Home life
Almost human
Alice Thomas Ellis
The daffodil was out in the London garden when we left. Just the one, looking like someone who has turned up, dressed to the nines, for a glamorous party on the wrong night. You had to admire its style, for while it looked faintly foolish it
also looked gallant and insouciant, pre- pared to stick it out in solitary splendour. I wish now that I had done the Perfect Hostess thing and bought a pot of its fellows to keep it company. I am thinking of those people who when they see a guest committing some dreadful social solecism — peas on the knife, drinking the water in the finger bowl — do likewise. Here in Wales of course there are fields of daffodils in positively Wordsworthian profusion and they look very beautiful but not nearly so touching. I hope I am not going to start worrying about plants having feelings.
Lamb chops are already off the menu because lamb chops on the hoof are gam- bolling outside the windows and the words
'mint sauce' have taken on menacingly brutal connotations. It would be a nuisance if one had to think up ways of anaesthetis- ing the cabbage before plunging it into boiling water. Mrs Earle in her Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden takes the view, which seems sensible while stopping short of sentimentality, that when starting .a garden you should be prepared to care properly for the plants you have chosen, giving due consideration to their various requirements, respecting their idiosyncra- cies and protecting them, in so far as you are able, from drought, blight, slug and the ginger tom next door. Rather like starting a family although the problems are some- what different.
Cooking the beans for Sunday lunch I kept thinking of that maddening ad on television which shows a lot of wrinkled and twisted old vegetables crying their eyes out because they can't join the club, while a load of uniformly perfect but dopey peas and carrots go sailing off, rejoicing, to be frozen and consumed. Cheer up, I hear myself saying. It would be beastly to end up on a plate in the supporting role of two veg to the star, roast beef. I really must watch this anthropomorphic tendency. It isn't even as if I had green fingers. Some- one, being aware of this, took a hand in the garden last year and cleaned it up magni- ficently, pruning everything to within an inch of its life. Some of the plants, the mock orange, the weigela responded with gratitude but the albertine is still sulking and the all-encroaching ivy with gleeful spite is preparing to take over the world. We know enough to know when we ha- ven't got it quite right so have enlisted the help of an export, lovely Elizabeth Smart who has towards plants that kindly aware- ness, the casual assurance that shepherds have towards sheep and the best mothers towards their children. She knows their little ways. We have planted wisteria, clematis, purple pansies and a passion flower and I want to put in a bougainvillea because it would go so well with the balcony. I wish we could have spanish moss too but am told it would not do well in Camden Town.
In the back yard we keep a mad magno- lia. Every now and then it remembers that it is supposed to have flowers and produces a few, though mostly over the neighbour's garden wail. Last year it had a bud in December which froze solid until it drop- ped off in the spring thaw making me think of a mother taking her baby to a Christmas party clad only in cotton rompers. Should we wish to see its flowers we have to visit the neighbour, or lean dangerously far out of the bathroom window. The plants in the front garden evidence the same tendency to avoid us — the roses climbing to the right into Robin's garden while the honeysuckle favours the left, preferring to bestow itself on Alan Bennett. It is very odd because if it is the sun they are seeking it cannot possibly be on both sides at once. The new plants are in the middle of the garden and it will be interesting to see if they attempt to stray. We look forward to the summer, sitting in the shade while the scent of the blossoms, we hope, disguises the smell of cat and the odour of scorched kebab from the Greek restaurant. If the worst comes to the worst I am going to buy cut flowers from the market and keep them in a vase on the garden table.
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