THE GARDEN

The definition of a weed is: any plant that’s growing where it’s not supposed to. And the definition of poetry is: the best words in the best order. So maybe a garden is a combination of the two: the best plants, all growing where they’re supposed to. And that’s probably why I like gardens, but I’ve never ever managed to make a good one, or even preserve a decent one that I’ve inherited – inherited in the sense of moving into a house that already had one.

When I think about why – and I’ve reached the time of life where I do that increasingly – I think there’s more than one reason. Just as well – I wouldn’t like to think I was so superficial that one single cause could explain all the effects I observe in my character and behaviour. On the other hand, it would be nice to think I was unified – that my diverse habits and preferences emerge from a strong central position: the stone in the middle of the snowball, which has had some influence on its eventual shape, despite all the external accretions, not only the snow, but the sticks and moss and bits of gravel, and bottle tops and crisp packets and – oh, you know, the stuff a giant snowball is bound to gather as it rolls downhill (and we’re all rolling downhill, make no mistake about that) before it hits the picket fence with a thud and breaks into slush and ice and assorted detritus.

One reason I do so badly with gardening is that I tend to work best in bursts, rather than regularly. The stories I write, for instance, tend to get composed in groups of six at a time, and each individual story is written, as far as possible, in one sitting – if you make allowance for visits to the loo, cups of tea, maybe a meal, and a dog-walk. They only get split over two or three days if I can’t quite see my way clear to the ending, and I’m waiting for the mists to part, or the final phrase to drop into my head. The idea of sitting down regularly, at the same time every day, to write the same number of words, and then stop, is anathema to me. All – or nothing. That seems to be my motto. There was even a time, one summer in Vienna, when I didn’t wash for three days, because I hadn’t finished a rather longer story. A bit like Samson grieving – and a hint as to why writing is not a terribly social occupation.

You can’t do that with gardens. You can’t just chop everything back and then leave it for another six months to sort itself out. It isn’t even really what you do with fields, though it may look like it. They need ploughing, probably twice, and harrowing, and sowing and raking and spraying and reaping and ploughing... The stuff doesn’t just grow, you know.

Well, of course, it does. But that’s weeds. Maybe my stories are weeds, because they do just grow. And what I do is pick the ones I like, and trim off some of the leaves, and put them in a vase and call them flowers, and everybody’s fooled.

And that’s my other trouble with gardens: I’m far too interested in the stuff that grows by accident. I find it difficult just to pull it up and throw it away – at least until I’ve seen what kind of flower it has. Maybe I have some sort of faith in the power of burgeoning life, and a bit less faith in the human ability to order things successfully. And that obviously connects with the fact that I’m so poor at ordering things myself. Regular and repeated actions of the kind necessary to maintain a garden are not my strong point – apart from going to the loo, walking the dogs, and eating and drinking. The rest of it I tend to do on impulse – or not to do at all, like cleaning and tidying.

But just because I can’t do the stuff doesn’t mean I don’t like it or acknowledge its virtues. Take music: it feeds my soul. But if anybody says, “What do you play?” I have to answer: CDs. And that’s the way it is with gardens and gardening. And maybe there’s a little bit of impatience, too. When I write, I see the story take shape under my fingers – it’s alive, then and there, it’s leading me on, if I prune it a bit, the new growth starts immediately afterwards, in all kinds of different directions. But with plants, you have to wait a long, long while.

And then there’s my habit of procrastination. If it’s to do with writing, it doesn’t matter. What I do at the last minute, under enormous pressure, is certainly no worse, and probably better, than what I would have produced, drafted and redrafted, in countless small moments of inspiration. I just don’t work like Gustav von Aschenbach – but since he finished up fancying eleven-year-old Polish boys with transparent teeth, and pegged out on the Lido in Venice after eating some dodgy strawberries, it’s probably just as well.

On the other hand, if the seeds were supposed to go in in March, you can’t just stick ’em in the ground at the end of May and tell ’em to get a move on.

