A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  The waiter smiled. “I’m from Romania. Foxes are vermin there.”

  Ed raised his glass to me. “Tally-ho.” He looked at the couple. “Do you think his jacket reminds him of being ‘in the pink’?”

  “That dress reminds me of all the gardens here, all splashy and glazed after a rain. Maybe the English just love their gardens so much they want to wear them. Ah! Come to think of it, maybe all the flowered chintz sofas and chairs and beds come from the same impulse—to bring the garden inside the house. A counter to the rainy weather.”

  “I’m happy. I’m happy that we don’t have to have an opinion on fox hunting. I’m happy to have, at least, passed over the ground of my ancestors.” The waiter brought a plate of delicate morsels—sliced zucchini with a dab of ratatouille on each, a twist of pastry with duck inside, potato puffs, kebabs of chicken and cucumber, and silver spoons filled with tomato mousse.

  Soon we moved to the dining room, Ed quoting Oscar Wilde on fox hunting as we walk down the hall: “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

  This pastoral landscape and the Rutland Waters, a large man-made reservoir that looks like a piece of the Lake District, turned out to be so lovely that we decided to come back for a week someday. From here I could make the journey to Leicester to check out the family tree.

  We explored nearby towns, walked twice a day, and read in our big bedroom decorated with a raj motif. When we found nearby Stamford, we wondered if could live happily ever after there. A dignified, intact town full of its own life, Stamford has kept pure its inheritance of gray stone. Narrow streets, like Italian vicoli, cutting between larger streets, add medieval shadows. I liked the tiny shops, where from the middle desk a person could reach almost anything. Right in the center of town we came upon a cemetery, which doubled as a small park right across from the library and the bank. In most places on the globe, that cemetery would have been dozed long ago. A man read his paper on a bench just beside William Hare, who departed this life aged twelve and had been resting there calmly since 1797. We stopped for nut and ginger biscuits with tea, passing up a variety of traybakes—chocolate, tipsy, apricot almond, and sultana. “What is a traybake?” I asked the lady at the cash register.

  “Oh, just something baked on a tray. Like that.” She had a voice like a bicycle bell. She pointed to the pans in the window. “Trays.” Another one of those little differences between English English and American English. She was pointing to what was essentially a small cookie sheet with slightly higher sides. English desserts—all that voluptuous cream and ripe fruit. Even the names imply that you will be comforted and cosseted by a plate of sticky tealoaf, sticky toffee pudding, oatmeal biscuits, or jam roly-poly.

  Oakham, too, was a town of character. We bought a sturdy plaid market basket, had lunch, and meandered. In the pharmacy, while Ed bought Band-Aids, I looked at the baby food. Since Willie joined our family, I’ve liked looking at the foods for infants for sale in different countries, a microview of the country’s cuisine. Here I find pea and parsnip, carrot and parsnip, peachy porridge, creamed porridge, oats and prunes, banana, and cream fool. In Italy, it’s prosciutto and peas, pasta, pigeon, veal, even minced horsemeat. What cultural message does the baby absorb? Perhaps the English baby is lulled by mild flavors, while the bambino gets the message early on that the world tastes savory and varied. That might change with a little Winston’s first taste of bangers and mash or bubble and squeak. Even during his first months, Willie was treated by Ed to aroma training. He held espresso, shrimp, ribs, and toast under Willie’s nose. He looked consistently startled and interested.

  A speciality of this area, pork pie is baked in a crust made with hot water. Such a sturdy pie won’t break if carried in a saddlebag, I read. Local pigs are especially succulent because they’re raised on the whey left over from the Stilton-making process. When we bought a fluted pork pie to taste, it was lardy and dense—maybe good to eat after filling in foxholes, but not appealing on a warm July day.

