Beyond the hedge was Richard’s farm. The fields were all one shade of green, stretching out a long way. It was a duller, bluer green than the grass in the garden. Jonathan said that if she stayed long enough she would see them turn to gold.
The lovely garden of Joséphine de Beauharnais
I want lots of flowers, she said to Charlie. Colour. I want masses of colour.
The garden lay white under snow. It was 1947, a cold winter that seemed to be meant to cauterise the recent past. When Claire looked out there was no distinguishing any more between the surface of the garden and that of the fields beyond, smooth and white to the grey horizon. Even the line of the fence was erased where a drift had swept against it. She had woken before him. Gone out into the snow. Now he had come out to join her.
Roses, lupins, irises, dahlias. Delphiniums, I love delphiniums. Peonies, big deep red ones. What else? Rhododendrons and azaleas. Can one grow rhododendrons here?
But you don’t know anything about gardening.
It was true. Those were about all the flowers she knew, apart from ordinary little flowers like daisies and forget-me-nots, which never found their way into London florists’.
I’ll learn. I can begin to learn before the snow melts. As soon as the snow goes I’ll start work. I’ll get Billy to help.
She hadn’t lived in the house long enough yet to make a mark on it, so full it was of the family past, but the garden was clear out there, blank now.
It’ll be wet, Charlie said, when all that snow melts. You won’t be able to get into the ground, you’ll have to wait a while.
Well, I can start planning, darling, can’t I?
She brought down Uncle Ralph’s gardening books from the shelf in his study that had become Charlie’s study, moved them into the sitting room, moved a table before the window where she could see as she planned. She took some sheets of paper, white and plain as the snow outside.
Again then they went out, the two of them together into the snow, paced the white ground. They left their footprints first in straight lines like geometry across it, recording the length and breadth of the lawn from the house to the half-buried fence, making the notes that she would transfer to the sheets of paper; then pacing the distance to the trees, the position of individual trees and shrubs, Ralph’s long-neglected border. They might have been treading the foundations of a house they were to build, young marrieds building a life anew for themselves.
What a mess we’ve made of the lawn now!
When they looked back the footsteps seemed to have lost all order, jumbled, criss-crossing as if there had been a gang of children playing. Or dancing. Charlie’s laugh made her feel warm in the cold. Almost as if he had touched her, skin to skin, beneath all the wool that they were wearing.
Then his voice ironical, a serious look. It’s not all playing, you know. Gardening’s science too.
Do you think I don’t know that, living with you and all your talk?
She had been married to a farmer long enough to know that first she would have to learn the soil and what liked to grow in that soil. There were magazine articles with pictures of trees and flowers, and there was the Gertrude Jekyll, but most of Ralph’s books were dry. Sanders’ Encyclopaedia of Gardening. Catalogues on herbaceous plants and shrubs and climbers, manuals on pests and diseases and the pruning of fruit trees, all in tight text with the barest of illustration. A larger book with engravings, about Joséphine’s garden at Malmaison which Ralph had perhaps visited at some time before the war. She put herself to work as she had not worked at anything before. The snow had been beautiful at first, but it lay too long. The house closed around them. She planned and planned. Charlie fretted that he could not himself get onto the land, and now she understood his impatience. The melt happened so slowly. Snow turned to slush and then froze again. Even when the snow was gone the ground held on to the cold and then the wet.
The first thing she had Billy do was put in the yew hedge. She had intended just a defining line, a piece of form in this landscape which had so little form. She did not imagine that the yew hedge would grow as tall as it eventually did. Only the very great gardeners could imagine such things, she would think in years to come, the Capability Browns who could see into the future.
If the farm was his to make, then the garden was hers. She made the boundaries, as if to claim some space back from him, some ground that would be her own and separate from all the rest of the land in which the house stood so plain and exposed. She would wrap the garden in hedges, a hedge of yew to the front and side of the house, to the east and south, to claim herself back from his space; and when he was gone she let the hedges grow tall to limit the sky.
