The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

‘I am not. Those were living things!’

  ‘Well, we can plant some new ones. Look how well these trees grow on the hillsides. You can’t stop them. I bet next spring we’ll see little shoots coming out from these branches or babies growing beside them. You wait.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait a long time…’

  ‘No we won’t. Come on, cheer up. Let’s go the garden centre and see if we can find some replacements. No time like the present.’ And with that he was off, secure in his belief that any problem could be resolved. And I, draped in doubt, stumbled along behind him, trying, as so often in our lives together, to keep up.

  Choosing plants

  We drove back down the valley to the Viveros Guzmán empire in Alheurín de la Torre. Great Granddad Guzmán had started the nursery fifty years previously with a few fruit trees. Successive generations had built an impressive business across five sites in the area. Their stock is of high quality, they grow most of their own plants and they supply not only many fine gardens in the area, but the local councils too, whose planting schemes for their avenues, numerous roundabouts and public parks are ambitious and, I suspect, spurred on by competition from neighbouring councils.

  By the time we arrived there, my fury had subsided. Chirpy as ever, Stan opened the car door for me and said to the surprised garden centre worker sitting in a nearby forklift truck, ‘Announcing the delightful Kaz Moloney.’ There was no response other than a fleeting look of incomprehension. That was it.

  Embarrassed, and still upset about the thoughtless earth moving, I rushed past them both into the main entrance.

  A disadvantage of using Guzmán’s is that very few of the staff there speak English, but we had been told to ask at reception for someone called Jennie, and when we did so, a small, compact, grey-haired Yorkshire woman pricked up her ears at the desk beside us.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Oh, hello. We want to create a Persian garden in Colmenar,’ I blurted.

  ‘Colmenar?’

  ‘Yes and we need olives, pomegranates, figs and citrus,’ I added. ‘It’s in the Quran.’

  She looked at me as if I might be short of brain cells.

  ‘We also need large palms for the welcome…. and dense cover for the car park… and cacti for the wall…’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, and some replacement almond and olive trees for the ones we’ve smothered.

  ‘Hang on,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll get the dog.’

  She searched under the reception desk for a minute, picked up a scruffy white shihtzu and walked us to the café where we were able to spread out the drawings to show her. As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that in Jennie we had found the horticultural equivalent of Nanny McPhee. Someone who knew what to do, how to do it and had done it all before. Someone we could trust. A voice in my head said, ‘There you are, Kaz. It’s all going to be all right.’

  Four hours later we said goodbye, having learned more about gardening in Andalusia than a whole library could offer. We learned that frost is not a problem, even up at 700m in Colmenar, because frost in Andalusia comes just a couple of hours before dawn and is quickly burned off as the sun rises. But what will kill young and vulnerable plants up in Colmenar, especially on our hilltop, she reckoned, would be the cold wind. We learned that the best time to plant our palms in the courtyard would be the hot summer when the soil is warm and welcoming, but the best time to plant our fruit trees would be the winter when they’re dormant and there is a chance for rain to nourish them. We learned that the Spanish don’t plant tall dark green cypresses in their gardens because they consider them suitable only for graveyards; the ornamental orange trees that we love don’t yield tasty fruit (only fit for marmalade); the fat Chorisia speciosa (silk-floss tree) we fancied can cost €2,000 – way out of our budget; and that we shouldn’t think about planting avocado or mango outdoors, although we might be able to raise them in the courtyard, and so on and so on.

  We talked for so long that the girl serving coffee had wiped everything down and was taking off her apron and turning off the lights to go home. The nursery was closing, and although we protested to Jennie that we were taking up her time, she seemed unfazed. As a public announcement told customers to proceed to the checkout with their final purchases, she beckoned us to follow and began walking us slowly around the endless aisles, looking at possibilities, pointing out this and that.

  An eerie quiet descended. The music was turned off, the water features were silenced, the last customers were herded with their trolleys out of the door, yet she insisted that we got into our car and followed her to their other nearby wholesale nursery. We were waved in through the gates. Acres of pot-grown trees lined up like soldiers on parade and seemed to salute us as we passed. We toured the rows in a golf cart with Jennie, her dog on her lap. A wise old bird, she watched us closely to see how we responded to what we were being shown. Of course, we fell in love with almost everything she showed us. If she hadn’t called time, we could have spent the entire night there, wandering in and out of the aisles until we fell asleep under the palms. So back to Guzmán’s for some serious editing of our wish list.

  We traipsed through the main doors of the garden centre, turned the lights back on and headed for the café. After more coffee that Jennie made herself behind the bar, we made a list.

  In the car park, to give a shaded canopy and to delineate the parking spaces, we would go for Schinus molle, the Peruvian peppercorn tree from the Andes. It’s a beautiful evergreen that grows 15m high and 10m wide and looks rather like a willow, the taller branches drooping from the top. Fortunately, it’s fast growing and long lasting and should give a feathery shade across the whole driveway. The Schinus molle hadn’t been our first choice, however. Stan’s original idea had been pine trees, typically used to shade cars in the Mediterranean. We had thought of Pinus halepensis, the common pine that you see everywhere here. It’s cheaper than Pinus pinea, its bushier cousin, but we thought we could cheat and prune it into a bushy shape. The needles we knew would drop onto the cars, but they would make a soft carpet over the years and their smell would be divine as you arrive onto the plateau after a long journey and open the car door to breathe in the reviving scent of pine. That was the original plan, anyway.

