15 June 2008

    I’m a prisoner here of C’s final exams. I’m itching to get to my garden where rain/heat/rain/heat/rain/heat in constant succession means that it’s far far more than even Vittorio can cope with. I was there precisely a week ago and so was he, cutting lawns. Then I had to go up on Friday. The grass was 15cm high. I think you’d need to run over it once a day to keep it in check… when, of course, it wasn’t a soggy marsh. And the weeds, the weeds!
      Of course, my lovely roses have been rained into oblivion, but then again, they do fade after their first glorious outburst. The rain, I guess, has just helped that process along. But I don’t like what this damp is doing to my peas and beans (somewhat mouldy) or to our poor house which gets so damp when it’s all closed up. I so need to get up there and stay up there, but C’s exams could keep us here until July 15. I don’t think I could stand that.
      In the mean time, the same rain is complicating my working life no end, with one project a constant series of missed opportunities. The trenches were dug for the watering system and lights, but became rivers before they got around to laying the pipes; the earth surfaces were prepared to lay the stone paving but are now plateaux criss-crossed by rivulets. Of course, had the various workers involved been a little more focussed on this project and a little less determined to rush off to their next big building site – oh gardens, always relegated till the very very end! – then these things might have been done a little more efficiently. But never mind: I talked yesterday to the very nice-sounding man whose nursery we have chosen to plant the garden once it’s ready. And he said that he was hopelessly held up by this ridiculous spring too.
      Up in my hilltop village things have ground to a halt too, though more due to conflicting desires and wills rather than inclement weather, though that has played its part too. The owner will be jetting in from the US in precisely one week’s time, accompanied by the photographers whose job it will be to take the alluring photos for the brochures which will help sell these ‘fractionals’. The garden (note, I no longer say ‘my’ garden) right now is a few clumps of bushes plus a muddy mess where the lawn should be. This project was causing me such grief: I can’t create a rational connective tissue – because that’s what this garden should be – between the various elements dotted around the village if (1) I don’t know which elements I am joining, (2) I don’t know which plots will be part of this tissue and (3) there is no masterplan. The owner is sympathetic. As things stand, no one knows how one thing interacts with the other, and anything you start doing risks being changed or superceded by decisions no one informs you about. Things are, apparently, about to change. Let’s hope. It’s such a wonderful, stimulating, challenging project. Or rather, should be.
      Anyway, the lawns should be laid – weather permitting – on Tuesday. Who knows what massive changes will have been wrought, unbeknownst to me, by the time I get up there to see what’s going on? And who knows when I’ll be able to get there, given C’s exam timetable.
      Elsewhere, two of my projects seem to have evaporated. The owner of the woodland garden I began working on near Spoleto no longer answers my emails. Even stranger, the family with the house at the beach near Rome has ceased answering anything at all: phone, cellphone, email… anything: most peculiar because a local family with a grand total of seven children doesn’t suddenly up sticks and leave. So what has happened to them? I do hate being put in this position. Money questions are never easy when you’re doing this kind of work: so much is done on trust. I throw myself into projects as soon as it looks like the owner is committed, and presume that I’m dealing with people who are as respectful of others as I try to be myself. If people change their minds or don’t like what I’m doing, I’d far rather they tried to haggle my price down than simply disappearing: it’s more honest. But taking my project then – I presume – getting some contractor to do it, having dumped me… well, that’s just petty. Come to think of it, in the case of the beach house, it was the local vivaio who sent the client to me, and I truly don’t think that the owner of that nursery would agree to plant my plan without telling me: he is a very very upright kind of a guy. So, that’s even stranger. I must try calling again.
      So many problems! The elements. Human nature. And the way nurseries operate, too, has been annoying me this week. (You can tell that I’ve had too much city-time to brood, rather than shrugging these things off in hard work in the open air.) For clients in Rome with a spectacular, massive terrace I ordered some rather large Lagerstœmia indica from a very big, respectable nursery in northern Rome. The trees that the nursery is proposing – almost four metres tall – seem to be vigorous, healthy plants. But nursery suppliers, presumably for the sake of easy transportation, tend to prune trees back to the bone before delivering them. So the specimens they have for my clients are tall tall sticks with tiny little leafy blobs on the top. Now, I know that they are healthy plants, and that by next summer, probably, they will be beautiful, spreading, flower-covered trees. But when my clients and I agreed on Lagerstœmia, they were enthusiastic because they both had childhood memories of great summer-long swathes of colour against rich green foliage in their mothers’ gardens. So enamoured of this memory are they, that they are prepared to pay €450 for each of six plants. But what they want, reasonably enough, is the thing they have in their memory: they don’t want to spend a whole season living with blobs on sticks, and they’re not willing to fork out a fortune for a promise of good things to come. (Moreover, they point out, indicating some rather sad Wisteria that never really took off elsewhere on their terrace, those promises don’t always come true.) Their reservations are completely valid. They can’t be the first people to have them. So why do nurseries and their suppliers do this? Would it really make life so difficult, not hacking foliage back to within an inch of extinction? Especially for specimen plants that cost such a fortune? It just seems disrespectful of customers’ wishes to me.


