‘Yes, but just not in the places we wanted.’
‘Well, that doesn’t matter, we wanted the scar covered and it’s been covered.’
‘But your lovely swathes of colour. All that Piet Oudolf stuff.’
‘Mmmmm? Oh, that doesn’t matter.’
Doesn’t matter? Doesn’t matter? What was he thinking? The man who had spent so much of his precious time designing exactly where the different species and colours and shapes would go and how they would complement each other… It didn’t matter that they’d thrown themselves across the hillside any which way they wanted? Maybe this mountain was beginning to work its magic.
A month later I took part in a writers’ workshop north of Inverness. The mornings were quiet in the house, the other writers were either scribbling in bed or sleeping off the previous night’s heavy dinner and wine. I rose early and ran for about thirty minutes along a black tarmac road crumbling at the edges into Guinness-coloured bog. It was a wild and uncompromising landscape, a vivid reminder of the mountains of County Wicklow, but in a strange way not unlike the higher hills around Colmenar. For two miles the early morning sun split the blue-black clouds as they rumbled across the mountains, but after twenty minutes of running into horizontal rain, I had to stop to catch my breath and decide if the promised view of Loch Ness another mile down the road was worth pursuing. I decided it wasn’t and branched off into the shelter of a forested trail.
On either side of me, brave bog cotton, white and tufty against the black peat and buffeted by the wind, smacked each other. Cream clover flowers, pink wild astilbe and occasional foxgloves took shelter under grasses that appeared to tumble like synchronized Chinese acrobats. The entire landscape around me was alive and heading east like the prevailing winds of Jaldarin. The flora was tossed sideways and the clouds, which had broken the bands of the earth and flew jubilantly above me, raced in the same direction. It felt as if I was pinned in a stream or a vein where everything rushed past me, whooshing on somewhere. Directly above my head a single black crow held his place against the wind for several seconds. I put out my arms to fly with him and although my kagoul flapped noisily like a luffing sail, I never rose. Ah well.
That evening, Stan and Lottie, who were back in Spain, called with an update.
‘The palms are doing better,’ Stan assured me. ‘But two of the Cycas have died. Muscle Manuel suggested they should be replaced, but I think we should wait.’
‘Me too. He’s always scaremongering. Leave them a year and I bet they’ll recover. How’s the hillside?’
‘Totally covered.’ he said, jubilant. ‘You can hardly see the mesh. It looks just like the rest of the mountain.’
I could barely believe that in a matter of months, the hillside we had torn apart, scraped so callously, gouged two long ditches into, piled debris onto and fixed rigid steel net across had decided to repair itself. We were in danger of being forgiven. But just to be sure, I consulted one of my fellow participants at the workshop, who was a travel writer and devoted tree-hugger. She suggested that we make offerings to the God of Jaldarin to ask forgiveness. We could leave out food or water or simply stand on the side of the mountain and say we were sorry.
‘I might find that a bit embarrassing if the builders are watching,’ I confessed to her. ‘Would it still work if I just muttered an apology under my breath?’
She looked at me as if I had suggested drinking the holy water in a Catholic church, but said yes anyway.
More damage
The ordeal was not over. A few weeks later Stan and I had been concerned after reading reports of more severe storms in Spain in which several people had died. Water had swept away whole houses in Andalusia and in one disconcerting email George had described how flash floods had nearly washed him down river when he’d become stuck in his car crossing a surging stream. Although half of me wanted to see for myself the devastation that this weather had wrought on our fragile mountainside, my work at this time took me northeast to Finland.
Stan had managed another trip to Spain and when my work that day was finished I waited anxiously for his call. None came. Only a text that said simply ‘sitting on our hillside, shirt off in brilliant sunshine, listening to the goats going home for tea’. I stood in my bedroom in a magnificent royal hunting lodge deep in the Baltic forest and threw open the windows. Outside, the stillness of thick snow couldn’t be further from the gentle, dusty Andalusian hum that Stan was experiencing. The black of the long Finnish winter and the dense forest in front of me couldn’t be more different from that bright Mediterranean light. The idea of the warmth of the sun on his body made me shiver in envy. I closed the window and called him.
‘There’s not much damage. The cold seems to have got at the cacti though.’
‘The ones that were thriving?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn. What, all of them?’
‘The small cacti seem fine, it’s just the tall Euphorbia-like ones that are bent over.’
‘Are they sort of shrunken and sucked-out-looking?’
‘Yep.’
‘Oh no. That’s what happened to my cacti at home the first winter I left them out, do you remember?’
‘No. But you take ours into the shed every winter now, don’t you?’
‘Yes, and they’re fine.’
Maybe what we were learning from this incident was not to be greedy. Perhaps cacti are really meant for the gardeners down on the Costa del Sol, who rarely get frosts and have walled patios to protect them from hurricane winds blowing upwards and rain slashing down on them. Obviously it was colder on our hillside than we’d ever expected and we had to think twice about planting more cacti.
‘I don’t know if I ever told you, but I put one of the spare Santolinas down the hillside at the beginning of the cactus walk and it’s thriving!’ Stan went on.
