The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  Back in Putrajaya, when I had finished my treetop walk, I retraced my steps up to the reception area and couldn’t help noticing a tree in the car park with which many Britons are familiar – the handkerchief tree, Maniltoa browneoides. I had been admiring one in the garden of Kenwood House only a few days before. But unlike the specimen in Kenwood, bedecked by a few limp pale hankies that you need to search to see, this was more like an ‘entire-pile-of-linen-sheets-falling-out-of-the-cupboard tree’ so large and spectacular were they. This taught me a lesson: don’t expect the same species to look the same everywhere.

  Walking back up to the main road to return to the hotel, I realised I had made a gross miscalculation. On my way down from the hotel, mid-afternoon, the traffic had been quiet and I’d crossed the six-lane highway with little concern. But now it was rush hour and waves of speeding cars, only metres apart, made my passage impossible. I would be human road kill. Having stood there for a few minutes looking incredulously for gaps, I retreated to the botanic garden reception for some counsel.

  ‘I want to cross the road,’ I said to the young girl who sat behind the glass window in her ticket desk. She was just closing and not inclined to help.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. But there’s too much traffic. How do I do it?’

  ‘You just cross,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘In the middle of that traffic? I’d be killed.’

  She giggled heartlessly.

  ‘Is there a pedestrian bridge?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there an underpass or tunnel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are the nearest traffic lights?’

  ‘Down that way.’ She waved her hand in the air unhelpfully.

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Mmm. Quite far.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘A long way. Far.’ She giggled again.

  I phoned the hotel.

  ‘Can you send down a car, please? I’m in the botanic garden and I can’t get out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, the courtesy cars are both out. Can we order you a taxi?’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  I had already spent fifteen minutes trying to work out how to cross the road, so another ten might be worth it.

  ‘OK. I’ll be sitting here in reception.’

  Thirty minutes later I gave up waiting and began walking back up the hill from reception, past the handkerchief tree to the main road. It was worse than before. Juggernauts were flying by at speeds that would shame a racing driver, taxis full of commuters who knew that walking anywhere in Putrajaya at this time of day was suicide and the young receptionist, who easily could have offered me a lift on the back of her moped, sped up the drive, waving to me as she passed.

  I dug deep for courage, ventured to the curbside and waited. Several times I estimated there was a gap long enough for me to dash to the other side, put one foot down onto the road and thought, ‘Will I make it?’ but chickened out. I retreated behind the bougainvillea hedge and waited. Then, pumping my lungs, I went back out to the curb and prayed. Like a miracle a lull appeared. I set off across the road like a woman on drugs. My sunglasses began slipping off my head and I grabbed them and ran for dear life. I made it. Four minutes later I was back up the hill in the hotel, panting and trying to relay my story to people who neither understood why I had gone on foot nor seemed to care that I had almost become strawberry jam. The title of my bedside book, 1001 Gardens to See Before You Die, suddenly took on a more sinister meaning.

  Losing confidence

  ‘Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.’ Douglas William Jerrold - 1803–1857 A Land of Plenty (about Australia)

  I returned to London with a cacophony of choice in my head. There was too much to think about and too much pressure. Sitting on an Andalusian mountain-top 1000 miles away was an enormous, dirt-dry site, possibly infertile, expecting me, who hadn’t a clue what would grow there (I had even been coveting the jungle look) to make it into a beautiful Mediterranean garden. That was nigh on impossible. For a start, it was many times larger than any garden I’d ever owned. In my first garden I could stand at the kitchen window and see the whole thing laid out in front of me without raising my eyes. In my second garden I could spit from one end to the other. Admittedly, my current garden is on three sides, so I do have to walk a bit to see it, but no more than ten paces at most. I had never had to so much as to stretch my neck to see my gardens. This one took a whole day to circumnavigate.

  Then there was the soil. Although the clay in London can be heavy to dig and difficult to drain, it is essentially nutritious and easy to improve with a few bags of compost or drainage grit. This soil was different. It was pale brown and fine, like powder. Full of shale. It didn’t look as if it could nourish a stick, let alone the verdant paradise I had in mind. Although I had left in haste the last time we’d visited our site, I’d had the foresight to bend down and grab a handful of soil. Having no test tube handy, I had poured it into my ‘clear gels and liquids of not more than 100ml’ plastic bag and took it back through security and home to London for a soil analysis.

  As soon as I got a moment, I took my sample to the shed and, using a home-diagnosis kit, discovered there was literally nothing in it. Nothing much, anyway. No nitrogen, no phosphate, no nothing. To improve this soil we would have to import tankers full of water and truckloads of goat manure.

  I put on my white coat and reported the results of the lab test back to Stan.

  ‘Our soil’s rubbish,’ I said.

  ‘Really? What will we need to do?’

  ‘Replace the top-soil, import tankers full of water and truckloads of goat manure.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘By the truckload.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I said truckload,’ I repeated, thinking he hadn’t heard me.

  Our site was so large that we weren’t talking about a few litres of John Innes No.3. But tons and tons of the goodness that was missing. Stan seemed unaffected by my announcement. He turned back to watch Manchester United trounce some other pretender.

