Right, so where do I start? Obviously the little ornamental walled garden attached to the house. It has been in use for the last twenty years or so as a rough patch for breeding pheasants for the guests in the hotel to annihilate. But it's not a hotel any more. It has to look like a country house. Those in power have decreed that although it is an 18th century building, the period to be commemorated will be the Victorian era, when the house was at its height, and for which more information and original artefacts are available. That means a Victorian-style garden,. The Gardens Adviser has come up with a design based loosely on an old photograph, and although less fussy, it is a reasonable approximation for a modern audience to enjoy. My first task is to learn all the plants I have to use and pretend I know all about them. All my experience has been with plants in use in the present day, but the list I have here has been selected to be appropriate to a garden a century old. In the council, I have never had access to old-fashioned shrub roses, nor to the Victorian varieties of bedding roses. I am horrified when I look up the rules for pruning them. Every one seems to belong to a different category and needs different treatment. Some you just take the tips out, some you remove a third of the growth, some about half, there is renewal pruning thrown in there, and before all of that I will have to learn which class of rose each plant belongs to. Additionally, I will be pegging the bedding roses down to cover the ground more fully, and I've never done that before. Every evening I am at the plans and books, studying hard so as not to fall on my face, let down by my performance.
The first bit is easy, in fact, because I have come to the garden after the pheasant pens and rough grass and wire netting have been swept away by my predecessor, and I have a sort of starved lawn, surrounded by a rough path and long, deep beds around the perimeter beneath the wall. My first job, and it will be a big one, an achievement fought for against the incursions of the stonemasons, will be to mark out the beds in the turf, and dig and manure them prior to planting. I can do this. Marking out shapes on grass is something I can do. Every Friday on the council I used to mark out sixteen football pitches. I also did hockey and rugby pitches, athletics tracks and cricket wickets. I can mark out. No worries.
It is amazing how quickly a garden begins to take shape once you take the plunge.
I could keep up this pretence for a couple of months. We had the whole area to dig, manure to incorporate in lorry-loads, we had the terraces to construct and turf. In the interim, I could look as if I knew what I was doing. I looked like a professional. I looked like this:
I could keep up appearances for a while. No one would see the panic as I slowly sank under the weight of my own ignorance. Fortunately, the only people who knew the difference were based elsewhere, and I only saw them rarely. The team I worked with were clueless as to the level of my inexperience. That's the great thing about being a gardener. Nobody really knows what you do. As long as you look busy, you'll be all right. I always looked busy. And all my spare time I had my nose in the books, learning how to bluff better.
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