‘OK, that’s what we’ll have to do then. Dot the hillside with Santolina.’
‘The hillside we seeded looks fabulous. It’s lush green and completely covers the wire mesh. It must love the rain.’
‘Great.’
‘But there’s some bad news. Are you sitting down?’
I closed the shutters and sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Muscle Manuel says that some plant, I forget the name he gave it, is beginning to colonise the hillside and it’s extremely invasive.’
‘What? He’s just scaremongering again. You know how pessimistic he can be.’
‘And there’s something else. Remember that gooey sap disease that Muscle Manuel was treating on the almond trees? Well, there’s more of it. Two or three more trees. Muscle Manuel has painted that white ointment over the trunks. He seems to think it will work.’
‘Good.’
‘And another thing…’
I didn’t think I could bear another thing. The black forest outside my window was beginning to feel oppressive.
‘Muscle Manuel says the rosemary will survive but the lavender won’t.’
‘What?’
‘He says no.’
‘If the rosemary will survive, the lavender will.’
‘He’s adamant.’
‘Well, he’s talking rubbish. If he means that the rosemary will last many years longer than the lavender, then that’s different. We know this. Lavender will have to be replaced sooner. But it’s not going to die. The conditions are fine for it up there. He’s just trying to make us think he knows everything.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
At times like that I began to question what we had taken on. The enormity of the responsibility of a large remote property and the vulnerability of our position became ever more apparent. We had to rely on so many others to act on our behalf, to tell us what we needed to know, to look out for our interests. There were several people we had to trust in addition to George and Muscle Manuel: Placido the lawyer, Jennie the plants woman, Antonio the Plant, Antonio the Bank, Antonio the Corridor, the Professor. Knowing them for so little time w
as a handicap that began to weigh heavily on my inexperienced shoulders. We were so far away and so easy to confuse with misinformation and mislead with false guidance.
The stillness of the forest outside began closing in on me. I knew that at 9am the next morning I had to address forty businessmen and women in the salon downstairs. They too were struggling to deal with multiple responsibilities across diverse geographical regions, leading remote teams of people they don’t get to see often enough. They’d complained to me before about feeling out of touch and insecure. Our job trying to create this garden in Spain was no different. How did I advise my clients to cope? I would have to think this through carefully and be prepared to take a dose of my own medicine. The recollection of the Red Dao rice farmers who took what life threw at them with dignity, patience and courage popped into my head. Overnight I worked it into a story with a business message and delivered it the following day. They understood.
The invasion
The worst was still to come. A couple of days later Stan and I met in a restaurant in Camden Town before attending a performance of Cuban flamenco at the Roundhouse. I had arrived especially early and chosen a good table, imagining myself on a date with my very own husband. Having spent a precious day at home completing the mundane tasks required to ensure our London house ran smoothly, like ridding the fridge of furry food, ignoring parking-fine demands and sorting my shoes into colour order, I was keen for human company and thought I had polished up rather well. When he arrived, he was late and grumpy and hardly looked at me. The traffic had been horrendous, he explained, and proceeded to order his food with as much enthusiasm as I used to go to vespers in my convent school. The fact that he had given up alcohol for January and February didn’t help, and he seemed unsettled and anxious.
‘Muscle Manuel says we’ve got to get rid of this - thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘The plant that’s creeping up from the hillside onto the platform.’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve sent you the photos I took of it. We need to identify it, because if it’s something we’ve introduced, we’re in big trouble.’
‘Why?’
‘Manuel says it’s totally invasive. It’ll take over the mountain top and kill everything else.’
‘He says it’s impossible to get rid of. It grows three-foot high and swamps everything else.’
‘Oh!’
‘And you can’t pull it up because the roots are thick and long, and go really deep.’
‘No.’
‘He says we need to act now before it comes into flower and the seeds start to spread it across the entire platform.’
‘What does he suggest?’
‘He says he’ll hire a small tractor and spray herbicide everywhere.’
‘What? Herbicide? That’s madness!’
‘I know.’
‘Everywhere?’
‘Well, over the hillside we planted.’
‘But that’ll kill off everything we’ve just established.’
‘So how else will we get rid of it?’
‘Well, I don’t know, but that sounds a bit drastic, and using all those chemicals…’
‘What else are we supposed to do?’
I sat there stunned. How could we have introduced something so dangerous? We were trying so hard to do the right thing. If we let Muscle Manuel loose with the weed killer, all our hard work would come to nothing.
‘I’ll get on the Royal Horticultural Society’s website and see if I can identify this triffid. If I can’t, I’ll send the photos to the Professor at the seed place and ask if it’s something we’ve planted and get him to tell us how to destroy it.’
That seemed to pacify him, at least for the evening. The next morning I consulted my records and found the list of seeds supplied to us by the Professor. After half an hour trying to identify the invader myself, I gave up and emailed the photos of the offending plant straight to him. His reply was immediate and very reassuring. He said yes, indeed it was something we had planted. He identified the plant in the photo as the Medicago sativa, the bio-mass that was intended to grow for a couple of years and then die down, thereby feeding the soil. It certainly wouldn’t take over, he said. On no account should we destroy it. It was, he confirmed, part of the two-year plan and if we kept the faith, everything should be fine.
