The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

‘I love this tree,’ I had told him on one visit. ‘Will you bury me under it?’

  ‘What, now?’

  But this hillside cried out for more than one single tree with a gravestone napping in its shade. There needed to be more. Big specimens, hearty oaks, solid and stately.

  Bandera County, Texas

  I had gone to a place called the Dixie Dude Ranch in the middle of Bandera County, Texas to relax after a particularly crazy week with an oil company in Houston. There, surrounded by cattle farmers, people who say ‘howdy’ and doff their Stetsons to women on the wooden walkways in the local towns, who look at you out of the corners of their eyes, I felt the hot, dry, thyme-scented landscape of our Andalusian hilltop thousands of miles away. We ‘dudes’ as they called us (city folks who want to play at being cowboys for the weekend) were seeking good old fashioned Texan hospitality, the experience of sleeping in bunk houses, eating beans and pancakes and riding the range with wranglers by day, then sitting on the porch listening to a guitar by night. It was a long way from Andalusia in one sense, but so close in another. The life there was simple, the terrain was dry and dusty, and the earth breathed with a seductive oaky odour.

  We set off on the first morning on well-chosen nags, good-tempered and disciplined. Our backsides, more used to the accommodation of office chairs, sank into broad, comfortable, western saddles padded with sheepskin and blankets. Even the widest American bottom couldn’t complain. As the sun prised the sky open and the earth began to crackle, we started our slow climb away from the ranch and up into the Bandera Hills. I loved the rocky white paths, well worn by the worldly horses, and the boulders and prickly pears making every twist and turn on our trail look like scenes from a cowboy film. I had spent much of my early teenage years watching westerns on Saturday afternoon TV so hoped to hear the rattle of a snake’s tail, to see the silhouette of a noble Indian astride his palomino looking down on us in the valley, and hear the ping of a rifle rebounding off a nearby crag and reverberating through the hills.

  Actually, what then happened was even more corny. Ned, a stringy old cowboy who was leading our group, stopped just above me on the hill and lit a Marlboro in the lee of his Wrangler jacket. When I brought this iconic image to his attention he didn’t seem to get it and his interest in what I had to say from then on drifted off into the far hills. I guess what to us might seem an advertising cliché is to him still a way of life.

  Most of all, I loved the oak trees. These are the oaks of the Mediterranean – encinas, or Quercus ilex. Their leaves are reduced like a holly leaf, the edges straight (unlike our wavy English oak leaf) to limit water loss. The bark isn’t spongy like Spanish oak, at least not enough to harvest corks for wine bottles, but it is crinkly, grey and pitted and unmistakably oak. The shape of the tree, although not generous and spreading as an English oak, is more restricted. This magnificent species has evolved into so many forms: English, Spanish and American and I’m sure many others I haven’t seen, adapted but keeping a family resemblance. A bit like émigrés acquiring the accent of their adopted land but still bearing the countenance of the Irish, Russian or Italian families they left behind in Sligo, Vladivostok or Calabria. Recognisably oak, but adapting to survive. I decided to get dozens of these ancient majesties for our hillside.

  Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Florida

  Months later I was back in the US with Lottie, this time in Miami, armed with a recommendation from 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die to visit a botanic garden named Fairchild, just half an hour from where we were staying.

  I had picked up a Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden leaflet from the hotel the previous evening. If you, like us, had overdone the Disney experience when your children were young, you would be suspicious of any American tourist blurb claiming that the garden is unique: Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is truly a unique place. Here you can walk garden paths surrounded by the wonders and beauty of nature, talk to experts in horticulture and conservation science, view impressive art, see butterflies and birds at every turn…’ So, secretly fearing I would find a theme park rather than a real garden, I left the tired teenager asleep in the hotel, put the top down on the hired car and sped south down Highway 1 for a look.

  First impressions were poor. The entrance to this garden was hardly imposing – a tailor-made reception block housing the ticket office, shop and toilets and made from stone that looked like dirty, hard sponge with holes in it. Of course, I later discovered that this dirty stone was highly prized coral. I guess that’s why American tourists, after years of enjoying good-quality fake marble, could be disappointed with Rome. Furthermore, the garden seemed not to be a garden in the sense of being someone’s garden - attached to a house and home - because the man who founded the garden, Robert H. Montgomery, never actually lived there. There wasn’t even a house.

  But once I’d overcome my English expectation for a homely garden and accepted this park as a sprawling, well-funded and kosher botanic garden, I was impressed. Everywhere I looked there were beautifully chosen specimens, clearly labeled and well maintained. There was conservation work going on, graduate studies programmes, and a whole range of education projects for all ages. Most of all, the gardens were maintained by an army of Florida’s biggest resource: fit, enthusiastic old people. But then, no one’s old in Florida. These volunteers were in their sixties and seventies, strong, tanned, wealthy, and passionate about spending one or two days a week in the community of fellow amateur botanists, guides, gardeners. I sat down amongst them at the café.

  ‘So how come this place is called the Fairchild Garden? I thought it was founded by someone called Montgomery?’ I asked.

