The front garden is piled high with wood from the hedge, cut down last Tuesday. I couldn’t bear to watch as the branches were lopped, even though I knew it had to be done, the colour of the season gone. I apologised later. It will come back next year I know. The wood, which is waiting to be collected, will go to a joyous use as bonfire season approaches.
The shrubs of lilac, forsythia and field maple have been de-crowned and now stand in a line bordering the house. Cut down like this, it reminds me of when I first came here and had it done then. Since then I’ve managed it myself, with a little help. I hope it will now be at the right height for me to manage again.
I quite like it in a way. I can see further to the surrounding fields and woods, and the shape of the trees in the neighbouring gardens seem to compliment.
A lot has been written and aired about gardening and green spaces being good for mental health and wellbeing. Twenty – five years ago it wasn’t so clear. It was the garden that persuaded me to come here, though. I was living in Cambridge at the time, recovering from the car crash. I just wanted to start again, somewhere else. And I wanted a garden.
It is still as essential to me now as it was then, so it’s a question of starting again.
Polly’s garden
The scent of Philadelphus always takes me back to Polly’s garden. That exotic, slightly cloy, sweet smell of summer evenings that seems to linger.
A tear-filled session with our headmaster had prompted the move to Polly’s, so that we could continue to study unhindered by my step-mother’s moods and fits of cruelty.
Polly had a small flat at the back of her bungalow. My father paid the rent and we had a small allowance, supplemented by working on a Saturday at the local supermarket. We were given PE off to do housework and shopping. We made our own meals. It seems now, this was a bit much at 17, but we had learned how to do chores from an early age. We were free now, or so it seemed.
Polly was a young woman in the Second World War. Like so many women of her generation, she had lost her beloved in that conflict and had remained single. She trained as a nurse and then a mid-wife in London and was working towards her retirement as Matron in the local cottage hospital.
Every morning she would stride to her car in grey uniform and come home smiling.
We could go anywhere in the garden, but kept to the back, which was our side, if she was in, knowing that she liked her privacy.
It was well kept, in an informal way, and could be a little untidy. She wasn’t one to fuss about the odd weed here and there. She mixed vegetables with garden plants, only concerned that they were happy, which meant in the right place with enough sun and rain.
There was a proper veg bed stuffed with cabbages, onions, radishes, beans and a bed of carrots. She watered the vegetables with rain water from a butt and grew a few tomatoes in the tiny greenhouse nearby. In the evenings we would often see her, knife in hand, on the hunt for a lettuce.
She loved roses, which she grew as shrubs and often had a jug full of them on her window sill, floppy old roses with large heads. Her end was filled with white lilac, rhododendron, camelia and magnolia shrubs, connected by a mowed lawn. We rarely saw her actually gardening, but must have done so, perhaps secretly at night.
She left plants to self-seed so in season there was an array of foxgloves, holly-hocks, love-in the mist. There was a little alpine section with flowering sedums and tiny cyclamen.
She invited us to tea quite often in her bungalow. There were proper patterned cups and saucers and a silver tea stand which held sandwiches and cake, bought from the many jumble sales and fetes she was invited to attend.
It was then that we learned she didn’t have a sense of smell. She lost it when she had fallen and hit her head in a riding accident as a girl.
New Directions 