ROME
9 October 2007
Were
it not for clients – and, worse, for clients’ gardeners –
garden design would be the finest career in the world. Come to think of
it, it probably is anyway. But those two elements – plus uncooperative
contractors, of course – can be counted on to make it as draining
as possible.
In one of my almost-finished projects, I have an owner who is livid about her lawn. I’m not sure quite why she is livid about her lawn: it’s a fine lawn. All right, it was in need of a good mow when I dropped by last week, but it was looking remarkably green despite this never-ending lack of rain. It was because of the lawn that I got the job: she had desperately wanted a green sward to sink her feet into right outside the front door, and I saw her point entirely… unlike another garden designer who had been advising her before me and who threw up his hands in horror at the idea of a lawn, rather than a crisp expanse of elegant gravel, there.
As her plumber took months to install the watering system, after which Lucia in her inimitable fashion took weeks to get around to laying the turf, the lawn was not ready until June. Which, for some reason, seems to be the problem. All her friends with gardens tell her no one ever plants lawns in June, and especially not in Junes as hot as ours this year. No amount of assuring her that I planted other, perfectly healthy lawns in June and July will calm her down.
Now, I’m not sure what lies behind her ire. Is it that she got a shock when she saw how much her hankered-after lawn cost? (She still hasn’t paid for it.) Or was the shock caused by her gardener who had to go up there three times a day through the long hot summer to water her new grass, and charged her accordingly and abundantly? Or was it the price of the water that she had to have trucked in to keep everything alive because for some reason her well was not functioning? Probably a combination of all three.
So incensed is she, that she doesn’t want to hear that I had to water my four-year-old lawn twice a day through the summer and it still looks like a burnt-out savannah; or that I had to turn my plant-watering system on – for the first time ever – in March because it was so dry, so had her lawn gone in any earlier she would have had to water for even longer. And it’s no good telling her that had that watering system that held us up for so many months ever actually worked, then her gardener wouldn’t have had to charge her for so many hours of pointing a hosepipe at her grass.
The lawn is just wrong, and that’s that.
Sometimes it makes you want to shake someone.
Elsewhere, it’s the gardener – with some help, admittedly, from the client – who is giving me grief. Having learnt, over the space of far, far longer than it should have taken to make a minuscule garden, that my clients tend to change their minds with disconcerting regularity, I decided that the final, planting, stage at least should be short and streamlined. So I frog-marched the owner to a very reputable nursery that I had located which, I was determined, would supply plants and plant them.
It all seemed to have gone so well. They were closing for their annual holiday the following Saturday, but the final two days before the shutters came down would be dedicated to completing my garden. Two days after congratulating myself on organising this, the nursery phoned, irate. My client’s gardener had dropped by to say he was planting: he’d just take the plants and do the rest himself. No phonecall from the owners either to the nursery or to me. I was astounded.
The nursery people knew this gardener and clearly had a very low opinion of him. He turned up just as they were closing down and took a handful of plants. Which he left sitting in the sun in the garden, without planting them and without watering them. He has, apparently, a cousin who is the kind of nurseryman who does a fine line in petunias and geraniums: he was incensed that the plants hadn’t been purchased there. My choices of plant were all wrong and couldn’t possibly survive. He wanted, first and foremost, to seed the lawn and was not happy when I pointed out that there was little point in seeding a lawn if he’d then have to walk back and forth over it to fill beds with soil and plant them. (All this, I should add, was done by proxy, because the gardener never answers his phone.)
As the plants sat there wilting, I asked my clients why they put up with this. “Meglio tenerlo stretto,” they said: best to keep him close. To make sure you have someone keeping an eye on the property? I asked in my naivity. No, because we don’t want to have him bearing grudges against us, they said. Is that, I ask myself, a good reason to keep on a gardener who willfully lets plants die?
Some of the plants have since been planted. Some have been watered. On Tuesday (today), said the gardener when I finally tracked him down last Friday, he would fetch the rest of the plants from the nursery where one of the family at least was around to hand them over. I hope he doesn’t. I hope he continues with his usual inaction. I hope he does nothing at all until the nursery reopens next week and I get them back to do what they should have done two weeks and much heartache ago: nip in, and in the space of little more than a day, convert a building site to a striking garden.
After which I’ll take some pictures, heave a sigh of relief (get a cheque…) then run. Because I know that, for all her telling me that her son loves that house because it’s so very modern, my client has no desire at all for the modernity to extend to the garden. The moment my back is turned, I’m sure, my striking architectural plants will be supplemented by a host of petunias (pink) and geraniums (red). Bought, I’m prepared to bet, from the nurseryman-cousin of the unhelpful gardener.
