Garden-to-be

It always takes us a while to get going on Sunday morning, because of Saturday night and taking people home after they have finished drinking and dancing and trying to find somebody to fall in love with.

It was five o’clock in the morning by the time we had got home, and taken the dog for a final empty round the Library Gardens, and showered the acid smell of taxis and other people’s nights out off us with fragrant lavender soap.

All the same, Sunday is our day off, and it would have been an awful waste to miss any of it, so we got up again at ten.

We decided that we would spend the day doing things in the garden, but there was a chill breeze and cloudy skies, and somehow we just seemed to stay in our rocking chairs in front of the fire for ages, drinking cups of coffee and lazily looking out of the french windows and doing armchair gardening.

We like armchair gardening, it is very absorbing to sit and gaze at the garden and have ideas, or to look at it from lots of different places and think of ways we might make it look beautiful from wherever we are standing. We have planned and imagined all sorts of improbable but exciting things, like painting the Lake District slate walls in Jaipuri pink, or building a Moroccan riad with a fountain, or even just building an extension and putting a roof garden on the top.

Of course in the end we haven’t done any of these things, and what we have got is a riotous jumble of lots of small moments of inspiration and things built out of stuff that real builders have chucked out, which is how Mark likes to do gardens best. We have got a lovely bright brick path, which I think is splendid, but Mark built half of it when we knocked the kitchen wall down, and the other half when one of our taxi drivers called round in great excitement to tell us that he had found a skip full of bricks.

It is at its most beautiful when Mark has not got his trolley jack or a stack of spare wheels or his compressor parked in the middle of it. This is difficult to arrange all the time because of the very smallness of the space and because he is tiresomely messy and does not seem to notice when the garden is starting to look like his uncle’s scrapyard.

I agree completely with Walt Disney, who liked his parks much better than his films, because once the films were made they were finished and could no longer be messed about with, even if suddenly he had a brilliant new idea: but he could keep being inspired and thrilled and busy in the parks for ever.

I feel like this about the garden, which is loads better than Disneyland, because I don’t have to put up with Mickey Mouse and ten million visitors a year, which must have been a trial. However I can also see that Walt Disney might have appreciated not having somebody constantly leaving old land rover axles and gear boxes and flat car batteries lying about all over the place for him to stub his toes on and curse in the dark.

In the end we were brave, and layered on jerseys and coats and boots and Mark went to cut some more wood up and I went to pot on some of my little seeds: and we had only been outside for a very few minutes and the sky cleared to a bright forget-me-not blue and the sun absolutely beamed on us. I had only been potting things for a very few minutes before I had to peel off my scarf and jacket, and suddenly we forgot about being tired and cold and started to feel really excited and enthusiastic about it all.

Mark filled the fireplace with logs and then set to building his shed doors, and I built a trellis with the garden canes and planted the sweet peas along the front of it. Mark has cut up all of the logs that he brought home the other day and stacked them tidily in one of the log cupboards he has built. I dug up some of the more profligate mint and planted some mangetout and peas that I will cook in ginger and butter in the summer.

We had a lovely afternoon, being busy and grubby and dreaming about the-garden-as-it-will-be, planting coriander and lupins and freesias, digging in sacks of muck from the farm and hanging the doors to keep our good stack of logs dry and aired. By teatime we were tired and happy and pleased with our efforts. It has been a splendid day off, and I am restored and refreshed for work tomorrow.

After a good night’s sleep, that is.