Chapter Fourteen
First thing in the morning, there are the usual noises from next door. The sound of running water and a clatter in the kitchen, even the smell of coffee. Yet, once more, no sign of him on the balcony.
As soon as possible, I’m down among the bushes. Pen and pad in hand, I make notes as I go.
My main objective is also to decide where best to start with my smaller gardens. In theory, closer to the terrace would be ideal, so the garden renovation can proceed like a wave gradually turning the land from brown to green over the next fifteen months.
People think restoration is difficult; they’re wrong.
It’s easy as long as you find a key. For example, a large hole with a broken statue.
It tells you this was a pond, so you repair the structure, refill with clean water, plant water lilies, some flowering bushes on the outside, add a new statue, a stone bench, and hey presto!
We have a water garden. Next, you find the remains of a box hedge – another key.
You follow the roots and recreate a mini maze.
My job today is to find some of the old features to create the new gardens around them.
But after several hours of pushing my way through dead bushes, I can’t find a key, somewhere to start. The more I walk around dead bushes, the more confusing it becomes.
All I have to do is look at the ground and see what had once been there, whether old flowerbed, topiary, trees or just meadow. Yet, I can’t seem to find a shape. There are trees but they’re in odd places. And just when I think I’ve found a dip where a flowerbed might have been, it ends suddenly.
The next day is no better.
By sunset, I give up.
Time for a different approach.
Forget the original design for now, let’s focus on creating a whole new design.
It’s just a question of finding the right place to start.
I know a hell of a lot about Victorian gardens; surely I can create a new one here.
Late into the night, up in my apartment with a sketchpad and pastel pencils, I make several gorgeous plans.
Three small gardens full of fountains, pools and a riot of flowers.
The next morning, excited about planning where to create the first of my little gardens, I take a pair of cutters with me so I can find the best place to start. It’s the first of March and a surprisingly warm sunny day. A good omen.
Wrong.
How can I explain the wrongness I sense through my feet? Imagine walking downstairs, but your legs feel as if you’re climbing up.
My beautiful vision doesn’t fit, like the wrong piece of a jigsaw: whichever way I turn, it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t my imagination fit here on the ground? Just where I plan a flowerbed, suddenly I find a tree in the middle. Just one tree. No explanation.
It’s as if the land is actually fighting me. I know this sounds insane; it’s just land, soil and weeds, isn’t it?
Am I in the wrong spot? Would this plan fit better elsewhere?
Using my cutters, I carve a narrow path deeper into the park. Deeper and deeper. The sun gets warmer and warmer. I have to unclip the straps of my dungarees to yank off my long-sleeved tee-shirt.
The problem is that the absence of inspiration is leaving too much room in my head for distracting thoughts of Osian.
That’s the worst kind of distraction because of our history.
Actually, no – not our history. Just mine.
That one-sided love that imprinted itself on me so that I always go for the wrong men.
Even when they loved me, they loved something else more.
I always came second to graduate studies, travel, a motorbike, and of course, other women.
No matter what I invested into the relationship, I walked away the loser.
Only one relationship has been a success.
Gardens never cheat on me; they’re always rewarding and give back ten times what they take. My relationship with horticulture has brought me professional respect, a good standard of living and endless joy.
So why is it now playing hard to get?
“Please.” I glance at North Park. “Stop fighting me. Let my inspiration come. Once I’m inspired, nothing else will matter.”
My foot catches on something. A long, thorny vine that scratches my ankle. I stop to free my leg and that’s when I realise it’s a rose.
Of course there are roses – they can survive decades; they can survive a century.
Every English garden worth the name would have had roses.
Okay, this is Wales not England, but you know what I mean.
What surprises me is that it’s a climbing rose.
There’s nothing to climb here – no walls, nothing.
Behind that rose, I find another, then another, and another.
My feet speed up with excitement. Very soon, I’ve counted fifty roses in a long curve.
Could there have been trellises?
That’s where a garden restorer becomes a detective.
It takes two hours with the GPS measuring app on my phone.
Drawing the points with my pencil and pad, I can map the roses; gradually, the picture comes together.
It’s a long wavy line approximately 130 yards long.
The length of a football field. That’s not a trellis.
That’s… a… I double check. Yes, that’s an arcade.
A rose arcade. In my imagination it’s green and beautiful: arch after arch of rose bushes climbing over my head, shedding yellow and red petals on the path underneath.
I look back. We’re right in the middle of the park. A rose arcade here would have been a gorgeous feature that could be seen from anywhere in Kendric House.
Thank God Osian and I had that falling out. Otherwise we’d have had a tractor ploughing all this down to the soil, and all evidence of this magnificent, romantic secret – this magic – would have disappeared.
Were all roses the same colour? Are they the five colours of hope?
An arcade of roses – a long arcade – would need benches along the way, maybe little nooks where people could sit and enjoy the view. Maybe at the point where two colours meet? A mini fountain, a statue, a picnic table?
Throwing my arms up in the air, I laugh out loud. This is why my other plans didn’t fit. I should have known! “Okay, okay, you stubborn land, you’ve been leading me here to show me the roses.” My heart sings and dances. I can’t wait to start.
I shade my eyes with a hand and scan the grounds. There’s a couple of acres between the roses and the house. What about them? If I want to work on the rose arcade, then I can’t have two acres of dead wilderness in front of it. That would be an eyesore.
