As soon as possible, I’m down among the bushes. Pen and pad in hand, I make notes as I go.
My main objective is also to decide where best to start with my smaller gardens. In theory, closer to the terrace would be ideal, so the garden renovation can proceed like a wave gradually turning the land from brown to green over the next fifteen months.
People think restoration is difficult; they’re wrong. It’s easy as long as you find a key. For example, a large hole with a broken statue. It tells you this was a pond, so you repair the structure, refill with clean water, plant water lilies, some flowering bushes on the outside, add a new statue, a stone bench, and hey presto! We have a water garden. Next, you find the remains of a box hedge – another key. You follow the roots and recreate a mini maze.
My job today is to find some of the old features to create the new gardens around them.
But after several hours of pushing my way through dead bushes, I can’t find a key, somewhere to start. The more I walk around dead bushes, the more confusing it becomes.
All I have to do is look at the ground and see what had once been there, whether old flowerbed, topiary, trees or just meadow. Yet, I can’t seem to find a shape. There are trees but they’re in odd places. And just when I think I’ve found a dip where a flowerbed might have been, it ends suddenly.
The next day is no better.
By sunset, I give up.
Time for a different approach.
Forget the original design for now, let’s focus on creating a whole new design. It’s just a question of finding the right place to start. I know a hell of a lot about Victorian gardens; surely I can create a new one here. Late into the night, up in my apartment with a sketchpad and pastel pencils, I make several gorgeous plans. Three small gardens full of fountains, pools and a riot of flowers.
The next morning, excited about planning where to create the first of my little gardens, I take a pair of cutters with me so I can find the best place to start. It’s the first of March and a surprisingly warm sunny day. A good omen.
Wrong.
How can I explain the wrongness I sense through my feet? Imagine walking downstairs, but your legs feel as if you’re climbing up.
My beautiful vision doesn’t fit, like the wrong piece of a jigsaw: whichever way I turn, it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t my imagination fit here on the ground? Just where I plan aflowerbed, suddenly I find a tree in the middle. Just one tree. No explanation.
It’s as if the land is actually fighting me. I know this sounds insane; it’s just land, soil and weeds, isn’t it?
Am I in the wrong spot? Would this plan fit better elsewhere?
Using my cutters, I carve a narrow path deeper into the park. Deeper and deeper. The sun gets warmer and warmer. I have to unclip the straps of my dungarees to yank off my long-sleeved tee-shirt.
The problem is that the absence of inspiration is leaving too much room in my head for distracting thoughts of Osian. That’s the worst kind of distraction because of our history. Actually, no – notourhistory. Just mine. That one-sided love that imprinted itself on me so that I always go for the wrong men. Even when they loved me, they loved something else more. I always came second to graduate studies, travel, a motorbike, and of course, other women. No matter what I invested into the relationship, I walked away the loser.
Only one relationship has been a success.
Gardens never cheat on me; they’re always rewarding and give back ten times what they take. My relationship with horticulture has brought me professional respect, a good standard of living and endless joy.
So why is it now playing hard to get?
“Please.” I glance at North Park. “Stop fighting me. Let my inspiration come. Once I’m inspired, nothing else will matter.”
My foot catches on something. A long, thorny vine that scratches my ankle. I stop to free my leg and that’s when I realise it’s a rose.
Of course there are roses – they can survive decades; they can survive a century. Every English garden worth the name would have had roses. Okay, this is Wales not England, but you know what I mean. What surprises me is that it’s a climbing rose. There’s nothing to climb here – no walls, nothing. Behind that rose, I find another, then another, and another. My feet speed up with excitement. Very soon, I’ve counted fifty roses in a long curve.
Could there have been trellises?
That’s where a garden restorer becomes a detective. It takes two hours with the GPS measuring app on my phone. Drawing the points with my pencil and pad, I can map the roses; gradually, the picture comes together. It’s a long wavy line approximately 130 yards long. The length of a football field. That’s not a trellis.
That’s… a… I double check. Yes, that’s an arcade.
A rose arcade. In my imagination it’s green and beautiful: arch after arch of rose bushes climbing over my head, shedding yellow and red petals on the path underneath.
I look back. We’re right in the middle of the park. A rose arcade here would have been a gorgeous feature that could be seen from anywhere in Kendric House.
Thank God Osian and I had that falling out. Otherwise we’d have had a tractor ploughing all this down to the soil, and all evidence of this magnificent, romantic secret – this magic – would have disappeared.