And yet – and yet – I like a good garden. With real, live plants in. And I don’t mind too much whether it’s natural or formal – though I tend to draw the line at those Japanese ones that look like building sites where the terribly tidy navvies have gone off for lunch in the nearest sushi bar, leaving the concrete mixer at just such an angle that the shadow of its handle will make a triangular connection with the pile of octagonal paving slabs that are just dislocated enough from each other to suggest the beginnings of a spiral... as though you’d got the sculptor Brâncuşi to give you some of his offcuts to use as beanpoles.

Though on the other hand I do enjoy the purity of barrenness. Rocks at jagged angles – for preference, the kind of stone with strata like a pack of cards that has been shuffled but not quite put back together properly – on its edge. Lichens making patterns and shapes that you feel you ought to be able to interpret but never quite can. Bogs, with quaking grass and that pseudo-cotton stuff – provided I don’t have to walk across them! – and marsh gentians and heather – heather! And ling, of course, as well. And furze, or gorse, or broom or whins – whatever you want to call it – sharp and prickly and wild-scented and always flowering somewhere at every season of the year.

In the first half of your life, you experience things physically; in the second half, metaphysically. These barren landscapes that I love – the Western Highlands round Assynt, with the sentinels of Suilven, Quinag and Canisp guarding the horizon, or the watershed of the Tyne, after Alston as you go downstream, or Ribblehead, with its orange mosses that are too close to the low grey sky – they’re like the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche: imagine things as bad as they can possibly be, no salvation, no life after death, no sense or meaning in anything – except for what you put there. That’s your job. And you can do it. No sentiment. No easy solutions. Just jumbled rocks and lichens and reflections in pools and the odd sheep’s skeleton and ivy-leaved toadflax creeping out between the gaps of a dry-stone wall.

That was the kind of landscape from which I was emerging when I first saw the garden. I’d left the dogs behind in the camper – the terrain was rough, there were bogs I didn’t want to have to pull them out of, and there were sheep I didn’t want to have to stop them chasing. Maybe I was scared of their affection, too – it wouldn’t have gone with my mood, in the way that the landscape did. And then I came over the edge, and there was the sea in front of me. And it was blue – deep, dark, lapis lazuli blue. And the sky was blue, bright blue. And the grey clouds above me were being pushed back inland by the wind off the sea. And below me I saw the garden.

A tiny village hugged the shoreline. The tide-race was fast there, I judged, because the beach was narrow and consisted of substantial shingle, rather than silver shell-sand. A tiny corrugated iron chapel on a small headland looked in danger of being washed away, and its graveyard seemed to have suffered that fate already. On the landward side of the road, however, there being no space on the seaward side, there were ten or a dozen houses. One had a red telephone box outside it, with the paint flaking, and a postbox, and a rusty enamel sign. Two more seemed derelict. Another couple were let as holiday cottages, to judge by the well-loaded cars parked in front of them, and the cheap garden furniture. The rest had a certain grimness and functionality, the washing cracking on their much-knotted lines in the stiff breeze was clean but far from new or fashionable. However, the one nearest to me, the last outpost of the village, before the increasingly stony road turned uphill to the village’s overflow cemetery, had a garden.

Really, that’s all I need to say. It exploded with colour and shape. Great saucer-like clematis blotched the house with purple. Black-eyed Susan was clambering over the roof. Two varieties of montana occupied themselves with the less sunny aspects of the walls, and smothered the potting shed. Pampas grasses waved like the banners of Robert the Bruce’s army at Bannockburn. Hollyhocks guarded the rear of the borders like pikemen, while in front of them snapdragons and love-in-a-mist and busy lizzies and every conceivable other kind of bedding plant that I didn’t think I’d ever seen before competed for space in the spectrum. It looked as though it had been designed by Jackson Pollock.

When I came closer, the smell hit me: honeysuckle first, and then jasmine, and then a whiff of sweet william, that smells of cloves, and then the pineapple mayweed that I was treading on, and some chamomile likewise, and roses, too, their heads lolling over the walls. An elderly man and woman, white-haired, bespectacled, somehow almost identical in their looks, with fresh red faces, were having tea at a stone table carved in the most wonderful abstract shape.