  A gardener famous on British TV opened his garden called Barnsdale a few years ago. Early in the morning we had it to ourselves except for a couple of workers who were rendered catatonic by their hoes’ rhythmic chopping of weeds. This was a teaching garden, divided into areas such as cottage garden, typical suburban backyard, kitchen garden. We found several ideas for our own plots. In the orchard CDs on strings twinkled from the branches and bamboo poles, keeping birds from eating the fruit. They looked rather magical. Asparagus, planted in an ornamental bed of flowers, looked soft and ferny. Recycled plastic water bottles had been halved, and the top part, with cap off, placed over new plants like the glass cloches in French gardens. This protects them from slugs while keeping in moisture and warmth and allowing them to breathe. I’m going to try this next spring when I plant tomatoes from seed. Crisp white bee boxes were used as focal points in divided gardens, instead of the usual nymph or shepherdess. Ed admired a compost box about five by twelve feet divided into three parts, one side of which had boards that slid up for removal of soil. We watched several voles darting from border to border, adorable and probably the reason for the recycled water bottles. I stood eye to eye with swaying yellow hollyhocks everywhere, sunny and cheerful. I wished I were in my own garden, fertilizing the lemons and training the morning glories up the pergola. I love how the British gardens all have so many places to sit, so many arbors, armillaries, arches—how furnished they are. I photographed an urn dripping with lantana, fuchsia, petunias, impatiens—who would think to combine those? Then I realize that in my two climates, you couldn’t. Lantana and petunias like sun, while the unprotected fuchsia and impatiens would shrivel in one day in the heat of Italy or California. The cool and rainy English climate seems to encourage strange bedfellows.

  At the urging of Mr. Hart, our host, we visited Burghley, a supergrand house in a vast deer park. We went, despite my allergy to such places, which I developed one year after seeing one too many French châteaux. In Burghley’s kitchen some strange soul saved all the turtle skulls boiled clean when soup was made and arranged them in a pyramid on one wall. Immense copper pots and long work tables conjured a vision of mincemeat pies and of a pig roasting on a spit. I read that the smallest man in the world once was served in a venison pie as a surprise for the resident earl and his wife. Outside the kitchen we passed through a room with one wall covered in bells, each one labeled with a room designation so the servant would know where to hie himself. A long tour through corridors and wings, under the tutelage of a knowledgeable guide, confirmed my resolve to avoid these tours. Even though the house is filled with lively portraits, the lifeless rooms with impeccably restored bed hangings, porcelain objets, and don’t-touch atmosphere made me want to run. Surprisingly, at the end we came to an immense horror-house stairway painted with the huge open maw of hell. Skeletons, death holding a mask, winged demons, and a vile eagle eating the liver of Prometheus completed this bit of interior decoration. The guide explained that the populace, seeking audience with the master, was suitably cowed on the way into his august presence. I wondered. We’d seen the opposite, the pious family chapel. Then turtle skulls and a dwarf baked in a pie. I thought the earl was just a real kinky guy. The last room, lofty with a fantastic Elizabethan ceiling, had a silver wine cooler large enough to bathe even a normal-sized man. After the stag hunts, it must have been filled with a thousand bottles of claret.

  On the Friday our next rental began, we drove to Chipping Norton on the edge of the Cotswolds. My book pinpointed dozens of gardens I wanted to see in this area. The house would be large for us, but it was a last-minute rental and we thought, looking at the photo of Old Chalford Manor Beech House, that we would cook a great feast and invite friends from London down for a day in the country. In the photographs the exterior was stately and inviting, while the interior looked gracious, with marbled hallway, and enough bedrooms for a sorority. As we followed the directions out of Chipping Norton, we were not exactly in idyllic countryside. We were z
ipping down a two-lane major trunk road to Oxford. “I hope we won’t be able to hear this traffic,” Ed said. “How far off the road is the house?”

  “Oh, I think it will be fine. It says take a left off this, then a right.”

  “Did the agent say it was in the country?”

  “Well, I told them I only wanted a quiet place. I explained that we are writers. And that you hate any noise at all.”

  “Good.” Then we found the left turn, then immediately the right. The house was spitting distance from the busy road. We stared at each other.

  Inside we could hear the constant vroom, vroom of motorcycles and see the tops of trucks whizzing by the wall that separated the house from the onslaught. Fascinating how a house inescapably reflects the owner. At the entrance we were greeted with a sign in boldface: PROPERLY PARKED? REMEMBER TO PARK ONLY WHERE DESIGNATED. In the foyer we faced NO BICYCLES, SCOOTERS, ETC. ARE ALLOWED INSIDE THE HOUSE, OF COURSE. I especially liked that of course! There were even “no smoking” signs tucked into the hunting prints that decorated the hall. Inside the cupboards were taped lists: TWENTY EGG CUPS, SIX WOODEN MATS, TWO TOAST RACKS . . . My favorite was PENALTY CHARGES WILL BE LEVIED FOR RUBBISH NOT CLEARED. Ed pointed out PLEASE DO NOT ALTER THE TIME CONTROLS and DO NOT MOVE THE FURNITURE and PLEASE DO NOT STICK ANYTHING ONTO THE WALLS. He opened the fridge and called me. “I’m fascinated by the mind that created this instruction: DO NOT PUT SODA CANS IN THE VEGETABLE BINS.” Ed thumbed through a notebook full of admonishments and instructions. “If you’re a hammer,” he said, “all you see is nails.”

