The house was an attractive holiday let which slept twelve, and I had assumed that people would use it as a base for walking holidays or some such, and would arrive in groups which would spend most of their days out in the hills. How naïve I was. In fact, it turned out that its most frequent use was as a party venue for people who preferred to wreck somebody else's house rather than their own. For my entire time there it caused me grief, especially so as its front gate was literally 20 metres from my house and I couldn't avoid any of the shenanigans. Nor could I escape the imposition of unsolicited callers at my door expecting me to fix things on a Sunday which they had destroyed on the Saturday night. And they used to pinch fruit and vegetables from the garden which I had earmarked for sale. The house itself was an attractive place, however, and of course was the reason for the garden, so I suppose I ought to have been more grateful.
It had a certain symmetry, a balance, a harmony, from which it derived its name. Inside was a fine staircase with some rickety banisters -
Anyway, I decided to put my head down and ride through the storms brought by the holiday let, and hope that the gardens brought sufficient rewards to compensate.
The fact is, both gardens looked a little domestic compared to the one I had been working in, and at first it felt like a huge come-down after what I had been used to. It took a while to discover that in fact there was much here for me to learn. The smaller garden, for example, was the only dedicated dried flower garden in the land, and I knew nothing about the processes involved at all. It also had an orchard of historic apple varieties and various other top fruits, a discipline in which, again, I lacked experience. I found the lack of experience an advantage as usual, as it gave me no fear of flouting convention. I did have the benefit of the advice of an elderly volunteer who had worked in the field all his life, and I valued his experience. Nevertheless, I was in a hurry, and had the temerity to ignore his instructions on a gradual phasing of the remedial pruning which was so desperately needed, in favour of quite rigorous measures in the first years. He muttered behind the scenes in disapproval, but it worked. Remember, when you are pruning fruit, that winter pruning stimulates growth, and that is the reason you always hear warnings about the forest of so-called water-shoots that such intervention will produce. Everyone is afraid of these, as if a vigorous response is a bad thing, when in fact what your tired old plants really need is that shot in the arm. The problem is that most people don't get round to the summer pruning that needs to follow. Summer pruning restricts growth. You need to combine the two. Of course, if you have the time to phase your winter pruning, that can be an advantage, but I never had time. I was always thrusting on, making up seconds and minutes for the next task.
Furthermore, the larger property had a sizeable kitchen garden, and again this was a field in which I had no professional experience and could have fallen on my face. No matter. I had by now over twenty years previous as a gardener, most of it as the man in charge, and my confidence was at an all-time high. The veggies I could cope with on my own if necessary, of that I was sure. I knew how to do it. I just didn't have experience on this scale. And I found from conversations over tea and lunch breaks, that our part-time gardener was in fact very knowledgeable on the drying processes and the historic fruit varieties. There were areas he would supervise better than I could. In this way I hoped to return self-respect to the gardens. My job would be to oversee the two sites to unify them. We were going to make this work, by pooling expertise and employing personnel to make the best of their strengths. And all the while, I would be learning. That is enough to make a person feel young again. And it worked for a while.
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