“Would you like a cup?” said the woman.

“We need someone to help us with the cake. It wouldn’t be healthy for us to eat it all,” said the man.

I went back three times during the next week. I even dared to bring the dogs, who sat quietly and didn’t try to dig anything up – probably bemused by the variety of scents. I have never worked as well or written as much as in that garden. They showed me their books, too – wall upon wall of old orange Penguins. When it rained – which, of course, it did, because we were on the West Coast – I sat with one of their books in a little grotto that I had not noticed before, and watched the drops fall from the leaves of the Russian vine.

My holiday plans changed immediately. Europe, I thought, could look after itself for a few years. It certainly had culture, but what was that, compared to horticulture? I would drive for a day and a half, just to spend a few hours in that garden, because I felt at home there. I’m afraid I can’t articulate my feelings any more clearly than that.

Because it felt like home, I didn’t do any of the things that you would do with people who were strangers: I didn’t ask the owners of the garden about their past, when they had come there, how much work the garden took, what had given them the idea, whether they had any help, how difficult it was to grow all these things so far north – I never knew how old they were, or even their surnames. And they didn’t ask me any questions, either. I had come walking over the hill, and been dumbstruck by the beauty of their garden, and they had asked me in for tea, and that was that.

Is that the effect gardens have on people, do you think? You know, because we started off in a garden, when we find our way back into one of the right kind, it’s as if we turn into our pre-lapsarian selves, and regain our former innocence. We forget all kinds of unpleasant things. Like death, for instance.

I came over the hill one day in early summer, full of anticipation. Over the previous few years, the village had been ‘discovered’ – by windsurfers, mostly. I could see a couple of their VW campers, with boards on the roof, parked by the little chapel, and two vans, one selling burgers and one ice-creams. There were more cars than I wanted to see, too, parked on the shingle beach, with the children playing noisily, and not entirely happily, because there wasn’t really that much to do. But I looked away from the things I didn’t want to see, to concentrate on the garden.

They’d changed the colour of the clematis, I noticed, it was such a dark purple that it was almost velvety brown – a bit like the darkest kind of pansy. And the bedding plants seemed to be dominated by a shrill and wiry shade of red. They were too small and spotted and speckled – like a poorly resolved photograph, too many tiny dots that fail to blend together. A particularly garish yellow was very disturbing. Then my eye was caught by a big splash of orange near the wall of the house. Marigolds, I thought – and then I realised that it was really the wrong time of year for them. The scents my feet released were coarse and rank: I was trampling over herb robert, which had completely swamped the chamomile.

Now I was near enough to see the truth. The black-eyed susan had lifted several slates and disappeared into the roof-space. What I had taken for clematis of a new colour were large patches of dark brown mould on the stucco that covered the old stones of the house. A gutter had broken. The bedding plants were the remnants of an old sofa, tossed on to the flower-bed and destroyed by wind and rain. Fragments of its covering remained as coloured threads, and the springs showed as rusty spirals. Worst of all: what I had taken for marigolds were what was left of a huge pile of orange-covered Penguins, thrown out by some one ‘clearing the house’ – or just ransacking it for ‘anything of value’. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I could see a clump of peonies, rich, ruby-red flowers that I had never seen in the garden before. But when I looked, they were just a cluster of wrappers from strawberry-flavoured ice-lollies, caught in the branches of a straggling bush.

I turned, and walked (as I hoped) far enough away for the illusion to re-establish itself. But it refused to do so. So I kept on walking, past the little cemetery, where (I noted in passing, though I didn’t stop) there was a new stone, all bright and bare and not yet weathered. I walked on and up into the barren landscape where there was nothing but rocks and heather and grasses, and no illusions, and I left, like Adam and Eve, the garden behind me.

Started 9.00am, finished 12.19 pm 19^th August 2002