	ROME 15 June 2008
	ROME 15 June 2008

			I’m a prisoner here of C’s final exams. I’m itching to get to my garden where rain/heat/rain/heat/rain/heat in constant succession means that it’s far far more than even Vittorio can cope with. I was there precisely a week ago and so was he, cutting lawns. Then I had to go up on Friday. The grass was 15cm high. I think you’d need to run over it once a day to keep it in check… when, of course, it wasn’t a soggy marsh. And the weeds, the weeds! Of course, my lovely roses have been rained into oblivion, but then again, they do fade after their first glorious outburst. The rain, I guess, has just helped that process along. But I don’t like what this damp is doing to my peas and beans (somewhat mouldy) or to our poor house which gets so damp when it’s all closed up. I so need to get up there and stay up there, but C’s exams could keep us here until July 15. I don’t think I could stand that. In the mean time, the same rain is complicating my working life no end, with one project a constant series of missed opportunities. The trenches were dug for the watering system and lights, but became rivers before they got around to laying the pipes; the earth surfaces were prepared to lay the stone paving but are now plateaux criss-crossed by rivulets. Of course, had the various workers involved been a little more focussed on this project and a little less determined to rush off to their next big building site – oh gardens, always relegated till the very very end! – then these things might have been done a little more efficiently. But never mind: I talked yesterday to the very nice-sounding man whose nursery we have chosen to plant the garden once it’s ready. And he said that he was hopelessly held up by this ridiculous spring too. Up in my hilltop village things have ground to a halt too, though more due to conflicting desires and wills rather than inclement weather, though that has played its part too. The owner will be jetting in from the US in precisely one week’s time, accompanied by the photographers whose job it will be to take the alluring photos for the brochures which will help sell these ‘fractionals’. The garden (note, I no longer say ‘my’ garden) right now is a few clumps of bushes plus a muddy mess where the lawn should be. This project was causing me such grief: I can’t create a rational connective tissue – because that’s what this garden should be – between the various elements dotted around the village if (1) I don’t know which elements I am joining, (2) I don’t know which plots will be part of this tissue and (3) there is no masterplan. The owner is sympathetic. As things stand, no one knows how one thing interacts with the other, and anything you start doing risks being changed or superceded by decisions no one informs you about. Things are, apparently, about to change. Let’s hope. It’s such a wonderful, stimulating, challenging project. Or rather, should be. Anyway, the lawns should be laid – weather permitting – on Tuesday. Who knows what massive changes will have been wrought, unbeknownst to me, by the time I get up there to see what’s going on? And who knows when I’ll be able to get there, given C’s exam timetable. Elsewhere, two of my projects seem to have evaporated. The owner of the woodland garden I began working on near Spoleto no longer answers my emails. Even stranger, the family with the house at the beach near Rome has ceased answering anything at all: phone, cellphone, email… anything: most peculiar because a local family with a grand total of seven children doesn’t suddenly up sticks and leave. So what has happened to them? I do hate being put in this position. Money questions are never easy when you’re doing this kind of work: so much is done on trust. I throw myself into projects as soon as it looks like the owner is committed, and presume that I’m dealing with people who are as respectful of others as I try to be myself. If people change their minds or don’t like what I’m doing, I’d far rather they tried to haggle my price down than simply disappearing: it’s more honest. But taking my project then – I presume – getting some contractor to do it, having dumped me… well, that’s just petty. Come to think of it, in the case of the beach house, it was the local vivaio who sent the client to me, and I truly don’t think that the owner of that nursery would agree to plant my plan without telling me: he is a very very upright kind of a guy. So, that’s even stranger. I must try calling again. So many problems! The elements. Human nature. And the way nurseries operate, too, has been annoying me this week. (You can tell that I’ve had too much city-time to brood, rather than shrugging these things off in hard work in the open air.) For clients in Rome with a spectacular, massive terrace I ordered some rather large Lagerstœmia indica from a very big, respectable nursery in northern Rome. The trees that the nursery is proposing – almost four metres tall – seem to be vigorous, healthy plants. But nursery suppliers, presumably for the sake of easy transportation, tend to prune trees back to the bone before delivering them. So the specimens they have for my clients are tall tall sticks with tiny little leafy blobs on the top. Now, I know that they are healthy plants, and that by next summer, probably, they will be beautiful, spreading, flower-covered trees. But when my clients and I agreed on Lagerstœmia, they were enthusiastic because they both had childhood memories of great summer-long swathes of colour against rich green foliage in their mothers’ gardens. So enamoured of this memory are they, that they are prepared to pay €450 for each of six plants. But what they want, reasonably enough, is the thing they have in their memory: they don’t want to spend a whole season living with blobs on sticks, and they’re not willing to fork out a fortune for a promise of good things to come. (Moreover, they point out, indicating some rather sad Wisteria that never really took off elsewhere on their terrace, those promises don’t always come true.) Their reservations are completely valid. They can’t be the first people to have them. So why do nurseries and their suppliers do this? Would it really make life so difficult, not hacking foliage back to within an inch of extinction? Especially for specimen plants that cost such a fortune? It just seems disrespectful of customers’ wishes to me.

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