The Gardens That Mended a Marriage by Karen Moloney

Author:Karen Moloney [Karen Moloney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780957556867
Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 2014-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

The author in her element

Land slip

Re-seeding the hillside

The hillside recovered

Granite arrived on site

View from the myrtle hedge

The garden taking shape

Persian garden paved and maturing

Olive and almond terrace with rosemary

The author and the Duchess collect supper from the London garden

We broke off heads of wild fennel, pods of broom, anything that looked as if it had a seed in it. We snatched whole dried flower heads, thistles, shrubs with dead cotton-wool blooms – anything that might colonise the hillside. We snuffled about under almond and olive trees like dogs in search of truffles. We gathered handfuls of shrunken nuts and pits and carried them back up to the plateau, working quickly now because the light was fading. We shoved seeds in where we could, scattering them across the top of the scree. But our reach didn’t extend more than a few metres below the top. It was a pathetic effort, really. But we worked like men possessed, or more like women desperate to get pregnant in their years of dwindling fertility.

Just as we were coming to the end of our task, Stan found a rope from beside the concrete mixer, thinking to tie himself to it and scale down the scree, scattering seeds lower. By this time I thought he’d gone too far.

‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘It’s dark, you’ll slip and slide down the scree, bringing the cement mixer down on top of you! It’ll crack your head open and you’ll bleed to death in ten minutes before an ambulance can get to you.’

He agreed. So I fetched the trowels and gloves from the car and we found a small space below the pump house. With a couple of buckets of top-soil and water from the puddle near the concrete mound, we planted twenty olive stones in a trench. At least they would get a better start than if we’d flung them in the dark off the top of the mountain. It was our miniature olive grove. We marked it with a few sticks so the builders didn’t use that corner of the plateau as their toilet, and packed up for the day.

‘How long will they take to germinate?’ asked Stan as we drove back up the ridge, our headlights skimming the bush, the dust leaving a red glow in our rear lights.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘In the UK the seeds wouldn’t sprout until spring because the soil is cold.’

‘But does the flesh of the olive dry up and then the root appear? And will the stem sprout up later?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said again, feeling lost and ignorant. ‘I haven’t seen one sprout since we put beans in a jam jar in primary school.’

‘A jam jar?’ he replied. ‘We had proper blotting paper and a test tube, so we could see the tap root going down and the stem curling up.’

‘OK, since you’re the expert in bean-sprouting, you tell me what our olives will do.’

He couldn’t. We both smiled, clueless, and drove on to Málaga tired and dirty but satisfied that at least two inexpert foreigners had attempted to heal the scar on our mountain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.