Unless I have turfed. Plain green grass would be the perfect temporary solution.
Best of all, my inspiration has found me. I doubt I’ll even have a minute to see Osian, let alone chat with him.
Tomorrow I’ll order the tractor and clear everything between the roses and the terrace; we could start laying turf by next week and then the real work can start. I turn to go back home.
Except the land, it seems, hasn’t finished with me.
As I push my way back, thorny brambles snag on my clothes and one of them whips across my face then gets tangled in my hair and won’t come free.
Tugging my head gently only makes things worse, and the thorns pull on my hair painfully. I reach for the clippers in my pocket, but as I try to cut blindly behind my head, they fall out of my hand.
They’re somewhere behind me but it’s impossible to see because turning my head pulls on my hair.
I take a step back, hoping to get behind where I dropped the cutters.
My foot lands in a tangle of briars, like barbed wire.
Shit. Trying to pull it out seems to drag some of the prickly vines with it.
They scratch my skin painfully and, I suspect, draw blood.
Every move tangles me even more. I can’t bend to free my feet without losing a chunk of hair and probably scalp too.
A further ten minutes of trying to extract myself either by tiny tugs or sideways twists, and it all ends with getting my linen dungarees caught on more thorns.
“Hello?” I call out.
Nothing.
“Can anyone hear me?”
I take a deeper breath and call again, as loud as possible
“Hello. Hellooooo.”
Nothing.
The house is too far away for anyone to hear me. Does anyone even know I’m here? In my determination to avoid Osian I had slipped down the back stairs early in the morning and didn’t see anyone.
I’m going to be here for ages. And even if they thought to look for me, they’d never think to look this deep. The path I cut earlier ended at the start of the rose arcade. A football field away.
I’m going to be here until old age gets me. An old skeleton imprisoned in the wilderness.
I let out a piercing scream like I’m being attacked. “HELLO,” I shriek. “HELP ME.”
A woman comes out on the terrace and looks out. I scream again and wave. “Help me!”
She disappears inside. Did she see me?
A few minutes later, a window opens on the first floor of the south wing, the wing closest to me. The woman is Leonie.
“Are you all right?” she shouts.
Why do people ask this?
“I’m stuck and can’t free myself,” I call at a more manageable volume because my throat is hurting now. “Go to my apartment and get the shears.”
“What are they?”
“Gardening tools; they look like big scissors. In the long holdall on the floor.”
“Which one is your apartment?”
My throat hurts too much, and I start to cough. It feels like I’ve swallowed wood chippings.
“Wait, I’ll find Osian. He’ll know.”
No, not him!
On the other hand, I’m not in a position to do anything other than stand and wait in the hot sun.
Ten minutes later, I see him emerge from the terrace doors carrying a gardening bag – not mine. He shades his eyes with a hand and scans left to right, but I’m among big bushes, he probably can’t see me.
“Evie?” he bellows. “Where are you? Wave!”
I lift an arm and rise up on my toes, causing one of the thorny branches to scratch me very badly.
His head snaps in my direction and he waves back before sprinting down the stairs.
It takes him a while to work his way through the worst of the wilderness.
Something wet starts to trickle down my foot.
I look down and yep, it’s blood because I seem to be wearing a bramble like an ankle bracelet.
My eyes land on a dark narrow edge, like a line in the ground.
A thin dark edge, like slates standing up on their side – they stick out of the ground in a straight line running away from me.
As if someone has buried a house sideways and the edge of the roof is all that sticks out.
This is so out of place. I can’t understand why it would be here. Unless…
Unless the garden wanted me to see this. I’d been too tired and anxious to get home and would have never seen this. And once inside, I’d have just called the tractor.
Did I say this garden has a will of its own? It’s never going to tamely surrender to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a shovel. It demands respect.
“You fight dirty, don’t you?” I can’t help saying out loud.
“Who are you talking to?” Osian asks from a few feet away. He cuts through to me at last and stops, breathing hard, sweat glistening on his forehead.
He has large cutters in his hand. One quick look at me and he holds up a hand. “Stay still.”
“Really?” I rasp through a dry throat. “Because I was about to go to travelling. What do think? Glasgow? York? I hear Grimsby’s lovely this time of year.”
His eyes flick to me, his expression amused, then he notices the scratch on my face. “Shit, this is bad,” he says, tugging at the branch that’s caught in my hair. Then he looks down at my clothes caught on thorns, and at my feet in a tangle of briars holding me prisoner.
He works quickly and effectively. In no time at all, he’s trimmed back everything within a circle around me.
“These must be yours.” He hands me my lost cutters.
“Don’t touch your hair – there’s a nasty vine stuck in it.
I’ll need to get you inside and work with smaller secateurs.
And you’re bleeding.” He places a hand in the small of my back and guides me carefully back to the path he seems to have cut to reach me.
“Just a sec.” I take a couple of steps sideways and bend to check the slate. Now that Osian’s made a bit of room, I can squat all the way down for a better look.
“Careful,” he says. “You don’t want to get your wounds dirty.”
Bending my head down, I peer under the growth. It’s just as I suspected: the line of slates runs a long way; the end isn’t even visible from here.
“Did you lose something?”
“I’ve found something.” I can’t help grinning.
“Your credit cards?”
“Tell you when my throat feels better.”
Without a word, Osian helps me all the way back to the house.