The Good Life
The flowers may be flagging, but the lambs have work to do as milking sheep.
As I write this, I am looking out the window at the toppled ruins of my delphiniums. I am mad about delphiniums and, in common with Prince Charles, believe “one must have battalions of them”.
I raise my delphiniums from seed and am extremely boastful about doing so. Pride cometh before a fall, and each summer I, and my delphiniums, fall. It is the rain that does for them, and also the fact that I, unlike Prince Charles, do not have squads of gardeners to properly stake my battalions of delphiniums, and I am too lazy to do it myself.
In the country, one has a complicated relationship with rain. We need it and crave it – sheep eat grass, and rain makes grass grow – but it plays havoc with my garden. The rain always comes just as the roses are at their glorious best, and turns them shabby and brown. Nonetheless, it’s necessary for my poor, gasping plants.
A year in the garden mimics a year of a life. There are triumphs: the almost-black Asiatic lilies are nearly 1.8m tall this year; another pink and white variety whose name and provenance I have forgotten is blooming prettily and fragrantly outside the kitchen window. There are disappointments: the martagon lilies failed to do a damned thing. There are squabbles: the lady’s mantle does not much care for the echium blue bedder and has crowded it out (some fool may have planted them too close together).
Gardens, for me, are as much, if not more so, about the anticipation as the achievement, or lack thereof. Looking forward is the fun bit. Which is also just like life.
And in the country, the pace of life is slower – except in the garden. I say to my sweet peas: “Slow down! What’s the rush?” But rush they do; they want to set seed for the next year and I plant so many I can’t keep up with the deadheading that would delay this rush to what I see as death and they see as procreation.
There is an obvious lesson here: don’t plant so many bloody sweet peas. It is a lesson I
appear incapable of learning.
Is the pace of life slower here at Lush Places? Yes and no. It seems it was just the other day that two tiny day-old orphan lambs arrived on our doorstep and said: “Mama!” And just the other day that our lambs had somehow grown into enormous sheep and had their own lambs that emerged and said: “Mama!”
Our lambs, Elizabeth
Jane and Xanthe, will always be our lambs, and they will always come, galloping and calling, when we see them. But they have left home. They are living at Miles the sheep farmer’s place and their lambs have been weaned. They went to work for the first time the day I wrote this: they began their lives as milking sheep.
Xanthe, the super-model sheep with a temperament to match, would not have much relished the idea. There is sadness about this, but it is what we, with such great care, raised them for. And they are just up the road.
Nowhere is very far from here in the country, which is comforting, and what I have come to think defines a proper sense of community. I once liked the idea of the anonymity that goes along with living in a big city; there is no anonymity in the country, but it feels embracing, not claustrophobic.
It is nice to be embraced, especially by great big sheep that will always be our lambs.
I say to my sweet peas: “Slow down! What’s the rush?” But rush they do.