Prunus pruning

The gardening frenzy is on and in our village it’s not just the weather. The announcement of the date for Open Gardens Day (this year in aid of RDA) has plunged the participating gardeners into a whirling dervish of plan and counterplan. The date stares firmly from every diary – threat to the novice, challenge to the keen, promise to the most accomplished—but to all, like laughter lines and baggy eyelids, now unavoidable.

Pippa, whose garden, good sort that she is, is made available year after year, invited me over for a lazy coffee over half term. Her son Hugo, my Houdini and my 8 year-old scrabbled about in the garden getting muddy in the hen coop, chalking a blue and yellow dusty scooter racetrack on the terrace, throwing sticks for the fetching lab. Most of which landed, naturally, in the herbaceous borders, expertly positioned between delicate delphinium leaves and snapping peony shoots so that maximum collateral damage could be achieved by bounding paws.
“HUUGOOO!” Pippa shouted from the kitchen. The spots on the Emma Bridgewater teapot jumped to attention.
“Heigh-ho,” she sighed, rubbing her forehead, “time to make some willow shelters.”

For Pippa, Open Garden Day means not so much exciting new plans and designs or trips to the garden centre or planting up new plants as it means running a protection racket. She spends hours constructing beautiful willow wigwams and tepees around the delicates, her garden sprouting twiggy bunkers till it looks like a dwarf Indian village. And still the balls and dog paws come crashing through. Observing her mounting frustration as the day approaches has probably been the main deterrent from me throwing my lot in with the rest of the brave band and opening mine too (well that, and the fact that my Latin plant names are not entirely up to scratch, oh yes, and that neither is my garden).

Last year I took my darling nearly-deaf mother, who was visiting from America round the village gardens.
The artist’s garden was fascinating. Tucked away behind a small cottage on the high street, the artist’s garden is a series of little outdoor rooms made up by hedges and low walls, steps up here, a path down there. Different textures underfoot, sudden changes of colour, scent and light. Around one corner a hidden henhutch suddenly clucks to life, around the next a swirling sculpture on a pole swings towards you in the wind. There are stained glass windows hanging from the trees and phrases of poetry embedded in the terrace. You feel you could spend hours there and never see it all, could approach the same room twice from different angles and think it was a new one. The artist hid under his hat in the shade of his apple tree, with a reticence I like to think more shyness than contempt. No conversation was required.

Proud across the street, the Old Rectory, with its shiny as a new penny family, opened its gates verbosely. Printed notices directed you on a set route. Labelled trees spread their ancient enormous arms. The lady of the house, brunette chatter on heels, swooped to my mother’s side
“Welcome,” she smiled, warm and hostessy, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in the village before,”
“Thank you,” my mum smiled warmly back.
Disconcerted by this non sequitur, Chatter arranged her hair, arranged the large rings on her fingers, proceeded undaunted with the tour.
I do not explain my mother’s deafness to people we meet. What am I supposed to say – hello, this is my mother, she’s deaf– as if her deafness is the single quality by which her rich and varied life should be described? She is my own darling, still standing tall mother, who likes English gardens, and kept a fine garden herself in her day. I let them figure it out for themselves.
But sometimes I do have to laugh.
From hollyhock to cornflower, across more lawn to rose bed we followed our talkative guide. Under the dark foliage of a large cherry my mother looked up admiringly,
“Do you like Prunus?” asked the lady of the house.
“Sometimes,” my mother looked querulous, “at breakfast.”
“I just love them,” Chatter raved, heels sinking suddenly into the lawn, slinging her drunkenly off balance, “perfect answer to the winter blues.”
“I have problems with regularity too,” confided my mother discreetly.

Their Magic Eyes

We’ve got company. And it’s two too many for me. Both of them are nice people, kind people, generous people. They’ve driven down from Scotland to see us. They’ve been the epitome of perfect guests, trinkets for the children, bought me a David Austin rose for the garden. Sceptered Isle -- a pink rose in that gorgeous loose old English rose shape with a musky scent. It even repeat flowers. So I feel lower than a paving slab admitting my frustration at their being here.

Thing is, they’re people for whom a Saturday at a National Trust house counts as a day in the country. For me this is emphatically not so. Anything involving queues and car parks starts me off on the wrong foot. Walking on a neat gravel path with two families in front of you and three behind wanting to walk at different paces, needing passing places for buggies. This is not, in my book, a country walk. It is not decent family time. It is not freedom or space or wonderment. Much as I love the National Trust (the card in my wallet, if not the sticker on my car), a perfect spring Saturday was meant to be taken somewhere else. But guests must go where guests want to go. Hey ho.

“May we be finding a hungry place?” my two-year old said when the crowded path had opened into space enough for the millions to mill about.
“Sorry? A what?”
“We may be finding a hungry place?” she repeated with the syntax rearranged.
I took this to mean, roughly translated, “I’m peckish”.
I’m hungry too, I thought. Hungry for more of you, my sweet, for more of us. For less of this.
“She’s peckish,” I pulled on my husband’s sleeve a little grumpily. (The friends are his fault).

It is perhaps one of the geniuses of childhood that children just take what they need. On the way to the inevitable café, the eldest spied the gate to Narnia under a bush, ducked in and called. The two year-old naturally followed, dragging me along. What bliss. We hid. We burrowed way back into the undergrowth, found some furniture made from tree stumps the previous occupants, speaking Beavers undoubtedly, had left behind. “Magic!” the eight year-old said, scooping up fallen leaves, rolling them between her palms till they fell to the ground in crumbs. “Magij” the little one replied, doing the same. When we had made ourselves some brown leaf tea, cooked and eaten twig biscuits, and gathered enough nuts and berrystones, green leave salad and pinecones for the winter, we made soft pine-needle beds, slept in them (for all of two minutes). And started the day again. Bliss my babies. I love you.

I bless them for taking me along. And that leggy old laurel for laying its arms at quirky angles along the ground, lying like for fifty years to make itself the open den. The smell from the blossom, the leaf mold and moss. What joy my children bring me. I bless their magic eyes.