Dead-heading the Cosmos

‘Since my retirement, I have literally buried myself in the garden.’ – Oxford don

The attractions and allure of gardening eluded me for a long time. I used to think that tending to a plot or a flowerbed was a waste of precious hours. Why grovel on the gravel weeding when you could be doing something so much more interesting? My parents enjoyed gardening and my sister is a botanist who even had a spotlight attached to her house so that she could cultivate the garden in the dark. But although I enjoyed the fruits of their labours I was never tempted to take up trowel and trug myself.

Then we moved to a house where the modest garden had suffered from fifteen years of neglect. Originally, the garden must have been carefully set out and planted but when we arrived some of the fences had collapsed and the ivy was growing rampantly across the mossy lawn. In some parts of the world, English ivy is a prized evergreen climber but it had grown everywhere. It had grown over walls and even through them with a branch the size of a child’s wrist.

Shrubs like a ceanothus had fallen over and everywhere there were the evergreen leaves of one of the two native species of iris, Iris foetidissimus. Most stinky iris. All that Latin I’d learnt at school was starting to come in useful as I gradually memorised the names of more plants and started to realise how much money one could bury in a garden by visiting garden centres. ‘Go to nurseries,’ advised my sister. ‘Avoid garden centres like the plague.’

Fairly soon after our arrival, a neighbour who is a keen gardener recommended Matt to us. Ever since then, he has been working on the garden for two hours a week each Wednesday. He reckons to attempt most

things out of doors, except electrics. He trained in the local horticultural college and has an exceptional work ethic. His white van is a garden shed on wheels and contains a multitude of implements and potions. He first came when I was working elsewhere and was described to me by my wife as ‘A fine upstanding Gloucestershire lad who looks you straight in the eye.’ At that time Matt was twenty-one and he’s now a married man with a young daughter called Emily Rose and a son called Eddie.

Practical, resourceful and good-natured with a beguiling grin, Matt turns up when he says he will, works hard and to high standards. I keep a small black notebook in which I now mainly write jobs for Matt and when I look round the garden I see his handiwork everywhere: Trim the wisteria. Set the paving stones. Remove rotten pergola. Herb Robert under berberis. Grass in flowerbeds. Chestnut leaves in gutter. Speedwell by wall. Bindweed at bottom of garden. As he says on his van, no job too small. He has also planted hundreds of bulbs, particularly tulips, English bluebells, snowdrops and daffodils. He gets on with things decisively while I dither and limber up prior to contemplating what I plan pensively to do next.

We seemed to have purchased the National Collection of Iris foetidissimus, also known as adder’s meat, gladdon and roast beef plant, apparently because of the smell of its leaves when crushed. The leaves are evergreen and fleshy and in winter the seed-pod splits open to reveal a grinning row of orange arils which are apparently poisonous to livestock. These orange pills provide strong winter colour when there is little else. Native plants, they seem to grow well in the sandy loam here and previously I’d never encountered the plant. Now whenever I need a space for a fresh plant, I fork out a leathery old iris foetidissimus.

If stinking native irises grow well in the sandy soil, I thought, then cultivated irises should enjoy it too. So I started to investigate the types of irises I might introduce to the sunnier parts of the garden. Oh the inestimable joys of garden catalogues and wishful thinking. All those rich colours and images of exhibition-standard blooms and in particular of irises.

I have learnt that there are three main components of the iris flower: the upright standards, the conspicuous falls and the colourful beards. As a result of careful plant breeding, there are numerous varieties available in an alluring array of colours. In about May, I now love looking daily as, between the sword-shaped leaves, the long tightly-furled buds slowly reveal their colours like sharpened watercolour pencils, purple, blue and yellow. In the warmth of the sun, the tripartite flowers open and can be seen from each side with their trinities of tongues. Then there they are: the pale standard, purple falls and orange beards of Impressions of Jouy, for instance.

Even the name of each iris has been given to seduce like Celebration Song, Caribbean Dream, Java Bleue and Jazzed Up. I have spent hours poring over the Cayeux catalogue in colourful dreams of future irises and choosing my imaginary colour and planting schemes. The irises arrive from France in a box marked Urgent and the rhizomes are wrapped in aromatic pinewood shavings.

Much the same is true of tulips which Matt likes to plant closer than recommended so that there is what he rightly calls a ‘hit of colour’. In my limited experience, bulbs are seeds that work and tulips provide a richly rewarding burst of life and colour in late spring. I tend not to like the plain yellow or striped red and yellow tulips which look like pantaloons and so I choose mainly red in various lipstick and wine tints, although I am now moving towards raspberry ripple and orange sorbet colours.

I know of someone who refused to have a single yellow flower in her garden because she did not like the colour. Mondrian apparently detested green but then he wasn’t a gardener. It’s not that I dislike yellow or yellow flowers but a number of them have a rather sulphurous appearance and I tend to prefer the more buttery yellows: primrose, daffodil and evening primrose. Apparently statistics indicate that blue is ‘the world’s favourite colour’. I enjoy blue as a colour and I favour blue flowers when I can find them: Mer du Sud irises or Blue Nile delphiniums, which are also very popular with the squadrons of slugs which breed here. I have repeatedly tried to grow

blue poppies from seed but without any success. But I have managed to plant another Caryopteris Bluebird.

I also love the powerful scents which stop you in your tracks and so I have tried to encourage more scented shrubs by planting a small wych hazel near the white jasmine and a daphne odora near the pallid wisteria which does not smell strongly enough for my liking. When I arrived I also planted almost twenty bare-root roses and was initially disappointed by their slow progress. For me, the best rose for fruity scent is probably the pink rose named after that doyenne of gardeners, Gertrude Jekyll.

If I don’t know or can’t remember the name of a plant or flower, I tend to make it up until the botanical name returns to me. Thus the sparkling wand of yellow stars growing from a pubic tuft of slim green leaves which was given to me became The Hairy Fairy tree until I rediscovered from the label that it was an asphodeline lutea.

With hindsight, I have now realised that all my adult life I have wanted to cultivate my very own bluebell wood. There is not enough room for one anywhere in the garden but Matt has cleared a patch in the comfrey or bone-ease beloved by the bees and that is where I have planted some native bluebells ( scilla nutans), first in seed form and next in bulbs because the seeds seemed to take an age to germinate and develop. They take about three years, according to Matt. So far, there are a few nodding native bluebells rather than a sea of hyancinth-scented blue but I am as ever-hopeful as I hope posterity will be.

Above all, a garden is a grand cure for narcissism, solipsism, egotism, despondency and incipient self-pity. CGT: Cognitive Garden Therapy. It encourages us to celebrate the ordinary and delight in the special. The ravages of slugs, on sweet pea seedlings for instance, can produce rabid garden rage but acceptance, hope and then delight are the main emotions to be experienced. Deaths and disappointments are present too but especially with a garden there is no point sulking through the inevitable. You can filter your own thoughts and philosophise while you contemplate the busy lives

of earwigs, woodlice, wasps and spiders. You can admire the tenacity of plants and the patience of trees, marvel at the thirst of root systems and enjoy the energetic exhalation everywhere of life-affirming oxygen.

Essay Prize Competition 2018 Third Place