“What on earth are you doing out here at this time of night?” Ian whispered incredulously.
“I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to make sure the slugs weren’t eating the hostas,” Liz whispered back to him and gave him a wry smile.
“But it’s half past two in the morning and you’re gardening in your pyjamas! Come on in, you’ll catch your death and you won’t be fit for anything tomorrow,” he cried in disbelief.
“Just give me five more minutes-I still need to check the delphiniums,” she gave an imperceptible nod.
Ian knew from experience that meant that she wouldn’t be in for at least the next hour.
“Look I’m going in, I’m getting cold.” He thrust his hands down into his dressing gown pockets. “Please, promise me you’ll come in soon.”
“Ok, stop worrying.” Her response was pre-occupied. Liz was wide awake and she found the cool of the summers evening far too alluring to be back in bed thinking about everything she had to do.
Ian rolled his eyes in mild irritation. There was no talking to her. For four nights in the last week she had sneaked back outside after he had gone to bed. She didn’t just love her garden-it was like an obsession.
Outside Liz was lost in thought, running through her mental list of tasks to do. She often used to come outside and garden in her pyjamas. She had invested in a pair of green slip-on gardening shoes after she realised that she was getting chilblains from where the dew soaked through her slippers and made her feet cold and wet. Invariably she didn’t feel any chill because she was working but if she did, she simply slipped a fleece or waterproof over her pyjamas.
Tonight was a beautiful peaceful evening with only a resident hedgehog for company. She did her best thinking in the dead of night and found she could get far more done than in the daytime with the antics of the birds to distract her.
The moon was so bright and clear it illuminated the whole garden outlining a fine silver highlight to the edges of everything and adding an ethereal purple hue to the normally variant shades of grey. On occasions if she found it too dark, she would flick on the outside security lights which were more like bright floodlights. But Liz found them too harsh and had become adept at gardening with only limited vision. It somehow served to heighten her enjoyment by stimulating her other senses as she stroked and inhaled her way around the grounds. It was amazing how her senses had learnt to overcompensate, so much so that she only had to trace her fingers over the flowers in containers to know when a flower was just starting to crisp and needed deadheading.
The layout of the garden was imprinted in her mind and immortalised in a notepad which she referred to most days so that even with her addiction of moving plants, she still knew exactly where every tree, plant, shrub and bulb lived.
After they sold their last house Liz and Ian searched for months for the right new property. Eventually they moved into rented when Liz fell and fell in love with an old Station Masters Cottage which had nearly an acre of land. As luck would have it less than a year later the owners announced that they were planning to sell up and move abroad. Liz and Ian put in an immediate offer which was accepted and just a few weeks later Liz was rewarded with the full ownership of the gardens she had meticulously tended. Her fixation with the gardens eventually became a full time activity so Ian agreed that she should continue her accountancy work freelance, basing herself from home in order that she could reduce her hours and concentrate her efforts on her one true love-gardening.
That was over ten years ago. Since then, every winter during the colder months (when she wasn’t outside,) Liz spent hours working at the kitchen table by the wood burner-sketching and painstakingly planning into her notebook which plants she was going to introduce, what moves would need to be made to accommodate them. She was like a master chess player anticipating the seasons and how the colours might work together to give her illusory perfection. She worked like an artist, sketching onto a blank canvas then mixing the colours and augmenting the paint until she was completely sated.
One of her favourite tasks was to spread the new seed catalogues and brochures over the table-so she could visualise the beds in her minds eye. She could never resist the cleverly marketed catalogues of ‘must have’ plants. Any willpower fast deserted her when faced with a cup of tea, a digestive biscuit and the latest inspirational pages, so she was always rather over enthusiastic when it came to ordering. Every new variety and inspirational colour combination would shout out of the pages to come and join her in her wonderland. But no matter if she over ordered-any ‘surplus‘was inevitably designated a small nook hidden somewhere that no one else would have seen. Liz always managed to squeeze in a little more colour or form and anyway, she could never have too many of anything, especially bulbs.
