Garden

A hammock barely manages to stay buoyant, adrift in the garden, grass sprays licking crests over its gunnels. If you are so inclined to recline, you will find, leeward of the sun, a giant monkey puzzle tree. It's a veritable kraken, with green scaled tentacles doming out a space behind the grassy wash. Its dizzying parabolas mesh with a worn apple tree, barely yet wheezing fruit. Under them both is a secret place, a heartening refuge which offers security as much by the knowledge that it is there, as by actually being entered. In the hotter months, I'm intending to spread hay throughout to help coax people out of the heat. A neighbour and I plan to play chess there one day.



Beyond the monkey maze, a yellow plum tree elbows over the hedge, and snarls of blackberry burst through to mug you. Here is a huddle of chairs and our fire-creche, the off-centered axle for our house's social wheel. And begins the strawberry patch. Garlic reeds and chives, parsley, baby potatoes, errant carrots, soon-to-be cilantro, courgettes, pumpkins and squash. Peas, broccoli, kale and maybe a lettuce. These all line the back of the yard, closing with our herbs and compost.

In this joyous, oxygenerative ver-dance, when the nearby traffic is muffled, are bumbling buzzes of bees and plump flies; bright birdsong from even tinier secret canopy holes; our hedge-cat HuckleBetty, who confers his confidences shyly, but with love, popping out from the under/over growth to say hello. Hummingbirds perch on the marshaled phalanx of bamboo, while crows hurl insults down from almost anywhere. I like to stand or sit or lie here until my edges and boundaries are massaged down and folded into the garden's batter.

But all here is not life, death still acts as ballast. A moribund stub of apple tree crouches at the prow of the hammock. Harrowed and harassed by the years, it droops the ferryman's lantern into the nights. A fir, once the garden's pride and ad hoc sundial, now creaks weathered and scorched above us. Opposite it, next to the ancient, ivy-clad bones of a fallen cherry tree, an enthusiastic young eucalyptus rustles desiccated leaves through the breeze. A sad lullabyebye.

But it's beautiful, this garden. When we dug the fire-pit, we hit a vein of old horse manure hearkening back to when the second building was a coach-house. Remnants of tenants past poke out at odd angles, and like horticultural archaeology, we can only guess as to how the snow-drops migrated, and who founded the birdbath corroded beyond repair, how the gnarled rosemary can persist after so many years of torture from the pestilential morning glory. It's a font of love, for me, this garden, a well-spring of inspiration and relaxation. This town would feel quite alien without it.