nice, the walls were unsatisfactory and it was in the wrong position. We shouldn’t have bothered to put either chestnut or larch logs in the pile because they both spit when they burn and that wasn’t good for the kiddies, was it? The oak was useless; it only burned on a massively hot fire, which we would never achieve because the rest of the wood was such rubbish. The ash had been split far too small and would burn too quickly. Sycamore had no calorific value to speak of and what we had was rotten. It would take more energy to start the fire than would be given out by it. And were we two years ahead with our cutting programme? He looked at me in that generous, hesitating way people use to those whose self-esteem they have just bulldozed into a silage pit.
The idea of putting up a building of any kind was a mistake. You would make the windows too small. You would spend too much money on it. You would do something totally out of character. You would create a dreadful ersatz fake (‘Tesco’s’) when people in your position had a responsibility to patronize new architects and architecture. You were living in a retro hell. You would not install the correct insulation/safety features/ heating system. Heating systems! May I never, ever have another discussion about heating systems for the rest of my life.
Then there was the chicken question. You were thinking of getting far too many of them. Were you really going to be eating 80 eggs a week? Had you performed the cloacal swab test for salmonella on them yet? You certainly couldn’t think of giving eggs away if they had dirty cloacas. Their housing was disgusting and if an RSPCA man should happen by, he would be appalled. You may have heard someone was prosecuted for just this kind of thing the other day. Anyway, they should have been bedded down on sawdust not straw. It was amazing you hadn’t found that out for yourself. I don’t quite understand why you were going in for these things.
Moving quickly on, children should wear clothes made out of only naturally occurring materials, fed only naturally occurring foods and baked beans should be sugar-free. Trees – these two subjects always somehow elide – should be planted without stakes, or tied only loosely to stakes, or planted without tree-guards or only after a comprehensive drainage system has been installed, or only on M25 rootstock, or only from Deacon’s Nursery in the Isle of Wight, or only with local genetic material, gathered from the last of the local orchards, and anyway fruit trees are only a pleasure if you have done all the grafting and training yourself. Have you managed to do that, Adam? Or have you ever thought you might be taking on a little much here? Have you had your dog castrated yet? Aaaaaaaargh.
My sons – lovely stage in life – had just then started playing Oasis on their ghetto-blaster at crow-scarer volume. The songs wormed their way into the mind, colonizing whole stretches of it. After one particularly gruesome hour or two with a couple of people who came to lunch and knew every damn thing there was to know about the usual subjects – orchards, firewood, chickens, ducks (‘one says “duck”, doesn’t one, in the plural?’), heating systems, woodland management, grants (‘We’ve found we’ve done quite well out of the whole County Council Heritage Landscape scheme but I’m told, I’m afraid, that they’ve run out of money now and won’t be taking any more applicants at least until fiscal 2000’) – I found myself stacking the dishwasher and singing, much too loudly, ‘Yer gada roll wiv it/ya gorra take yer time/yer garra say wotya say/dern ledd anybuddy gerrin yer waaajy …/There’s nuthin lef for me to saaiy …’
The bravado papered over a pit of anxiety. One morning I woke at four and said, aloud, ‘I’m worried about the fields.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Sarah said without a momentary flicker. She’d heard this sort of thing before and, anyway, was already awake worrying about the garden. We lay there in silence for a moment, travelling through the universe together at 24,000 miles an hour, each in a private little cubicle of hysteria and each thinking the other stupid. ‘The fields are fine.’
‘They aren’t. What’s wrong with the garden?’
‘It’s out of control.’
‘That,’ I told her, ‘is also what’s wrong with the fields.’
‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Fields don’t get out of control. That’s one of the good things about them. They just sit there perfectly in control for day after day.’ Gardens didn’t, apparently. Gardens were nature on speed. In fact, you could see them as hyperactive fields. They went mad if you didn’t look after them. Anyway the fields were not going to be photographed on Wednesday, were they?
This was true. Sarah had got a job as a junior doctor in the renal unit of the hospital in Brighton. She was sharing it with another young doctor but even half-time, in the days of famously long hours for junior doctors, it often required her to be there 40 hours a week. The hospital was about 45 minutes’ drive each way. Day after day, she had to leave early and return late, missing Rosie, feeling that she had come here to find a new life with us but that her work was taking her away to the point where our lives were hardly shared at all. Even when at home, she was too tired to take much pleasure in what we were doing, or where we had come to. It seemed absurd.
We decided together that she couldn’t go on. When she had been pregnant with Rosie and after she was born, Sarah, who is incapable of doing nothing, had taken time off and set up a florist’s business called Garlic & Sapphire with her university friend Lou Farman. As florists do, they had bought their flowers and foliage from wholesale merchants in Covent Garden market. This was fine, but it was not that easy to make any kind of living, and anyway it felt a little tertiary: selling flower arrangements to London clients from boxes of flowers bought at a market and almost entirely shipped in from industrial-scale producers in Holland. We could do better than that.
Sarah’s father, a classics don at King’s College, Cambridge, had also been a passionate botanist who with his own father had painted the entire British flora and was the co-author of the New Naturalist volume on mountain flowers. He had taken Sarah as a girl botanizing across bog, heath, mountain, meadow and moor in England, Scotland, Italy and Greece. She had drunk flowers in at his knee and from him had learned the science of flower reproduction and habitat. The Ravens had also made inspirationally beautiful gardens at their house near Cambridge (chalky) and around their holiday house on the west coast of Scotland (acid). So this much was clear: Sarah had gardens in her genes. She had to make a garden. Her life would not be complete unless she did.
We had made together a small and lovely garden in London with pebble paths and hazel hurdles and we had talked together about making it more productive. One day I happened to be sitting next to the publisher Frances Lincoln at a wedding party. ‘Do you know what you should publish?’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, a little wary. ‘A book called The Cutting Garden about growing flowers to be cut and brought inside the house.’ ‘Are you going to do it?’ she asked. No, I wasn’t, but I knew someone who could.
So this was already in our mind when we came to Perch Hill and it was obvious that when Sarah gave up her job as a doctor, to look after Rosie and to be with us at home, she should embark on making the cutting garden and writing the book. We wrote the proposal together, with plans, plant lists and seasonal successions, and sent it off to Frances, and soon enough it was commissioned. Perch Hill was about to take its first step to new productivity.
It was to be a highly and beautifully illustrated book whose working title at home anyway was The Expensive Garden. From time to time in various parts of the house I used to find half-scribbled lists on the back of invoices from garden centres spread across the south of England, working out exactly how much had been spent on dahlia tubers, brick paths, taking up the brick paths because they were in the wrong place, the new, correctly aligned brick paths, the hypocaust system for the first greenhouse, the automatically opening vent system for the second, the underground electric wiring for the heated cold frames (yes, heated cold frames), the woven hazel fencing to give the correct cheap, rustic cottage look (gratifyingly more expensive than any other garden fencing currently on the market)