In one of my almost-finished projects, I have an owner who is livid about her lawn. I’m not sure quite why she is livid about her lawn: it’s a fine lawn. All right, it was in need of a good mow when I dropped by last week, but it was looking remarkably green despite this never-ending lack of rain. It was because of the lawn that I got the job: she had desperately wanted a green sward to sink her feet into right outside the front door, and I saw her point entirely… unlike another garden designer who had been advising her before me and who threw up his hands in horror at the idea of a lawn, rather than a crisp expanse of elegant gravel, there.
As her plumber took months to install the watering system, after which Lucia in her inimitable fashion took weeks to get around to laying the turf, the lawn was not ready until June. Which, for some reason, seems to be the problem. All her friends with gardens tell her no one ever plants lawns in June, and especially not in Junes as hot as ours this year. No amount of assuring her that I planted other, perfectly healthy lawns in June and July will calm her down.
Now, I’m not sure what lies behind her ire. Is it that she got a shock when she saw how much her hankered-after lawn cost? (She still hasn’t paid for it.) Or was the shock caused by her gardener who had to go up there three times a day through the long hot summer to water her new grass, and charged her accordingly and abundantly? Or was it the price of the water that she had to have trucked in to keep everything alive because for some reason her well was not functioning? Probably a combination of all three.
So incensed is she, that she doesn’t want to hear that I had to water my four-year-old lawn twice a day through the summer and it still looks like a burnt-out savannah; or that I had to turn my plant-watering system on – for the first time ever – in March because it was so dry, so had her lawn gone in any earlier she would have had to water for even longer. And it’s no good telling her that had that watering system that held us up for so many months ever actually worked, then her gardener wouldn’t have had to charge her for so many hours of pointing a hosepipe at her grass.
The lawn is just wrong, and that’s that.
Sometimes it makes you want to shake someone.
Elsewhere, it’s the gardener – with some help, admittedly, from the client – who is giving me grief. Having learnt, over the space of far, far longer than it should have taken to make a minuscule garden, that my clients tend to change their minds with disconcerting regularity, I decided that the final, planting, stage at least should be short and streamlined. So I frog-marched the owner to a very reputable nursery that I had located which, I was determined, would supply plants and plant them.
It all seemed to have gone so well. They were closing for their annual holiday the following Saturday, but the final two days before the shutters came down would be dedicated to completing my garden. Two days after congratulating myself on organising this, the nursery phoned, irate. My client’s gardener had dropped by to say he was planting: he’d just take the plants and do the rest himself. No phonecall from the owners either to the nursery or to me. I was astounded.
The nursery people knew this gardener and clearly had a very low opinion of him. He turned up just as they were closing down and took a handful of plants. Which he left sitting in the sun in the garden, without planting them and without watering them. He has, apparently, a cousin who is the kind of nurseryman who does a fine line in petunias and geraniums: he was incensed that the plants hadn’t been purchased there. My choices of plant were all wrong and couldn’t possibly survive. He wanted, first and foremost, to seed the lawn and was not happy when I pointed out that there was little point in seeding a lawn if he’d then have to walk back and forth over it to fill beds with soil and plant them. (All this, I should add, was done by proxy, because the gardener never answers his phone.)
As the plants sat there wilting, I asked my clients why they put up with this. “Meglio tenerlo stretto,” they said: best to keep him close. To make sure you have someone keeping an eye on the property? I asked in my naivity. No, because we don’t want to have him bearing grudges against us, they said. Is that, I ask myself, a good reason to keep on a gardener who willfully lets plants die?
Some of the plants have since been planted. Some have been watered. On Tuesday (today), said the gardener when I finally tracked him down last Friday, he would fetch the rest of the plants from the nursery where one of the family at least was around to hand them over. I hope he doesn’t. I hope he continues with his usual inaction. I hope he does nothing at all until the nursery reopens next week and I get them back to do what they should have done two weeks and much heartache ago: nip in, and in the space of little more than a day, convert a building site to a striking garden.
After which I’ll take some pictures, heave a sigh of relief (get a cheque…) then run. Because I know that, for all her telling me that her son loves that house because it’s so very modern, my client has no desire at all for the modernity to extend to the garden. The moment my back is turned, I’m sure, my striking architectural plants will be supplemented by a host of petunias (pink) and geraniums (red). Bought, I’m prepared to bet, from the nurseryman-cousin of the unhelpful gardener.