  These oh-so-anal admonishments we could ignore, but the traffic astounded me. I reluctantly walked to the house next door and learned that the owner was away. “In Tuscany,” her daughter (no sign of damage from über-Mama) said blithely, “and no one ever complained before.” Isn’t that a well-known psychological strategy? Quickly pull the rug. Who rents a vacation house on a highway?

  And so we left. And so we find ourselves comfortable at last in the little schoolhouse, which our U.S. agent arranged, even though the Beech House owners refused to give a refund. How might I have avoided this? The agent was appalled. She had not been told about the road noise in all the owner’s elaborate description of the place. Mental note: agent must have physically visited property.

  Basta! Onward.

  Ed has adapted to driving down a mirror quite easily. I occasionally feel the urge to put on the brake or accelerate from my side of the car because we remember the friend of a friend on her first day in England who looked the wrong way before crossing and was mown down by an oncoming truck. As we drive the lanes of the bucolic countryside, patched with hamlets of butterscotch-colored thatched houses and hollyhock gardens, my vocabulary has shifted poles from the austere words—essential, stony, stark, elemental, harsh, lonely—that described Spain. Cozy, cosseted, charming, adorable, sweet, I’m saying. As I point to a storybook house with shining mullioned windows and an energetic climbing rose arching over the door, Ed says, “You have to watch that word cute.”

  “Okay,” I answer, “but really, wasn’t Lower Slaughter the sweetest place on earth? Even the rivers are well behaved, as if they flow through only for ornamentation.” Everywhere described as “honey-colored,” the stone houses are that color, but some are dark like chestnut honey, some pale like acacia or linden honey. Every few miles the geology shifts enough to change the shade of the limestone. Like Tuscan farms, the houses seem to have grown out of the land rather than been built. Because of their serene beauty and their ease in the landscape, the Cotswold houses are among the most pleasing domestic buildings in the world.

  “They give awards around here for the ‘tidiest’ villages. I wonder if it’s just too tidy for words.” He slows to look at a field of blue lupin with a fold of sheep sleeping under a beech tree. “Even the sheep look clean here. Remember the knotted old herds in Portugal gnawing on dead weeds?” He brakes. Across the road three horses in wavy grass look up at us. “Perfect,” Ed says. “Why has no one ever ruined it?”

  “I know—that’s horrible. We expect ruin?”

  “Well, much of the world has been ruined. Not here. I just didn’t expect so much beauty. I’ve slept like someone administered knock-out drops. Maybe it comes from counting all these sheep.” He drives on, down the green-tunneled road. A golden light sieves through the trees. “Let’s find a tea shop. Time for plum and ginger pie or strawberry and apple crumble.”

  “‘Gravy and potatoes in a good brown pot. Put them in the oven and eat them while they’re hot.’ ” I’m thinking, not for the first time, about the books my daughter memorized when she was three.

  “I can’t even guess what that’s from.”

  “I believe you’ve heard a direct quote from Miss Tiggie Winkle in a Beatrix Potter book. Plum and ginger pie reminded me. That’s something Jemima Puddle-Duck might have liked, or Peter Rabbit. Or maybe gooseberry tart with clotted cream.”

  “The desserts are worth a detour around here.”

  “Except for spotted dick.”

  “Should I ask what that is?”

  “Raisins in a steamed dough. Raisins are the spots. Dick is the pudding they’re in, so—spotted dick.”

  “Sounds like a disease the British Army picked up in colonial jungles.”

  “‘Dick’ relates to dough; dog and duff, too. You’ve heard of plum duff, haven’t you? They’re old recipes, some with suet. They’re covered in custard sauce—which makes anything good. Actually, a big supermarket chain tried to change spotted dick to spotted Richard because women customers were squeamish about asking for it.”

  “I’ll stick to plum and ginger pie, mille grazie, just the same. Custard sauce—blaaa.”

  “Think crème anglaise, and it’ll taste better. Just north in Mickleton the hotel Three Ways House is totally devoted to English puddings—even their bedrooms are named Oriental Ginger Pudding, Summer Pudding, Sticky Toffee and Date Pudding, Lord Randall’s Pudding.”