  What swung it in favour of the Schinus molle was Jennie mentioning the word ‘pepper’. The small white flowers, tiny pink peppercorns and pale grey bark of this tree are all aromatic. Imagine. As cars drive up onto the plateau and glide into the spaces beneath the branches, they will crush the flowers and berries that carpet the gravel, maybe even roll over some fallen bark, and release a divine mystical and exotic scent. They may not know quite where they have smelled this before, but it is familiar. It reminds them of their mother’s kitchen or of a trip they made once to South America.

  Pepper is a spice I adore; I can’t get enough of it. I grew up in the 1950s with boring old white pepper (loving it nonetheless) discovered freshly milled black pepper in the early ’80s, not long after I bit into my first plump green peppercorns in brine, then graduated to pink pepper, and now, in the 2000s, I had been buying stocks of it fresh whenever I travelled to tropical countries. To be fair, the Schinus molle isn’t actually related to pepper sold commercially for cooking, but it shares the aroma and that would be enough for my fix. A later internet search confirmed that the flowers and fruit are poisonous to pigs, poultry and small children. But tough – so is heroin. Kids shouldn’t be eating berries anyway.

  The travellers’ palms, Ravenala madagascariensis, were another change we had to make. We had wanted two plants either side of the great doors to welcome visitors, and what could be more appropriate than travellers’ palms, with their generous little cups of collected water? The leaves grow outwards at 180°, giving a flat shape to the plant, so they could be positioned safely against the walls either side providing some protection from the howling wind coming up from the west. Stan had seen them in Mexico and Barbados and loved t
he colour and shape they made. My trips to the botanical gardens in Putrajaya and Singapore had confirmed our choice.

  Something was needed to mark the entrance. The Ravenala were perfect: colourful and living and, let’s face it, a lot cheaper than two large bronze dogs. But Jennie told us they wouldn’t survive up in Colmenar unless they were in the courtyard. So we chose the more chaotic but trainable Strelitzia augusta – the bird of paradise plant with its parrot-like red head, yellow beak and purple plumage. Less architectural perhaps, but likely to add a little drama.

  The palms for the courtyard were a different matter altogether and took a lengthy discussion. For townies like us, palms seem relatively straightforward, don’t they? They’re just tall straight things that grow skyward and then produce big fat fronds at the top, and some fruit or a few nuts if you’re lucky. But what we had never realised is that their care, if they are to look good, is as intensive as a Hollywood starlet’s grooming. If only it were simply a question of planting them, watering them and letting them grow, we’d have bought several there and then, but Jennie disavowed us. The work involved in creating the smooth bark on a good-looking palm trunk is not inconsiderable. First you cut off the old fronds about 6 inches from the trunk, to leave a bit of rough. If you don’t regularly cut them off, they hang off rather like unruly drunks. Then you leave those stubs for a few years to shrink and for the base of the fronds to slowly die and mould into the trunk. Then you have to shear off the 6 inches of dead leaf and shave the base close to the trunk. Next, by rubbing up and down the trunk where you’ve shaved, you sort of sand and polish it. Nothing short of cosmetic surgery.

  ‘Wow. Could I do it?’

  ‘No.’ said Jennie. ‘You’d need a special palm person to do this. It is very skilled.’

  And probably expensive. So, we put off the idea of placing a large order and thought instead about how tall and how broad our four palms needed to be for the courtyard. Could we squeeze them through the great big doors or would we need to hoist them up with a crane, clear the top of the wall and lower them into the courtyard? Whichever way we were going to get them into the courtyard, we agreed that the builders needed to finish their work on the house first and get out of there, leaving holes for planting.

  Finally, we kept on the list the essentials that constitute a Persian garden: mature olives and figs as specimen plants, and oranges and pomegranates to outline the rectangles of the quadripartite design.

  The olive trees Jennie showed us were ancient and gnarled and would have cost the same as a fleet of small cars, but some others were affordable and would fulfill the brief given in the Quran of the trees we would find in paradise, presuming, of course, that we get there. After a long afternoon and evening like that, listening to Jenny’s earthy wisdom and walking quietly through the hills in the sunshine hand in hand with my husband, I felt halfway there already.

  Finding our feet

  As we slept in the hotel in Colmenar that night, the nasty clouds that had gathered in the evening blew over and we woke to a crisp, brilliant blue sky. In his excitement to be up at the site, Stan donned his running shoes, iPod and gloves and ran off into the sunrise. I gaped at his energy. He was awesome. He packs more into a day that many of us put into a week. Of course, he is blessed with natural get-up-and-go and he keeps himself fit so he can live the demanding life he chooses, but I know he gets tired and it is then that his uniqueness shows. For he will set his jaw firm, shrug off his weariness and keep going until he can go no more. I have only seen him grind literally to a halt once or twice in his life, but not until he has given effort that would have killed lesser men.

