It’s the stillness of the summer evenings that we love – as if someone has thrown a soft bridal veil over the garden.
Ours is a postage-stamp lawn; a few pots with daisies and arum lilies; baby breath of gypsophila, heavenly blue of petal.
When we sit there together in the gauze of twilight, drinking tea, chatting about our day, we are content.
We have made our own secret garden.
The acer in the pot – a gift from friends for my 50th – is pressed for space. It needs repotted – mine is the guilt of a mother whose child is wearing too tight shoes.
The peony blooms cerise pink and deep yellow – “Bowl of Beauty,” said my mother.
I see her there lifting the bloom, like she’s tilting the chin of a shy child, raising a face to the sun, saying: “How beautiful you are.”
She bought the peony for me on one of our gardening hikes down south. I haven’t managed to murder it yet.
My victims are many. Their corspes lie behind our garden shed – little withered brown shrubs that used to be blue-eyed flowers. I gave them my heart and way too much water.
It seems like yesterday that ma and I would drive off with a busload of gardeners for three days of garden visits – from fancy tulips in stainless steel bins to frothy pink old-fashioned roses.
Ah, the people we met and the stories we heard. Ma wasn’t just a good gardener, she was a good listener.
Then, we’d swing back into the Europa bus station – a jungle on wheels, green fronds and blousy roses bursting out of every window.
In my garden, her ghost kneels beside me, digging as our robin stands sentry, waiting for his worm supper.
There are her forget-me-nots, because we will forget her not, and, as my friends who’ve shared in the joy of the little blue flower attest, they are the gift that keeps on giving.
They are not quite the thug that is achemilla mollis – you give that to your enemies – but like feral children, the forget-me-nots need to be contained.
On warm summer evenings, my husband and I look back on summers past.
There was the year when our back dripped with snail slime – it was an invasion – a scene from Alien.
He gathered the snails gently, taking them down the road to free them in the green of the park.
“They’ll be back by sundown,” I warned him. Snails have a homing instinct and ours is a big juicy home.
There was the year he took our small son out to paint the old concrete wall at the back.
They whitewashed together, father and son, sloshing the paint from the bucket.
“Daddy, the wall is moving,” said our boy. He was right.
The woodlice were living in the holes in the concrete – they all came out and ran about in their fresh white paint coats.
My husband would have been concerned for them. Our spiders are evicted gently in glass jam jars; he refuses to kill a slug that showed up in our bedroom.
“It’s only a baby,” he said.
Maybe I’m entering dotage. I talk to babies and cats and dogs and geraniums – anything that can’t talk back.
My husband caught me in the kitchen one morning stirring the porridge gently.
“How’s your imaginary friend?” he asked with a smile. He could hear me chatting away to myself in the kitchen.
It reminded me of how, in her final years, ma liked having me to stay and sleep in our old “girls’ room”.
“I love to hear you breathing next door,” she’d tell me.
“That’s me snoring,” I’d tell her, but she didn’t mind.
I talk to her now in the garden.
She taught me so much.
You can’t give the plants enough water at this time of year. She’d leave the hose on for a good long soak.
I do the same.
“I think that’s Spelga about empty by now,” says my husband as I dash out to turn it off.
Our garden is undergoing a sudden growth spurt… turn your back on it and, like a teenage boy, it’ll have suddenly shot up a foot and be looking down at you.
I’m a fair weather gardener – an instant colour woman.
But our garden has taught me to slow down… to wait out the darkness of winter; to savour like warm brandy the sun on a summer’s evening.
