Day 107: I Have A Gardener

My garden was very pretty once. Then I looked away for a month, turned back, and found enormous overgrown things, peonies lost in the shade of a mock-orange, and the tentacles of next door's murderous apple tree (which nearly killed my cat Monster one day), reaching high up into the sky and over the garden wall.

I had had Enough one morning. Looking out of the window made me immeasurably sad, not happy and soothed (as my cellar now does). But I don't know how to do gardening stuff, and when I do I break things and they usually die, or I forget to water them, or put them in the Wrong Place. Happily, later that morning I needed small nails to affix a coat hook to the door, and found myself in the hardware shop of the Tiny Chinese Man and his Silent Wife on Streatham Hill (four doors down from the Deaf Scottish Petshop Owner). And there I saw a card, with the words "Noel. Garden Care and Attention."

Noel is now in the garden. Noel is 58 and quite posh. He looked at all my books and my parents' wedding photograph ("I say! Look at those boots! I must say, I had awfully long hair once.") He looked at my grandmother's wedding photograph ("Must have been ... 1944? Look at that cap".) We drank coffee and ate ginger biscuits and talked of Empress Josephine and her 170 varieties of rose, Neil Young, the book he is writing with an illiterate Iraqi minicab driver, what it was like being the translator for Manitas de Plata of the Gipsy Kings, decking, and Elizabeth David. Then we took a turn around the garden.

"The thing about gardens is they come straight from the Manufacturer. The only living things are people, animals and plants; you wouldn't leave a dead body around, so the thing is to take the dead things away and see what's still living." He starts clipping things and talking about Monastic Gardening. (You say nothing, listen to nothing, concentrate and work fast.) "It has a nice vibe, this garden. You should be able to sit and think in it. And sleep in it in the summer." I raise my eyebrow. "No, look. You put the bed here (points at the back wall), and grow that lovely rose up there (points at the garden fence), and ... well, they do it in France."

It is Decided. I shall sleep in my garden in the summer, and Noel will make secret corners that you won't be able to see, but I will know are there. We are having soup for lunch. "Oh dear you, are you sure? You are kind". I love nice posh people, me.