  A handsome sexagenarian, who drove the trams around the gardens and gave the guided tours, explained. ‘Montgomery was just an enthusiastic amateur. David Fairchild was his friend but he had a lot more money, so he built these gardens to display his friend’s collection.’

  ‘It says in the brochure that Dr David Fairchild was an economic botanist. What’s that?’

  ‘That’s someone who combines the work of an economist with botany. He was employed by the US government during the Great Depression to travel the world and bring back seeds and plants that would provide staple foods for the poor here in America. His job was to find new work for the agricultural unemployed and give a kick-start to the farming industry.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘He brought back pineapples, mangos, chocolate, palm for oil and many more plants, several of which have since become mainstays of the agricultural economy here. And he gave a lot of plants and seeds to his friend Montgomery. Enough to start this garden.’

  I hadn’t noticed much evidence of staple foods in the garden.

  ‘So where’s the potager, then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The kitchen garden? You know, where you grow all those plants. The orchards, the market garden? The edible stuff?’

  ‘Oh, there’s not much of that here. Only a few specimens. To be honest, I guess Montgomery’s heart was really into the less edible species, because what he created here was one of the best collections of ornamental palms anywhere in the world. In fact, we here at Fairchild are the keepers of the national palm collection.’

  This was looking good; in addition to oaks, palms were on my list.

  I set off with as much energy as I could muster in the heat, skirted around the artificial lakes to avoid the alligators, and started to scout for covetable palms. For some time I had wanted a Bismarckia nobilis for our garden in Spain, but we’d had to discount them because of the cost and size. In Fairchild, they are everywhere. They’re magnificent, particularly when positioned on their own in the middle of a large lawn. And the oak trees, this time dripping with epiphytes and orchids, looked stunning. There were plenty of fruit trees – mangos, papaya, jackfruit, banana, pineapples from tropical climes, and I also saw vanilla and cocoa. For a while I became a little disoriented. Parts of Florida seem to have a Mediterranean climate, but th
is garden seemed sub-tropical, although it was called a tropical garden. But I couldn’t find a single olive or almond tree to remind me of Colmenar.

  I had several ideas here. First, a Chorisia speciosa. I’d seen one before on a roundabout in Alhaurín de la Torre where Guzmán’s nursery is near Málaga, and once seen, never forgotten. Every time we passed the one on the roundabout, Stan and I referred to it as the barnacle tree because the trunk looks like the hull of a ship and the spikes growing out of the trunk look like barnacles. Its trunk has the girth of a barrel, more like a large cactus or piece of coral rather than a tree, although it can reach 30 feet in height. In the Fairchild Garden, they referred to it as the ‘silk-floss tree’. Perhaps a small one wouldn’t be too expensive or too difficult to source.

  There was another tree tucked away in Fairchild Tropical Garden that caught my eye. It looked on first sight like a regular tree, about the size and habit of a mature apple tree, with branches and twigs that you would expect to bear red crab apples, but instead it was covered in familiar purple blossoms. I went up closer and the label confirmed it as a bougainvillea tree. A far cry from the bougainvillea hedge or the bougainvillea climber or the topiaried columns I had seen in Europe or Asia. This was a proper fruit tree. Perhaps all it took to transform this ubiquitous tree from flower to fruit was someone with a vision and a pair of loppers.

  The other tree they seemed to make much of was the baobab. They have three or four grand specimens, large enough to house a family inside which, they tell us on the tour, is what they do with baobabs in Africa and India, as well as using them as prisons, larders and bus shelters. Mind you, it’s hard to tell in the US sometimes what is fact and what is fiction. The stories told by the guide at Fairchild seemed to stretch what I read on the botanical labels a little further than the scholars who wrote them might approve. Nonetheless, I left this garden armed with grand ideas and a hunger for a wetter climate.

  What’s a garden for?

  You can call me a trainspotter if you like, and I have to admit that I was counting down the gardens in my book from 1001 (Fairchild brought me to 934), but this visit helped me think about what gardens are for; specifically our garden in Spain. Why were we creating it? Yes, of course we were doing it as a project, something to work on together, but what would be the purpose of the garden once complete? Was it just a family retreat? Would we make it something that others might want to come and visit like a public garden? Was it to bring together a collection of indigenous plants like a national botanic garden?

  They’re peculiar places, botanic gardens. Some I’ve visited, like the one in Madrid, seem to be for the sole purpose of impressing other botanists – the public just an unnecessary nuisance. The ones in Hamburg and Cambridge struck me as wanting to be serious botanic ventures, but knowing they should also provide the function of a public park for the wider community. The ones in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were there, without doubt, for a higher purpose – the education of the populace – a mission both these countries take very seriously. So gardens could fulfil different functions, depending upon the vision of the owner or founder.

  After gallivanting around the world looking at these magnificent gardens, my vision (which had started as a garden in the sun for us and our family and friends to enjoy) had grown into something greater: a garden of interest to art lovers, where beautiful plants and sculptures and even an eccentric Saints Walk would elicit joy. It had become important. Perhaps even self-important. Why create something that might be of interest to more than just our family? What purpose would it serve?

