all my good intentions I completely forgot to do the circuit again, with fertiliser. I feel so mean clipping those roses back when they’ve already made such an effort to get so many buds almost into leaf… in fact, many into leaf. My tiny apricot tree, too, had me feeling all adoringly gooey inside when I saw its flower buds ready to burst. On the other hand, I did try to explain to them all (and just as well there was no one there to hear me do it… I think on balance that lengthy stretches as a country hermit are not necessarily good for ones’ sanity) that they really shouldn’t be rushing ahead like that; that is really wasn’t the season. But nature just isn’t listening. (Artichoke growers, apparently, are desperate: the whole crop of carciofi romani – those delicious little Roman artichokes – is ready now. All of them. When in fact they should start being ready in about a month’s time, with picking going on for another month or so after that. Not this year. Carciofo-compost will be all the rage.) So a compensatory sprinkling of fertiliser would have been just the thing to calm my conscience. Except that I got so badly side-tracked that my conscience didn’t even get a look-in. First of all, I fell in love with Chaenomeles. To tell the truth, I’ve always had a soft spot for what I shall continue to call japonica, though I’m pretty sure that what I have planted is Chaenomeles speciosa rather than Chaenomeles japonica. It is certainly rubra… a wonderful shade of too-perfect-to-be-real dark pinky red with a tinge of something oriental. Somewhere, some time, I saw a photo of a host of them emerging from a bed of white stones, maybe in Japan. So, when I saw these little specimens – again, already ludicrously in flower – in Lucia’s nursery, I couldn’t resist them. They will be the centrepiece of my stone garden, under the old cherry trees.

It has taken me a while to come round to my stone garden. L has long been telling me that I have to embrace our stones. Not literally of course. And of course, he’s teasing. But my garden-making exploits (here, and in other gardens for other people) have, from the start, been a battle against the stoniness of the local terrain. They’re rather lovely stones: smooth and river-washed. They’re the stones that our house is built of, ploughed up out of fields and recycled into habitation. But they are everywhere – wherever you plunge afork or spade, wherever you want to knock a stake in; in some places – such as the still-stark bank right outside the front door – they are a solid wall. All right, the soil between them isn’t too bad. But once the stones are removed, there’s not all that much of it left. I try not to admit this to vivaisti when they’re planting gardens for me. Loud lamentations from them about having to work with ground like that meet with a stony resistance from me: each rock removed is, if you think about it, a ready-made planting hole, just waiting to be filled with compost. At least that’s what I tell them. It doesn’t stop me cursing my own stones. But I’ve decided to take L at his word and make a rock bed. Not a rockery, mind you: that would be too awfully predictable. But a tiny corner of my garden which is a homage to our stones. Above, the poor woody cherry tree; japonica will emerge from stone-level, as will the huge old tea rose with the pretty-party-dress-pink flowers that I hacked out of what is now the car park when we first bought the property and stuck – for want of anywhere better – here and forgot about. Then I’ve placed three of the big terracotta pots with deep borders that I bought so long ago at the wonderful Asti e Fallimenti (Auctions and Bankruptcies) down the motorway at Attigliano around the trunk of the first cherry tree. And I’ve put put one of those old battered zinc basins I found lying around at the corner of the bed, where the car park meets the path down to the house. It all looks quite ridiculous for now. The basin and pots are empty and the stones are still in an ugly pile against the chicken house, many metres away from where I eventually intend to move them to form a stark ground-cover. But the general framework is there. Now, what to put in the pots? And what to plant on that little slope as a buffer between my stone garden and the buddleia-and-caryopteris bed beyond… though here, I think, it’s a straight competition between hostas and periwinkle, tucked in there under the cherry trees. I may have to toss a coin. Having not finished my stone garden, I moved on to not finishing my vegetable garden. This summer, I so want to have an orto. I have all my seeds ready, ordered from the wonderful Organic Gardening Catalogue (www.organiccatalog.com) which I pored over with delight for nights on end before selecting just what I wanted. Now, at great expense and as a birthday present to myself, I have ordered some super-dooper pigeon-proof root-trainer-propagators to sit on the balcony in Rome. Rather than doing my usual trick of pouring a whole packet of seeds hastily into a drill as I rev up the car ready to head back down the motorway to Rome of a Sunday evening, I shall (if all goes to plan) have a wonderful rolling system of periodic planting, with perfect seedlings – just enough to meet our vegetable needs – ready to transplant into my beautiful raised beds as needed. In my mind, it is all simple perfection. In reality, it’s some bits of green twine and a few stakes. Actually, even less useful than that: I realised that the natural obstacles – the compost bins, the immense pile of nice earth dumped months ago in the proto-veggie patch by Giuseppe the bulldozer boy which will eventually find its way into the raised beds – were hampering my scientific efforts to measure out my beds to such an extent that I just measured the periphery (basically a rectangle, but hopelessly skewed) and sat down at the computer to work out lengths and details electronically. But not before I had spent many an hour, beneath a persistant English-style drizzle, working towards the inevitable conclusion that I was wasting my time. I also, in a fit of enthusiasm, popped into the woodyard down in Fabro where I shall probably buy the wherewithal to make not only my raised beds, but to edge the carpark with a low wooden barrier. The ‘creep’ – that inexorable march of unwanted grass into the carpark gravel – will never ever stop, I realise, unless it knows where it’s not wanted. Well, when I say stop, what I really mean is slow down because I strongly suspect that nothing will ever stop it. I don’t want railway sleepers along there: too bulky, not to mention too expensive. L doesn’t want the usual round chestnut logs that people use. So I guess it will have to be 7x7cm square-section chestnut planks – two of them, one on top of the other should do – and I shall order them from Fabro on Monday in the hope that thery’ll be there are ready to put into place next time I’m up. (There was pine too - cheaper, according to the wood-cutter Stefano with whom I discussed the finer details of my hardscaping, "but I wouldn't guarantee that for more than ten years: if you want it to last forever, you'll have to go for the castagno.") Naturally, as I was measuring up I realised that what seems like a fairly straight line along the edges of the carpark is in fact full of little bends and curves which will have to be dug and straightened out. But that’s not such a problem. Much more of a problem is what to use for my raised beds. The great thing about the Fabro wood is that it’s cut right there on the premises, and not treated. (I certainly wouldn’t want the wood for my raised beds laced with arsenic or any of the other nasties that they use to pressure-treat lumber seeping into the soil and thence into my vegetables.) The downside is that it seems to be frighteningly expensive and what initially seemed like a rather humble little project now appears terribly major. Already the natural wood protection product that I’ve bought – a soaking solution by the Italian company Durga (www.prakriti.it) – has set me back a fair bit, though I’m told that it’s great. I haven’t even begun to calculate what the wood is going to cost me. Mostly because I don’t know what to use. Down there in Fabro they have so many types – oak and chestnut, and cut in so many ways. Ideally, I’d like to make a patchwork of their offcuts, but how long would this take me to put together? I’d have to go through the great pile he showed me, piece by piece, trying to fit it into the complex pattern of my hopelessly regular-irregular beds. I expect that in the end I’ll bite the bullet and go for the obvious/easiest: neatly-sawn 20cm widths, neatly nailed into place. If I don’t, then my orto may never materialise.
		BACK HOME