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.

My catcher's mit

“It’s the best day of my life” said my eight year-old yesterday afternoon as we got home from school. She had just been chosen for tag rugby, the first ever indication (merest hint) in her life that she might, just might, be half-way good at ball games. A ballet natural, a swimming enthusiast, a cycling and skootering fanatic, she has never had much confidence with fast flying balls. I put this down to my own similar inadequacy hence lack of encouragement and practice in ball games. A little slow on the maternal uptake here, I am only just beginning to see that they might matter. Hugely.

Mention ‘balls’ and before I can type the second apostrophe around the word, there are blogs bashing the back of my brain, crying to be let in – the green and white cricket on the green blog, the ridiculous bottoms up fumbling in the hedge for the lost ball blog. None of them I am going to write today because as well as having a splendid game of tag rugby to watch with Baby Houdini scouring the perimeter of the field for hemlock and yew berries to suck, I also have my neighbour’s three children to watch after school into the evening whilst their mother takes their dad to the hospital and back; and then a huge homework project to supervise and cakes to burn for the school cake stall whilst I run upstairs and chip away tediously at the last two bits my patient editor is waiting for; and then when the clocks in America say I may, my lovely deaf mother to ring and shout at slowly. And all those balls in the air this day are enough to catch.

But the thing my palm is itching for, the thing that, if it stuck, I’d tuck to my chest and fold my shoulders over tackling tomorrow to preserve, is that look she tossed my way. Perched on the teetering edge of her seat, her body bursting with buoyancy -- “…the best day of my life.” Oh to be so sure that this one moment you’re living is the one you love, before the game’s begun or won or anybody’s even pinned your tags on. Just the possibility enough. That’s the look she tossed. Thank God I had my catcher’s mit on.

What is it about the Moon?

Both my girls treat it like a person, running to meet the moon like granny at the airport. It happened first when our eight year-old was nearly two. She saw it one late afternoon making a premature appearance in an autumn sky hours before the stars, sat right down in the middle of the path, stretched her toddler arms out to it and pleaded “Come”. Where have I been for so long, I thought, that I have should have forgotten the moon’s face?

Our younger one, now not yet three, with perhaps less poetry in her soul but a greater love of motion, spies the moon in the sky and insists that Mummy run along with the pushchair singing a falling three note tune “Hello, moon, moon, moon, Hello moon, moon, moon, Hello Moon.” Knowing the second time around that two-years old doesn’t last long, I forget about what the neighbours will think and oblige her, chugging up Black Bank a little breathless. I think she hopes we will catch it up, or believes that it is having a race with us.
The eight year-old doesn’t sit in the path anymore waiting for the moon to come. She wants to know about waxing and waning. Realising that along with the Kings and Queens of England and the 52 States of America here is another tranche of information I have once been taught and forgotten, I look up the moon’s details in a tatty old book in my husband’s study and discover that if you put your right hand up to the moon and it fits the ‘C’ shape of your hand it is waxing and if it fits the ‘C’ shape of your left hand it is waning. That’s ok I can remember that – my mother taught me to beeswax the dining room table when I was a girl --waxing is forever right handed for me.

As for my mother, she is waning. Far off in the delightful climate of the Southern United States she is getting smaller and smaller. Her ears hear less on the telephone. Her letters are fewer and shorter. Not yet a sliver of herself, she is, I have to face it, in decline. I wish she weren’t. I wish I could stop it. (If I lived closer I would build a high wall around her like they talk of building round Venice. A kind of sea defense against time.) I love the seasons, their changes and chances, but this is where my being in harmony with the natural flow of life ceases. I want to go backwards, hear her tell me to polish that spot again, show me how to put my eye at the edge and look sideways for smudges and gleam. I would happily take the ache back into my skinny schoolgirl arms, rub the rag round and round forever if it could take the wane away.

Wild and inquisitive, my own girls are all wax. Me? I go on hoping I am not yet quite full, and don’t really want to know in case I am wrong.

Whaddya think? Maybe my two year-old is right. Maybe the moon is having a race with us after all.