  Neither Stan nor I were botanists: we could hardly remember any Latin names, we were not specialists in conservation and to be honest, the plants we were keen to introduce were more for their aesthetic value than their botanical interest. The main criterion for us was do they look good? We weren’t going to create a public park and invite tourists and locals, because this was our home. Nor did we want to make money from a commercial garden, open a nursery or sell produce. And we certainly weren’t driven to educate the public: that was the job of the government. We’d barely managed to educate our children, let alone a nation.

  But what had started as our private garden had definitely grown, without our conscious contrivance, into a bigger project. The space, it seemed, was crying out for something more than a cultivated plateau at the top and scrubby hillside below. What had begun as a Persian garden to complement the house, and maybe a palm walk, oh yes and some fruit trees, and perhaps a walk down through the scrub, and maybe the Stations of the Cross, had acquired a greater purpose than just our private pleasure. But what greater purpose? What theme brought it all together?

  The Farm, New Zealand

  I found my answer a few months later in North Island, New Zealand, where I was resting after a long trip in Asia. My old Trinity College friend Mac and I had been visiting her beach house in Matapouri and, driving back across the peninsular towards the Kaipara coast, had come across some fields being irrigated by large sprays. At least that’s what we thought when we first looked.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That spray on that hillside, behind the wall.’

  The sun was in our eyes and the water sparkled.

  ‘Well, it’s definitely water. It must be irrigating those crops,’ she said. Although she’d been resident for nearly thirty years in New Zealand, she was originally from a dairy farm in Ballymoney, so I presumed she knew all about country matters and left it at that.

  We drove on in silence. But I was worried. I couldn’t see any crops.

  ‘I can’t see any crops,’ I said. ‘It’s watering grass.’

  ‘So maybe it’s a golf course.’

  ‘Where are the bunkers? It’s just grass, Mac. Who on earth would water all that grass? Especially here in New Zealand, where your grass is forty shades greener than Irish grass and almost permanently wet.’

  We looked again. The water started to dance. It moved left and right, oscillating like my little spray attachment at home does, but then stopping and starting, up and down, some jets high, some low, in a choreographed sequence.

  ‘It’s a water sculpture!’ I squealed, pulling over onto the verge to get a better look. I opened the car door and stood up on the sill, clinging to the roof to get as high a view as possible. We were now close to the property on which this water sculpture was sparkling in the late afternoon sun. But it was shielded behind a high stone wall. We drove down until we found a driveway and a gate to the property, got out of the car and rang the intercom. A camera stared at us.

  ‘Hello?’

  No answer.

  ‘Hello. Can we come in?’

  No one was home. We tried vainly to peer over the top of the gate. All we could see were acres and acres of green rolling hillocks, exactly like a golf course but without the impediments. Just visible beyond the dancing water was a large steel sculpture glinting in the sun and behind that another installation we couldn’t quite make out.

  ‘What is this place?’ we asked in unison.

  ‘It must be a private collection. Have you ever heard of a sculpture park around here?’

  ‘No,’ said Mac. She knew everyone in the country and had a good grip on the fine arts scene. ‘I’ve not heard anything.’

  We got back in the car, incredulous that something so beautiful, so large and so man-made could have been created in such a small country without anyone knowing about it. The high wall we had peered over didn’t deter us and we drove a couple of kilometres further on, hugging the boundary, trying to find a way in.

  Around the back of the property we found another entrance. It was a farm track but the gate had been left wide open.

  ‘Let’s drive in.’

  ‘No! We can’t drive in. What if they lock the gate and we’re stuck here forever? We’d better not.’

  ‘OK. Let’s park here and walk in.’

  ‘We can’t. That’s trespassing.’

 
; ‘So? We’ll just tell them we’re curious. We’re not doing any harm.’

  Mac agreed. ‘No, you’re right. They can’t have something so beautiful all to themselves and not share it with anyone else.’

  So we parked the car, hobbled across the cattle grid and walked along the tarmac track towards this compelling landscape. The hillocks were sculpted like an Elysian playground, not natural at all. This was landscaping on a Capability Brown/Humphry Repton scale. There were no trees, just acres and acres of closely mown lawn on carefully sculpted contours. In fact, we could hear lawn mowers from two different directions. As we trespassed further the road bent round and off to our right. Down a gulley we discovered lines of cabbage palms, carefully placed to follow a riverbed. This was a living sculpture.

  ‘Look!’

  Then a little further on, astride two small hills, was an enormous work of art in some sort of ceramic material, shining like a big horn.

  ‘That looks like an Anish Kapoor…’ I ventured.

  And over the hill, towards the ocean, we could just make out an enormous Andy Goldsworthy sitting in the water’s edge.

  ‘This is amazing!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Like children, we jumped up and down with excitement.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  Around the bend, a large bearded man was speeding towards us on a quad bike. We’d been discovered.

  ‘Good afternoon ladies,’ he said politely, pulling up in front of us, grinning at our discomfort.

  Hello officer, we nearly said.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, we know we’re probably trespassing and everything,’ I blurted, ‘but we just couldn’t help it and it’s so beautiful here and we just had to come in and have a look and is that really an Anish Kapoor there and what is this place anyway?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s a private home, ladies, and yes, you are trespassing, but you’re right, that is an Anish Kapoor.’