Some bulbs that she planted had disappeared, never to be seen again-probably eaten by slugs or mice. Or as Liz philosophised, maybe they just didn’t like it here. She had learnt over the years to work with the soil that she had been given in the garden, but not every plant played by the rules.
By far her greatest pleasure was when the delivery van arrived and she would eagerly rip into the packaging to see the parcels of bounty before starting the military operation of planting. It was always a frenetic time but after a few days when everything had settled in its new home Liz would ruthlessly survey her efforts, replanting anything which did not meet with her approval and consign to the compost heap anything which disappointed in the way of quality. Once her work was done, all she could do was give a little support in the way of weeding and watering to encourage the plant to be happy. The rest, she had to sit back and wait for the seasons, and place her trust in Mother Nature to decide which would flourish or fall by the wayside.
Everything had a purpose and was planted for a reason in Liz’s garden. Nothing shallow or superficial kept her favour-it was not enough to have only outward beauty, however dazzling. She couldn’t afford to suffer fools and made everything work to earn its place. It needed another facet-a sublime perfume, to nourish the birds, attract the butterflies or provide a tasty addition to a salad.
Climbers scrambled over the pergola trying to catch her attention as she walked through the Orchard. Here she had embellished the previous owner’s collection with her own varieties of apple trees, a morello cherry and a plum. The far boundary was planted with evergreens to hide the houses beyond and, in front of this is she had dotted several varieties of Viburnum Tinus and Eucalyptus to make a soft screen of deep green and grey contrasting foliage. She wanted to give the orchard a romantic character. Drifts of daffodils and bluebells were beneath the trees in the spring. For now the rambling roses and honeysuckles climbed through some of the apples.
Walking through the area Liz felt excited, initially by the smell that first hit her then she saw the Belle de Crecy, a gallica rose which had timed itself to perfection with a sudden profusion of old fashioned mauve flowers. The magnificence of the full, frilled rosette shaped petals looked as if someone had cut the blooms part way through to form four segments, like an orange. “They were only in bud yesterday.” She remarked to herself, unconscious that she was speaking out loud. The days warm temperatures and her spraying with warm water had rewarded her well.
She caught a glimpse of Rosa Albertine and was for just a second overwhelmed by it’s delicate beauty. She remembered as a child how she used to pick fallen rose petals from the base of the stems and make ‘perfume’ out of it. Within only a few hours the smell was putrid and she would have to make some more. The strong perfume of old fashioned Roses was one of the main aspects of this garden she wanted to re-capture in her garden so she had chosen old fashioned varieties-blousy, cabbage-shaped flowers to furnish it.
The scent from a honeysuckle that was entwined around the apple trees filled her lungs. English Honeysuckle-it was the most arresting of aromas and never failed to halt her in her tracks. She stopped to inhale the intoxicating perfume and leaned against a rickety gate which was the entrance to a shaded grove area. Here, beside a small stream there was still a small secreted corner to fill with plants since she had managed to eradicate all the ground elder. It was planted with hellebores, lily of the valley and bluebells in her mind’s eye-she dreamt of creating a magical ‘woodland’-a themed space which she envisaged being over run with nymphs and elves when no-one was around.
“I’ll need to thin out the shoots of the Clematis,” she thought walking through the willow arbour. “It looks more like a disembowelled mattress.”
The lavender hedges brushing against her pyjamas guided her route along the path towards the cottage garden. The long, spiky flowers of the Buddleja ‘black knight’ suffused by butterflies and bees by day, looked glorious with its dramatic silhouette by moonlight.