  Furthermore, the sheer number of spaces I had to fill with plants and alternative ways of filling them was overwhelming. There would have to be a drive for a start, some way of leaving the ridge and arriving at the property. The track wasn’t paved, but it could be tidied up and edged by some planting that announced: ‘You are now entering a cultivated area. Watch out. People live here.’ Then perhaps a gate, or posts on either side at least, accompanied by exclamation mark plants such as tall cypresses or arched palms that created the feeling of entering. Once inside our property there would have to be low, dense trees to shade the six car-parking spaces Stan had estimated we could fit in the driveway, otherwise we’d be rushing out with first aid for our visitors’ burned thighs as they stuck to their plastic car seats after a day lounging by our pool. Then, perhaps, something either side of the tall door that Stan had designed, something that said ‘Welcome’ - those travellers’ palms I’d seen in the Caribbean and Asia, maybe.

  Inside the courtyard I could go loco in typical Spanish fashion. Patios, as the Spanish call them, a word that snobbish Londoners would never use, are often a mêlée of scarlet bougainvillea clambering up the walls, the odd straggly lemon tree, pots full of red pelargonium dropping crinkly leaves, and branches of pink and white oleander stretching out of their pots. A bit of a mishmash, really, and likely to make an unwelcome mess, requiring lots of deadheading and sweeping.

  No, I wanted something cooler, simpler and more contemporary. Perhaps four tall palms in the corners, or a pair of stout and venerable olive trees in planters. I wasn’t sure yet, and didn’t know how sheltered it would be in there, or what would survive and what wouldn’t. Maybe the courtyard would create its own microclimate, possibly even subtropical. Now, there’s a thought. I could grow bananas after all. Coconuts even. Oh, for goodness sake
, I hadn’t a clue what I could do to be honest, but my imagination went wild until I became overawed again with the number of unknowns.

  Quite apart from the courtyard, there was the garden itself. It would be flat up on the plateau, so could take a variety of different-sized plants. Also, as Stan had indicated, in scraping off the top of the plateau, we could create shallow terraces just beneath the plateau that widened the south and west sides. Crikey. What could I grow on terraces? Grapes? Or was that clichéd? Then there was the area around the swimming pool and the tennis courts further down, which needed shade but which on no account should drop leaves, fruits or needles that could clog the drains, stain the stone or cause tennis players to slip skywards. This was really getting complicated. So many considerations; I couldn’t get my head around it all. So I did what I normally do in these situations – I started to panic.

  How on earth was I going to do all this on my own with no training, little experience and a husband who expected a Gardeners’ World Makeover Miracle ready in ten days? Not possible. It was going to take years and far more expertise than I had mustered through creating my amateur handkerchief-sized gardens in London. What I had learned had been by trial and error, more error than trial to be honest, and always in a temperate climate. I hadn’t a clue about gardening in a Mediterranean climate, but I knew that it would mean a lifetime of labour.

  I had taken Matthew off to Naples a few years before on the pretence of visiting Pompeii, which he was studying at school, but actually I’d surreptitiously planned a trip to the island of Ischia to see La Mortella, the garden created by the composer Sir William Walton’s wife, Susana. Matthew came with me on the promise of a slap-up meal when our boat returned that evening and was rewarded with a sublime deep-fried mozzarella starter served with a local Taurasi wine, a combination that has remained in our family mythology ever since. Susana had begun her Mediterranean garden, which I reckoned was about the same size as ours, as a young wife aged twenty-two in 1948 and was still creating it when she died in 2010, sixty-two years later. So I knew I was in for the long haul. Let’s see. If I took sixty years to get my garden to the state hers was in, I’d be 115. Better keep taking those vitamin B- complex pills.

  If I’d asked Stan for help at this point, he would have taken over. No, I needed to have fun here on my own. I could do this, I knew I could. Maybe I could get an adviser, preferably someone famous who’d won something at Chelsea and was young and good looking and delighted to accompany a mature but not yet batty woman like me to Málaga for a day or two (on a professional mission, of course). Or perhaps I should just buy a book on gardening in the Mediterranean.

  As I was sinking into a depression, one of those rare moments of serendipity occurred. Stan had proudly announced that he wanted the house to be Moorish with Arabic and north-African influences and had told me that he intended using Moroccan tiling with carved wooden doors with an Islamic pattern, and window shutters that opened on iron hinges like those in the Alhambra. This was totally in keeping with the Islamic style of the great palaces in Granada, Seville and Córdoba, but of course he would give it his contemporary twist. It sounded wonderful, and most importantly, it gave us a theme.

  At about the same time, I received in the post one of those brochures that offer holidays to people interested in plants and gardens. My only experience of this company had been a week touring the gardens of Cornwall with my mother and twelve others in a rattling minibus. It had rained most of the time and the guesthouse that was our base had smelled of cabbage. It was possible that their international division was a little more adventurous, but I suspected that if Cornwall was anything to go by, they would take us to Madeira or the north-Italian lakes, ply us with cheap wine and leave us in the hands of garden tour guides who would know so little English that we would thank God that plant names are in Latin. I feared they would mislead us around the region’s botanical gardens, spitting sunflower seeds, pinching bottoms and stating that Genghis Kahn personally laid out these beds in the 1400s.

