The Italian contadino’s ability to seat himself never fails to amaze me. There I was, the weekend before last, shovelling soil into my second vegetable garden bed (still not full… I keep finding excuses and distractions) and along came Mario. He strolled down the drive, watching me with that vaguely amused look, then, noticing the little rosemary plants in the bed along the drive, said “did you buy those?” (I think it was disbelief that I would spend money on rosemary plants when I already had a great jungle of the stuff, much more than I could ever use in the kitchen.)
I told him either I bought them, or Lucia gave them to me, I couldn’t remember which. During which explanation, he had manouvred himself through the rosemary plants to the vegetable garden side of the bed. I couldn’t work out what he was doing. He looked like he was about to throw himself down the steep bank towards me. But no, somehow he managed to wedge his rear end between the two spindly branches of the little old peach tree up there, the one that is probably wild and produces so many peaches that taste of nothing but make wonderful peach jam. And there he sat, looking just like he was sunk in the most comfortable armchair. He made quite a picture.
Clearly, he was thinking – as we discussed the lack of rain and the state of the world – that I made a picture too, although I suspect he thought it was rather a comic one. And my blue and orange raised beds were clearly the funniest element in the landscape. “It’s my orto,” I told him. A wry look. “It’s an orto that’s more about aesthetics than vegetables,” I explained. Another wry look. “Oh all right, Mario, you know I like to make life complicated for myself.” He nodded sagely, then shook his head. “You know, you really didn’t need to do all that signora. The soil there’s not so bad. I would have come down with my tractor and dug it all up for you a bit. It would have been a great orto.”
Somehow, I don’t think that he had grasped the point.
Last weekend, when we were up there for the May Day ponte, Luigi put in an appearance. Luigi is our memoria storica: he was born in our house almost 80 years and knows all the secrets of our land. Or at least, he thinks he does, but I think he’s losing it a little. I was glad he turned up, even though I was rushing car-wards to speed down to Chiusi to pick up L from the station; it had been so long since Luigi had been up to check up on what we were up to that I was beginning to think he was no more. He, too, looked very dubiously at my raised beds. But he chose to comment on the contents rather than the things themselves. His peas, he informed me, were already producing. (Mine are still at the few leaves and not much else stage.) He has broad beans that are two metres high. (I don’t have any broad beans at all.) And as for my tomato plants… the noise he made wasn’t quite a scoff, but it wasn’t far off. What a challenge! I need to show them, somehow or other, that my beds are wonderful and that we funny city-dwelling foreigners can produce veg too. Hmmm.
As always, I succumbed to Luigi’s ill-concealed yearning to come down to our place and potter. Part of him wants to do it because it takes him back to his youth. Another part thinks it’s a way of supplementing his pension. He doesn’t weed or anything useful like that. He just wields power tools (using the few bits of finger that he hasn’t amputated during previous gardening forays). “I’ll just charge you for the petrol,” he says. But I certainly won’t be visiting his petrol supplier because it’s the world’s most expensive fuel.
I rather suspect that he can’t see much, which means that Luigi with a strimmer is a dangerous man. To himself, and to my plants. He suggested that he come down one day when we weren’t there, to clear out those two patches of shoulder-high weed on the chicken-house side of the drive. A good idea in theory. I carefully walked him round (well, as carefully as you can when you’re having visions of your husband tappng his foot impatiently in front of the station), showing him all the plants hidden in the jungle. He said “I’ll just take it nice and slowly so I won’t hit anything.” Which means, of course, that he’ll decapitate everything very slowly and thoroughly, rather than swiftly and inefficiently and with some small chance of survival. But he looked so dewy-eyed about the place, that I just couldn’t say no.
Two things may save us. Firstly, since I came back to Rome two days ago, it has done nothing but deluge up there. So strimming is unlikely. But perhaps more positively, knowing that Luigi was on his way made me wade in there myself and weed in places that I had neglected for months… at least that way, I thought, he might just notice the neat-looking plants in the neat-looking clear patches. As I weeded, things emerged, in rather satisfying fashion.
