Day 10 - Escape from Slavery

It's not easy getting this stuff right. You probably picture me as some sort of aphid, reproducing itself parthenogenetically. Some sort of supreme being, single-handedly working like a colony of ants while bringing up a troupe of kids he has made all by himself. But no. They have a mum. The thing is, when couples divorce, it often means they have decided that they no longer want to be a part of each other's lives. And I am sure the last thing my ex-wife wants is to be plastered all over the internet in my memoir. You have to respect that sort of thing, or else you are as bad at divorce as you were at marriage in the first place. Although there will be no further mention of this, let it be known at this point, that as far as marriage is concerned, I am no holocaust denier.

But what do you do it all for? All this work? Well, for me, responsibility came as a bit of a shock. I was used to working for a while and using the proceeds in order not to have to work for another while. It felt like a compromised freedom. I still had to work, but not all the time. Then I became a student and that was even better. It was only necessary to work when the deadlines approached. Then I became a dad, and all that changed. I had to find a way of earning enough to provide for six of us and two dogs. That's the situation I've reached in this story. It is also the very thing that began to dictate my approach to the work. Let it be said here that I hate with a passion the concept of working for wages. It is a form of slavery however you look at it. And here I was, committed to it for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. My internal organs were rebelling. I had to find a way to make it bearable. The way I did that was by slowly developing the philosophy which dictated my approach to gardening. A philosophy which allowed me to take pleasure and derive pride from my labours. To begin with, I didn't know I was doing this. It crept up on me gradually. I went from one who enjoyed hard work in the open air because of the luxurious sensation of fatigue it granted me at the end of the day, to one who was beginning to enjoy the process along the way. I began to see the creative potential of what I was doing. I took an interest in the plants, immersed myself in the pictures, the sculptural aspects of the job. Listened to the hoverflies humming. Lost myself in the syrupy atmosphere and the beauty of the environment. Slowly, the wages began to seem like a bonus, and not the purpose of the whole enterprise. It was going to work out.

So where were we? We had just completed planting the walled garden. It was young and newly-mulched, but there was a way to go. The stonemasons were gradually working their way out from my precious garden, and they had left behind a piggery of squashed and ruptured soil, lying under pools of stagnant water, and I had to create an ornamental terrace from it. Remind yourselves of how it looked.

The idea was to create a gravel path running the 200 yard length of the terrace. Running alongside it, a strip of turf, backed by a narrow border under the wall, which would contain a simple planting of Echium vulgare in the summer and massed Tulipa 'Shirley' in the spring. On the wall itself, trained on wires, would be varieties of espalier-trained pear trees. The central semicircle would be planted out with box hedging, and a unique historic feature would be reinstated on the steps up to the house - a cascade of pots with ornamental summer plants held in hoops welded to the balustrade.

This was a bigger job than I would have wished for, involving the purchase of screened topsoil in vast quantities, which came unscreened and riddled with bindweed. The rest is probably a story for tomorrow, but keep this picture in mind till then. The finished product will be a revelation.