  Then I noticed that one of the holidays in this brochure was in Iran, which struck me as a little odd. Iran wasn’t exactly top of my list of tourist destinations. The country at that time was governed by a fundamentalist regime, had an ‘advise against travel’ rating from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and was still refusing to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Authority who thought it on the way to enriching uranium. Why would it welcome groups of amateur gardeners from the home counties of England? One name in this advert set it all straight. The tour was to be led by Penelope Hobhouse. Now, I’m not a snob, but I’m certain that Penelope Hobhouse, if there were gardening royalty, would be Queen. She is one of the most knowledgeable, serious and thoughtful writers on gardens I had ever read. I’m a big fan. If she thought Iranian gardens were important, then I needed to pay attention. If, as the blurb said, gardens had been invented in Iran, then the Hanging Gardens of Babylon made more sense. There would definitely be gardens worth visiting over there, and maybe even gardens that would inspire my plans. I’d love to go to Iran with her as tour guide. But wasn’t it a little dodgy to be heading off to Iran at this moment?

  However, I phoned the travel company and they said they were sorry but Penelope Hobhouse wasn’t leading this tour any more as she was retiring. Her replacement unfortunately was ill and some of the gardens were in parts of Iran that the British government didn’t think we should be going to. So they were very sorry, but it was off. I should phone again next year.

  I slumped back in my chair and fought off that feeling of desperation you get when yet another door closes in your face. I tried cheering myself up. Penelope Hobhouse hadn’t died, I thought, she’d only retired. So I googled her, found that she was in rude health and called her. Just like that, without a second thought. Guess what? She actually picked up the phone. Imagine, the Queen answered the phone to me! I am pleased to report that she was perfectly lovely and we chatted for some time. But she was resolute: no, she wasn’t going to lead any more tours, and no, she wasn’t available to advise on my Persian garden in Andalusia, which, although it sounded lovely, seemed like quite an undertaking - as if I didn’t know. I put down the phone doubly disappointed. Another door closed. I was going to have to do this alone. Maybe the book route wasn’t such a bad idea after all, so I logged onto Amazon bought Gardens of Persia by Penelope Hobhouse and the next day it thudded through the letterbox onto the doormat.

  There are very few times in the course of a year when I’m taken completely by surprise. Having lived eventfully into my fifties, seen many sights and put a fair few miles on my clock, I’m difficult to impress. But this book took me into a world I had never encountered before and I found it enchanting: a world that began four thousand years ago when the first gardens were laid out.

  Over centuries, men with wonderful names like Cyrus the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, Qavan al-Mulk Mirza and Ali Mohammed Khan all took the idea of a paradise on earth and formulated the basis of gardens as we know them today. The first gardeners were Caliphs and Emirs from places like Mesopotamia, the Caspian, Sumer, Babylonia. The first gardens were carved out of the desert plains for the Achaemenid soldiers to rest. But the idea caught on, and if a sultry princess thought she might like to lie in the shade, a doting prince laid one out for her to do so. Oh, what exotic images these names and stories conjured and oh, what a service they rendered to humanity in creating the first gardens.

  The ancient Persians’ simple quadripartite design, dividing a garden into four quarters by swelling channels of water that fed fountains and pools, and that were viewed from terraces, platforms and open pavilions, persists until this day and could be the inspiration for our garden in Spain. Like us, the Persians needed to create a lush paradise atop an inhospitable surround, a refuge on the high harsh dry desert so their gardens were, if you like, a response to the impossible. This was looking familiar. I read on.

  ‘When Mohammed’s Muslim followers swept into M
esopotamia and Persia in the seventh century, the Sasanian lands they conquered included the regions of ancient Sumeria, Babylon and Assyria and stretched as far east as Kabul. The Arabs inherited an empire with a flourishing garden tradition that had existed for more than a thousand years, a tradition that encompassed enclosed gardens recalling the Garden of Eden and the vast royal gardens overshadowed by towering ayvans.’

  This was getting exciting.

  ‘Within a hundred years, Islam and the concept of the enclosed garden as the earthly embodiment of the celestial paradise had spread throughout the Middle East and to Egypt, North Africa and Spain and by the sixteenth century to Mughal India. For the next thousand years the Quranic Paradise was the basis on which gardens were created in the Islamic world.’

  We were getting closer to home. Spain had been the jewel in the crown of the Islamic world for several centuries. Then I turned the page.

  ‘There are four walled gardens in Paradise, divided into two pairs with symbolic fruits. The fig and pomegranate, the olive and date palm, in each, with intersecting walkways lining water channels representing the four rivers of life – of water, milk, wine and honey. Besides four fruits there are four fountains, in the lower garden two fountains of running water’ and in the higher ‘green, green pastures… two fountains of gushing water.’

  (Quran, sura 55: 50–76).

  So there it was in the Quran, the formula I needed. It was a start. I ran upstairs to find Stan.

  ‘We’ve got to have pomegranate, figs, date palms and olives,’ I panted.