The Excitement of a Waking Garden

It is when the garden comes to life in early springtime that is for me the most exciting time, especially after a hard winter or one that produced periods of extreme cold.

What survived and what did not? 

Geraniums and petunias and their soft-leaved like are not expected to survive, and don’t, except for some geraniums in a sheltered position, well off the ground and after a mild winter. 

But there are many surprises.

Our lemon tree, overwintered in the shed/summerhouse usually survives and keeps its leaves. But not during this 2022-2023 winter. Most leaves fell and it looked very dead when returned to its outside place on a plinth of Roman occhioloni. Then, one day, well into the spring, tiny dark leaves shot out from a branch bud. Others followed, very slowly. It had survived, but by how much?

Not far from it, a Japanese maple in a pot that was becoming established and going well, lost not only all its leaves but left a completely dead mini tree. Then, almost as my back was turned it burst out all over into its full bronzy leaf.

Our Bolivian begonia corm, usually kept on a kitchen window plank each year, became too large, so took its chance in the shed with the lemon tree. The cold spell in winter reduced the corm to pulp. 

Our two pieris bushes thrived in the winter weather, giving early leaf colour to the garden.

But dominating the garden with its red petals flowering with their yellow lemon centres is the Camellia bush. It foretells of many colours soon to decorate the garden. 

Ferns, playing dead, spring to life on either side of an apple tree in a pot. 

In that tree I “planted” misteloe berries. One that took now sports a diameter almost as great as its apple tree host. It is a Christmas splash of green for a bare winter garden. 

Our two bay trees, one pruned into a ball and the other like an umbrella, happily saw the winter out. 

A rosemary bush only just survived and may have to be replaced, unlike a fuchsia, which died right back but sprouted fresh leaves from its base. It sits in a pot next to a buddlia which can withstand the cold. 

Vines, winter pruned, are quick to come into leaf to give body to our wall-to-wall arbour. But a thick, probably 40 year old arch branch, which was ailing, died and will become somebody’s fire logs when I can deal with it.

The agapanthus plays dead each winter and bursts out with its verdant shoots each spring - a most pleasing sight of a return to life.

Morning glories sow themselves each year, as did some sweet peas this time around. Or had I planted some seeds last autumn?

Both successes and sadnesses defined our garden’s bird life after a freezing winter period. Few birds survived it, but great tits brought up an early family in a much-favoured bird box on our house. The young now fill our garden with new and vigorous activity when they pass through in a gang every so often. Hopefully, nature will compensate for bird losses. It generally does. 

Of our two edible crops, new potato leaves in buckets should poke through soon, and runner bean plants, started in pots, will soon be planted beneath a bamboo frame. We eat the beans when about four inches long and leave the rest for dishes and for next year’s seeds. 

It is a time to prune away dead wood. But one has to be careful. Dead-looking branches may still be alive. 

So it’s about the most exciting time of the year. 

 The Colonel’s ladies

At art school in the early 1950s I met “the Colonel” through his niece, a fellow art student.

It was a fortuitous meeting as he and I not only got on very well but he was also a patron of the arts and a collector of major paintings.

The Colonel was a very successful man in the City, thus able to live in style and in opulent surroundings.

When I sold my London house to travel the world drawing for a year, I gave my money to the Colonel who, despite a recession of the economy, managed to make a profit which enabled me to build a studio house in the country that I eventually sold to Francis Bacon.

In his art dealings he relied to a great extent on the expertise of the Mayor Gallery in London, where Freddy Mayor had the ear of top art dealers in Paris.

It was in Paris that we might all meet with me being their guide to the lower layers of artistic and cullinary orders. I was privileged to be their company.

I was also privileged to be invited to stay in the Colonel’s country seats of stylish good living where, for instance, breakfasts among the usual things, always offered Kedgeree, cold pheasant and partridge.

Coming from a country family, I was armed with country clothes, dinner jacket and fine 12 bore shotgun, inherited from my father.

Shooting was part of country life were I enjoyed “beating”. This consisted of a crowd of locals who, under the guidance of a keeper, would move more or less in line and use a stick to tap bushes and trees to make pheasants fly from woodland to allow “guns” to then shoot them out of the sky.

Sometimes I would be asked to follow the beaters with my gun to shoot at any pheasant clever enough not to follow the rest over the guns but to turn back over the beaters to escape and live. Then it was my turn to try to add those birds to the total bag.

I was not a verey good shot and seldom successful. But one time when a pheasant broke away from the others to escape toward the Deben Estuary in Suffolk, I fired and was delighted to see the bird fall to earth. A keeper picked it up and came to congratulate me. “Right through the eye, sir”, he said, which I imagine he was taught to say to any poor shot like me.

There was always camaraderie among the beaters and sarcastic remarks about poor markmanship were common.

Another gun/beater like me, was even less successful. A beater remarked, quite loudly, “if ‘e can’t ‘it that target, what’s ‘is misses going to do for a bit of pleasure.”

One of the Colonel’s earlier wives was the inheritor of a family fortune and raised in one of our far flung Dominions. She lived in part of the hall were I was staying to which no one was invited. She and I were friends and would drink beer together into the late evenings. Despite many enquiries no one knew, or would tell, what happened in her quarters. Did she live alone? No information was forthcoming. Later, after she died I enquired again, to be told that her rooms were found to be full of empty gin bottles.

But it was another, younger and prettier wife that I write about.

Staying in the manor house with me was a director of the Mayor Gallery. He and I changed into dinner jackets for dinner and were sitting by a roaring log fie waiting for the entrance of our host and hostess, when this lovely lady appeared wearing a fairly thin negligee of a dress to kneel and bend over in front of the fire to dry her hair.

It seemed so lovely that amid such constrained affluence, the lady of the house could, and would. Dry her hair in front of the log fire in the company of two youthful guests.

It was so nice to see that grand living could still be simple, domestic and charming. I enjoyed those days in the company and friendship of the Colonel and his ladies.

(A122)