Firstly, on that little bank between those two behind-the-chicken-house levels, there were my winter jasmine and my philadelphus. In fact, I knew the latter was in there and going strong because you can smell its glorious perfume right across to the car park. But until recently – or at least, when last seen – those plants were insignificant twiggy affairs. I didn’t have the heart to rip them up and start again, though. The Jasminum nudiflorum came from cuttings that I took from a magnificent specimen along a path that led to the funny little studio where C used to do ceramica lessons many years ago – her last flurry of creativity before Latin and Greek and hanging out with friends got the upper hand. The Philadelphus coronarius, on the other hand, I snipped – much to C’s embarrassment because there were cars and trams and people passing and staring – from the profusion that surges through the iron fence of the empty building right next to Nanni Moretti’s cinema, just across the river from here. I cycled past there last week, and the parent plant of my healthy-looking bushes was a sweet-smelling explosion of flowers. What a relief it is that even in the city spring smells so powerfully good.
Up beyond the gate, on the other hand, my rugosa rose hedge is starting to look hedgy. All right, in a rather low and patchy way, I admit, but you can see it has potential. I love the way those roses just send up stragglers all over the place. It’s getting so that it’s difficult, at ground level, to work out which shoot comes from which plant.
Excitingly, I have now commissioned Stefano to make proper brick gate posts. The effect as you approach our house now must be very odd for anyone who… well, who isn’t me, basically, and sees what’s really there, rather than my idealised Garden of the Future. Our funny old makeshift gate, cobbled together from wire mesh and metal tubing by Stefano even before we started work on the house is – less than elegant, shall we say. And all around it, field-like chaos reigns. It’s rather beautiful chaos at the moment, full of poppies and great clouds of yellow-flowered Sinapis. And my shades-of-blue iris are all out too, mixed in with these wild flowers and with my half-submerged artichoke plants right down the left-hand side of the drive. Grass and weeds are taking over the car park, the vegetable garden is in a state of swaying-grass flux, the bank up from there is half-weeded, half-weedy. Then suddenly, a neat gravel path departs and, lo and behold, the pompom heads of giant alliums are peeking out from between the buddleia bushes, the yellow and pink rose banks are weed-free and bending under the weight of the buds about to burst. The lawns are cut. The deep crimson geraniums (I can’t stand common or garden pelargoniums as a rule, but the colour of these was too alluring) are in bloom in pots against the wall of the house. Around by the kitchen, the aromatiche garden is leafy and lush. Insomma, there’s a tiny buffer zone immediately around the house of such perfect order that sometimes I step out of the front door and stand there immobile, in wonder. Just how, I ask myself, can I make this so neat and the rest such a… long-term project?
So, back to the gates. It was just like old times, getting Stefano round to discuss the gates. A perfectly simple, one-day project. We even supply the bricks… the ones that used to make up the four columns between which straw was stacked next to the aia, the threshing-floor which was where the top car park and the area enclosed by the rugosa hedge are now. The electricity has already been laid right up to there. I had drawn him a scale plan. L and I could hardly keep straight faces as we listened to him detailing just how fiendishly difficult the whole thing was going to be. The bricks might not be right, they weren’t even all the same size, there were lots of broken ones, who was going to sort the whole ones from the broken ones (L and I did, in a hour of hand-destroying, back-breaking work the other day), of course it would take special mortar… you would have thought we were asking him to re-restore the house. I phoned him yesterday to confirm. But should we see each other again there just to go back over it? Perhaps we should? I had a vision of the three of us, standing there, saying the same things over and over again, perhaps with a few more freshly-imagined complications thrown in by Stefano. No, I said. Just do it Stefano. We trust you. And we do. He’ll do a splendid job. But if he’s such an old man at 40, what will he be like when he’s old, I wonder?
