Country life
Ground rules
Leanda de Lisle
The garden is a source of considerable stress in this house. Not the walled kitchen garden, but the garden around the house — if you can call it a garden. 'Grounds' would be more accurate. It is really just grass with a few gloomy shrubs scattered about the place. Something must be done. The question is, what? My husband has his ideas and I have mine. Our constructive chats have regularly degenerated into war- fare which is why, thus far, nothing at all has been done.
Peter claims that a mid 18th-century house like this one should have formal gar- dens in the French manner. He wants to see a great deal of gravel and a scattering of pointy trees. He looks to Versailles for inspiration — well, at least on his more cheerful days. When he's thinking about death, his Spanish blood comes out and he fantasises about retiring to the Escorial. No flowers or frippery there. But flowers and frippery are what I yearn for.
This house ain't Versailles. Nor is it even one of those neat little 18th-century boxes. It is much more organic than that: a very English house, rambling on uneven lawns and protected by ramshackle trees that drop leaves into the murky lakes. I would like a very English garden too. I thought we could make a start by ripping out the gloomy laurels and replacing them with azaleas — that sort of thing. Perhaps plant some rhododendrons by the lake.
I had high hopes that my parents would support my point of view when they came to stay for the weekend. They have a beau- tiful Gertrude Jekyll-style garden which they work on very hard. I have always loved and admired it. However, I had forgotten that my father, like my husband, suffers the occasional moment of folie de grandeur. His own garden, he told us, is frightful. What we need here are avenues, urns and a river god at the end of the long lake — or long pond, as I am renaming it.
Thoroughly depressed, I walked with my parents to the east lawn where Peter wants his gravel and pointy trees. My mother looked down and came face to face with a rabbit in its burrow. That would have to go. I agreed. My father looked up at my favourite Scotch pine and said that would have to go too — 'if you want to be really smart'. He may have been joking, but I panicked anyway. I could see that the lawn would be next. Peter would get his gravel paths and contorted plants after all.
`I am not having this garden tarmacked over,' I ranted. 'Isn't it hideous enough round here? Hinckley. Coalville. "A" roads. Do we have to bring it into the gar- den? Can't I even enjoy a little oasis of green?' My venom struck home. Peter is a Leicestershire patriot and Hinckley is very heaven as far as he is concerned.
Of course, he would feel differently if Hinckley was in Warwickshire — which, like this house, it is, in a way. When we were buying the house, I discovered that, while it is geographically well inside Leices- tershire, it has a Warwickshire postal code. I didn't dare tell Peter for another two years. Our writing paper was engraved, `Market Bosworth, Leicestershire' and I just had to put up with getting our post a week late. Even now, our address remains a sensitive subject.
Anyway, thoroughly enraged by my attack on Hinckley, Peter informed me that I am dreadfully suburban and my longed for rhododendrons unbelievably naff. Really so unfair. It is only two weeks since I discov- ered that Surbiton is a place and not a con- cept. Even my father thought he had gone too far, 'Try telling Sir Giles Loder [the Tsar of rhodos] he's naff,' murmured Daddy.
The great thing about arguments is that they clear the air. With the help of my par- ents we are• beginning to sort out a compro- mise. There will be knot gardens, but no gravel paths, azaleas in the old shrubbery, but no rhododendrons by the lake. I am on for the urns, but the line has been drawn at the river god.
Previous page