  “That sounds as if it would promote sweet dreams.”

  “They have the Pudding Club there, which anyone can join. They meet on the first and third Fridays for dinner, which is served with seven traditional puddings. ‘Lashings of custard’ are promised.”

  “Seven? One is enough. So rich.”

  As we drive to gardens, we listen to radio plays on the BBC. They’re addictive. We don’t get out of the car when we arrive at the garden. We have to hear the end.

  Chipping Campden’s houses are the color of toast, of the wheat ripening in the nearby fields, and many are thatched. They are shockingly beautiful and mellow. This area is the ancestral home of the famous Cotswold sheep, known as the Cotswold Lion, whose fleecy wool was sold all over medieval Europe. Even today more sheep make up the census than humans. Chipping, from Anglo-Saxon ceapen, means “market.” Many of the Cotswold towns still have the lively market air they must have had when wool merchants made their fortunes and the farmers herded their flocks down the many Sheep Streets to sell. The fine country churches, indebted to those merchants, are known as “wool churches.” Chipping Campden has an excellent bakery, numerous tearooms lavish in their use of clotted cream, and cheerful shops adorned with hanging baskets. Also, one of the most famous gardens in England, Hidcote Manor, lies just outside town, with Kifsgate and numerous others nearby.

  Hidcote lavender attracts all the butterflies in Tuscany to my garden. The name comes from here. For the avid gardener, Hidcote deserves several visits. I always think about garden “rooms.” This garden abundantly illustrates that concept. Tall hedges outline rooms, with doors cut into them. Within a room a plethora of flowers madly spilling and bolting and climbing creates an intimate space, like a room in a Vuillard painting. Big sweeps of lawn break up the room idea, as does the simple dignity of an aisle of hornbeam trees. These extravagant lawns keep the ten-acre garden from becoming claustrophobic. Hidcote was developed by Lawrence Johnston, who used to winter with Edith Wharton on Hyères.
He was influenced by her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens. I spot the influence in the architecture of the hedges and the staginess of the lawns, one of which ends with a raised bed where theatricals might have been performed if there had not been a beech tree planted right in the middle. The hedges sometimes ascend into a topiary cut, a stylized bird that makes you smile when you see it. That, too, is an Italian touch. Starting from farmland, Lawrence Johnston had fun sculpting these walls. Did he begin with foot-high plants? In odd contrast to the classic lawns with busts and yew borders, Hidcote does several flip-flops and also features elements of cottage-style Arts and Crafts gardens. A ginger cat curls under a bamboo teepee of sweetpeas. Every English garden should have a sleeping cat. We suddenly spot a rose similar to our mystery rose at Bramasole. We’ve searched every book, as well as Cavriglia in Tuscany, the largest private rose garden in the world, and have not found this rose, which survived the thirty years of neglect our house suffered. A peonylike form, our rose blooms only once in early summer, but the flowers are profuse and the scent divine. I step out every morning and press my face against many blossoms, breathing in enough heart-of-rose scent to last all summer. The few renegades thrown out later in the summer lack that ethereal perfume. The one we find at Hidcote is Empress Josephine. Ed thinks the leaf is different. Then we spot another similar rose: Surpasse Tout, also a Gallica. The bud looks more like our rose’s ball-shaped bud. I write down the names and will order them for a comparison. Probably neither will be exactly the same. Maybe the nonna I always imagine grafted a friend’s rose onto one of hers.

  Roses have unattractive feet, but often I’ve been told not to underplant because the rose won’t like it—advice I’ve ignored. At Hidcote short lilies surround the roses. Hurrah! They look spectacular. I, too, have lilies under a few roses. I’ll become bold. One hundred yellow lily bulbs; I can already imagine the bees. I love the blue metal benches, the small poles with eye hooks in the beds for the clematis to climb—a moment of height. A pink rose garden is planted with mixed blue and purple flowers clustered beneath. Lovely. Iron arches, around four feet high, give the roses something to lean on without the rigidity of a stake. I have wanted to make a bed of roses, a literal bed. I see that I can simply make the head and foot from two arches and add crossbars. Hidcote has a classic ha-ha, basically a broad ditch that prohibits animals from escaping. The genius of a ha-ha is that it does not break into the view separating the garden from the fields. From a few feet back, they simply merge.