  He has cycled across Cuba, Rajasthan and Brazil. He has crossed the Andes west to east on a bike; the steep Chilean side first then freewheeled into Patagonia. He has climbed from 400m below sea level in Death Valley to 200m above sea level in one morning. He once ran three marathons in a month and was warned by a doctor to take it easy. Yet these are only his physical achievements. He has raised thousands of pounds for charities for the deaf over the years. Most Sunday mornings for thirteen years he has delivered meals to HIV-positive patients all over London. In between this he has written an award-winning screenplay, grown a multi-million-pound business and cared constantly for all of us without complaining. He is the first to think of others when they’re down and his generosity has stunned many recipients.

  But, like many people with outstanding talents or extreme personality traits, what is at times impressive and awesome can, when used to excess, become obsessive or even psychotic, as we will see. But that particular morning, his zest inspired me, so I dressed quickly and, checking my watch, reckoned the town would be waking up. I packed my phrase book, smoothed on some lippy and made a list. I needed to investigate this bank account our solicitor had opened for us, and check that the post office knew of us and could confirm our postal address.

  It was just past 8am and the town was beginning its day. Trucks with noisy engines were revving and old ladies were opening front doors and sweeping. Birds and dogs were snapping and, as I passed the school, students were already in the big sports hall throwing balls to each other in an orderly game.

  The young lady in the Cajamar bank, which I was delighted to find open at that hour, welcomed me in English, exchanged one further sentence, but then giggled and gestured that I’d reached her limit in my language and should talk to the nice man in the cubicle called Antonio, who sat me down, found my file and began taking me through options.

  ‘Would you like a debit card?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘A cheque book?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Internet banking?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  By the time I’d agreed to everything on offer and had signed my name countless times, I almost needed a wheelie bin to take the stuff away. But we settled for a large envelope. We shook hands warmly and he reassured me of his best service. The only thing I didn’t get was an overdraft.

  ‘No’ he smiled, ‘You need to talk to the manager for that.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were the manager.’

  He turned slightly pink and smiled wistfully.

  I wandered along the main road, turned up towards the town square and entered the tiny post office feeling positively cheerful. Antonio and the Bank had been very accommodating, the morning was already looking good, the sun was beating down and I had an idea to stop at the mobile van on the way back for some churros (fritters) and hot chocolate. As I stepped inside the post office the dark was blinding. I couldn’t see a thing. It was a windowless basement, and even though the light was probably on, it was so dark after being outside that I had to grope my way towards the counter. A scuffling noise at the back confirmed that there was someone present and a woman came to the window.

  ‘Eh?’ she grunted.

  She had a wedge of thick black hair like a Cossack’s hat and deep circles under her eyes as if she’d slept the night in an unlined coffin. When I asked if she spoke English, the corners of her mouth turned down in disgust. She looked at me if I were a fly that had landed on her apron and she was about to brush me off. Summoning all of my remembered Spanish, I attempted a request.

  ‘Nuevo casa, no address. Quiero un adresso, por favor.’

  I guessed at the word ‘address’ and added the ‘o’ at the end of the word in the hope that it was a masculine noun. She stood squarely in the window, like a dictator of a minor republic puffing herself out in front of her people. Doubting that she had got my message, I attempted some repetition in my pathetic Spanish.

  ‘Un adresso, por favor.’

  I’m not sure exactly what she replied as she spoke rapidly and at length, but I responded, then she replied, then I spoke back and over several minutes, we managed the semblance of a conversation that went something like this:

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to know what my address is so I can get my mail.’

  ‘What’s your name?�
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  ‘You see I’ve brought the map and official papers showing the parcel of land…’

  ‘Forget the map, moron, what do you think this is – a tourist office?’

  ‘And it says here…’

  ‘Look, just give me your name.’

  ‘Name? Well, it doesn’t have a name, it’s not built yet.’

  ‘Not the house name, you imbecile, what’s your name?’

  ‘The name’s just written here, on the document.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, that’s the name of the land – here, just write your name on this piece of paper.’

  ‘OK, keep your Cossack on…’

  I wrote my name and Stan’s name and handed the piece of paper to the postmistress. She strode off tutting, leafed through existing bundles of poste restante and returned to the counter to say, ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Of course there’s nothing. We don’t have an address so no one’s written to us yet.’

  ‘What do you want? Look there’s no mail.’

  ‘Address. I want an address!’

  ‘She wants an address!’

  ‘Yes!’ I demanded.

  She sighed, looking at me as if I had personally prolonged the Spanish Civil War, then scribbled something down and handed me a scrap of paper.

  ‘Here… now bugger off!’

  I looked down and scrutinised her handwriting in the dark. On this piece of paper, oh joy, she had written our new address.

  That was all it took. Between the squabbling and misunderstanding we had managed to create the address. I’d given her our names and the location of our parcel of land, and she’d given me the rest. OK, it wasn’t a postal address, it was poste restante, care of the post office, but no one around there, it seemed, had letters delivered other than to the post office. As a start, that would do. I returned to the hotel feeling that now we had a bank account and an address, we had moved one step closer to Colmenar. The cross Cossack in the post office may not have meant to, but she had made me very happy.