She could see the outline of a Fuchsia magellanica ‘Riccartonii.” It was not a particularly remarkable shrub except that it was the only plant in the whole garden which she allowed for purely sentimental reasons. It didn’t do anything other than look pretty and provide a good informal hedge. Long, elegant flowers of red and purple and a cluster of long, red, pollen-tipped stamens hang down from the centre of the bell. When Liz was a child there used to be an enormous one in the bottom of the garden near the pear tree and she used to play hide and seek with her brother. When she left home her mum bought her one in a tub for the balcony of her first floor flat. Over the years she moved the fuchsia into bigger and bigger containers until they bought this house and at last it was able to take up a permanent residence and be allowed to flourish to its full potential, just like the one she used to hide behind. She pinched off a couple of the shoots affectionately-sometimes it grew over enthusiastically and she had to encourage it into a bushier plant.
The cottage garden was probably her favourite area in the summer time because it evoked memories from her childhood and make her feel close to her dear departed mum and Grandpa. As a child she would help ‘Gramps’ lovingly tend his garden and had replicated so many of his choices in her own.
She thought about his little ditties-“if the Oak tree flowers before Ash, you’re in for a splash.” His prophecies always seemed to ring true-there had been little rain that summer since the Oak tree flowered first. She could have made a book of his sayings-she cherished them all. Gramps always said “You can tell from the sun setting at night whether it promises to be good clear day of weather ahead.”
She smiled fondly at his sage words. “It was a red sky last night so it promises to be a shepherd’s delight,” she thought hopefully, praying for good weather the following day.
He used to warn her about the gardener’s arch enemy, the slug. Particularly he warned to check for slugs and snails on the delphiniums-“Now you mark my words Lizzie-Delphiniums make a hugely appealing meal to those ruddy slugs and you should check them every day. But I have a trick because if you pop a tub of beer down into the earth the buggers can’t resist. And at least they die happy!” He used to make her laugh however many times he said it.
Liz felt that sunken tubs of beer in the ground looked unsightly in her garden and she hated using pellets so she decided her only way to control them was to check fastidiously. It was a painstaking job, but she neglected the task at her peril. She collected the offenders in a margarine tub and couldn’t bear to kill them. Instead she preferred to thrown them over next doors wall. She was sure that the farmer wouldn’t mind, although ‘truth be told,’ she had never actually asked him.
She studied the soil in an area where a couple of lilies still had not come up. She didn’t know where they had disappeared to. She took the little marker out of the ground and covered the patch over with soil.
As soon as she saw the clump of delphiniums she knew the slugs had been feasting that evening. Several of the stunning, stately spires had been completely ravaged leaving a small gap of height along the profile of the border. She wished she had listened to Gramps and put the beer traps down now.
Suddenly the screech of the tawny owl in the ash tree to her side startled her and she stumbled grazing her leg. It gave her a good excuse to cry. You would think after five years of participating in the National Gardens Scheme that she would realise her garden would never be perfect. Every year she worked towards it and every year she disappointed herself. But by tomorrow night at this time she hoped all her efforts would be rewarded-the one day of the year when people from all walks of life came and visited her gardens and they shared a common connection-their own pursuit of perfection.
Liz didn’t suppose that any of them ever found the fulfilment which they sought. If they did, there would be no point in carrying on with gardening...
For a second or two it was very still. Then the Blackbird started to sing. The sun was coming up. Soon she would be able to see the colours in full glory-the herbaceous borders showing off their vibrant colours as if they were being judged in a horticultural show. She knew she had better appreciate them while they were there. In just a few short months the evenings would be drawing in and the magnificence of the garden shrunk back to ground level.
She sighed. Time had run away with her once more. She had better go and shower. She might just have time to cut the camomile lawn afterwards if she was quick.
COPYRIGHT-Debbie White May 2008
We have been rehearsing the script in our house for nearly three weeks, my youngest cast as ‘Pork Chop’ and also ‘Mr Slack’ who turns into Santa Claus (you have to be there really.) 
What amazed me the most was how the children’s personalities have developed and their confidence grown over the last year. His class of twenty children, aged seven to nine years old consummately acted and spoke out loud and clearly to the back of the room and beyond into the car park-a ‘proper’ presentation with oodles of humour and fun woven into a feel good storyline...and there was even a nativity scene in there too. 
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