Relieved and grateful, I forwarded the Professor’s response to Stan at his office to reassure him that we need do nothing and should ignore Manuel. I thought that would be the end of it, but Stan wasn’t happy. He phoned straight back.
‘The Professor’s response was incomplete.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you didn’t ask him the right questions.’
‘What should I have asked?’
‘You should have asked him if the plant will germinate this spring.’
‘Why? What difference will that make? He says it’s going to die down, so there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Why do I always have to do everything?’
‘You don’t! I’ll call him tomorrow and ask if the feckin’ plant will germinate this spring if it makes you happy.’
The next morning, before I could do anything, he had e-mailed the Professor and received the following reply.
Dear Stan,
Medicago sativa is not a weed and the plant you have come from the sown but is not able to increase the population if you don’t spread more seed. Please don’t be afraid. It’ll don’t be a problem for you. Furthermore, the blossom is a good attractive for insect and maintain a healthy field.
Regards.
So there we had it. The plant was infertile. The Professor had come up trumps again. Now we were in a race to stop Muscle Manuel nuking everything on the hillside with chemicals. One simple phone call stopped him in his tracks. But he was not happy and grumbled on for months about the seeds we had sown.
The soil dump
There was another calamity towards the end of that spring. After the most severe rain for forty years, enough to sweep away whole hillsides across Andalusia, we were summoned by a worrying mail from Manuel to say that we had lost half of the terracing on the southwest side – swept away in the rain. We hurried over to survey our loss.
Deluges are not uncommon in the Mediterranean but on the way out of Colmenar up to the site, the brutal force of these rains became evident. On parts of the road, boulders and piles of earth lay where they had tumbled down. Across the other side, the tarmac had been eroded and ribbons of barrier tape strung by the emergency services warned cars not to go too close to the edge. As we ventured onto the dirt track to cross the ridge large gullies had been gouged across our path and the road was more rutted than we had ever seen it.
We were expecting the worst up at the site. Having experienced the rains two years before that had sent our loose scree slipping and sliding down the west side, into and over the two dykes we’d built and onto the farmer’s land below, we were fearing a catastrophe. The terraces had never slipped before. In fact, they had been the most solid of all the landscaping we had done. Stan had deliberately designed them shallow and, fearing slippage, we’d put in the almond and olive trees very quickly. Because the terraces were irrigated, the trees had rooted and secured the soil. Furthermore, Muscle Manuel and George, in one of their few joint initiatives, had built small walls of stone to shore the terraces up more securely. These were solid. So we were shocked to learn from Muscle Manuel that they had been victim to the torrent.
Something had been lost in translation. ‘Swept away’ was the term Manuel had used. Fortunately, when we got up to the site and ran over to the edge, it turned out to be a gross exaggeration - a false alarm. Yes, there was a loss – of about 40ft off the south-western edge of the olive and almond terraces, but instead of trees having been swept away, they’d been sort of ‘dumped’ lower down. It’s quite hard to describe, but a perfectly formed horseshoe shape of land had slipped intact dow
n the hillside, leaving a big crag above it, forming an amphitheatre. The trees had remained remarkably upright. This wasn’t erosion from gushing water sweeping sludge, trees, soil and anything in its path downwards, but what must have been a massive and sudden slip; the soil simply compacting itself 2m below.
‘What shall we do?’ I asked.
Stan stood above and looked down in silence.
‘Nothing,’ he said after a while.
‘What do you mean nothing? Shouldn’t we rebuild it? Hoist the trees back up? Rebuild the terrace so the trees line up again?’
He gazed into the chasm. Then shook his head.
‘Nah,’ he said.
I was stunned.
‘Let’s leave them where they landed.’ And with that he walked away.
It occurred to me how far we had both come in the three years since those lovely curving terraces had been drawn on paper on our kitchen table. I had imagined them slightly tumbling and rustic. Stan had designed them in a perfect arc from a mid-point in the Persian garden, radiating uniformly with precision, delineating the edge, spacing each tree equidistantly. Now here we were, many experiences later: landslides, slippages, cracking - buffeted by climatic events, thrown off course by nature, but assuming completely different positions. I suggested regaining control; he wanted to let nature take its course. So there they remained, lower down the hill, where, let’s hope, they will stay for some time.
We walked round to the south side where, with magnanimity, the mountain had also given us the most spectacular springtime display of wild flowers. I couldn’t begin to describe them all, let alone name them. What excited me most was finding beautiful wild orchids – deep purple, about 8 inches high with showy, multi-petalled flowers and rigid stems – thousands of them. Just when you think you’re losing more than you’re planting, you turn a corner and there - more life than you could ever have planned getting along quietly without you. We are, in the larger scheme of things, insignificant and our attempts to influence or even contribute to Gaia mere hubris.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 17