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.

Elixir of Youth

How is it that some people just don’t age? Where did they find that hidden bottle of elixir?
I took the girls for tea yesterday to Mary’s, the large Georgian house on the green, with wrought iron railings and long windows, shutters folded back. ‘Took them to tea’. It sounds so formal and stuffy, starched tablecloths and scratchy petticoats. What I mean is I took them around unannounced, they pounded the door, knocked the knocker, rang the bell, then the eldest charged round to the back garden whilst the younger one lifted the letter flap and called in her most insistent tone “Maaa-weee” (she hasn’t got the hang of r’s yet). You never make appointments with Mary. You call round when you can. If she’s in she’s glad to see you; if she’s out she’s having a nice time somewhere else. She treats each day like an empty beach with its own tide washing up what it will. She says she likes every day full of surprises. I admire this arrangement with life; it is how I too would like to live when the season of school runs and ballet lessons and swimming lessons and piano lessons and flute lessons and playgroups and pony for a week, and netball and governor’s meetings and (you get my drift) is over. And so we roll up and bang on the door curious and hopeful, is Mary in? Is she upstairs, in the garden? Is she out? Harrumph.

A loud hurrah from the back garden where, of course, Mary would be on a gloriously sunny day like today. I grabbed Baby Houdini’s hand and we hare round to find Mary, not rising from her weeding or brushing down the paths, but caught in the middle of a hopscotch game, hastily chalked squares in front of her, a pebble in her hand.

Mary will be 80 today. She’s had MS for years and years and lately she’s started having a fluttery heart they can’t figure out. I’ve seen her on the carpet with my girls teaching them her leg exercises. I’ve seen her spraying them with water in the garden, playing limbo, throwing and catching balls, but I have to admit hopscotch is a first.
“Look at you,” I hug her, laughing.
“Cup of tea?” she asks, tossing the pebble into the rose bed.
Inside the kitchen I notice a birthday card with a photo on it of a lady almost exactly Mary’s age and size, shape and agility, feet astride a hopscotch square on a municipal park path. Two ancient friends on the bench in cardigans and sunglasses applaud. The caption reads: ‘Getting Old is Inevitable. Growing Up is Optional’. I wave it at Mary who is busy with the kettle.
“I was trying it out.” she says.
I remember the time a few years ago when I reminded my eight year-old, then about four, to be careful when she was playing in the garden with Mary. “You can’t run at her so hard, honey, you might knock her down. She’s old, you know.”
She stopped in her tracks, perplexed. “She’s not old, she’s new,” she insisted.
When I told Mary she roared and then reassured me, “I won’t break.”
So I learned not to wrap her up. Sometimes, when she falls with the MS, she stays inside for a week or so till the bruises on her face go away.

Mary’s biscuit barrel is legendary, a galaxy of dark and white and milk chocolate biscuits that only come in a giant tin. Homemade buns, a slice of Victoria sponge. She rattles up a platter of treats while the girls sniff about the larder “Mummy, why don’t we have nice labels on everything like this?”. (What do you mean? A tin of beans already has a label). I warm the teapot. Mary treats them like wine connoisseurs in her store of fresh pressed apple juices – Discovery? Cox? Golden Delicious? Jonogold? So many things to taste in Mary’s house, though in truth, despite the dignity of the architecture, restrained taste is not her thing. She likes her colours bright, and lots of them. Especially all together in one room. Her late husband painted murals on the walls. Above the Georgian fireplace in the green panelled drawing room one panel depicts Mary in clouds with pastel angels all around her looking like the Queen of Heaven.

A lot of things have gone wrong for Mary. Her parents didn’t bother to educate her much. True, the farm she bought with the cash instead did end up a better investment, she says, than 12 years of school fees. But in the things that matter she has suffered. Wanting nothing more than children she married young to a man who, when babies did not appear promptly exchanged her for a more fecund model. When she did find love again, he was married to someone else, and a priest, and the end of that marriage gave him guilt he could never shake, much as he adored the queen of his new heaven. She nursed him through his stroke, and watched him die, got MS. You know the rest.

Today she will be 80. Since her heart started doing its little bird routine I have started to worry, though doing so contravenes every law of her house. In her drawing room this afternoon, under the guardian eyes of Mary of the mural, unstarched, we took our tea. The little one, perched too high for the coffee table on a teetering piano stool swirled her pointing finger over the plate of heavenly biscuits like a game spinner, trying to choose. “Mmmmm… this one!” her finger leapt to decision. I caught Mary’s eye and she caught mine, we caught the eye of the elder one. Delighted, we made her do it again. Just to see the finger of fate play with chocolate. And then I spied it. On the tapestry cushion of the chair behind hers was written in lilting letters
“Live Well,
Laugh Often,
Love Much”.

Mary’s elixir.