The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

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      I grieve and dare not show my discontent

      I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

      I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;

      I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

      I am, and am not; I freeze and yet am burned,

      Since from myself my other self I turned.

      My care is like my shadow in the sun –

      Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

      Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;

      His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

      No means I find to rid him from my breast,

      Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

      Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

      For I am soft, and made of melting snow;

      Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.

      Let me float or sink, be high or low;

      Or let me live with some more sweet content,

      Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant.

       Elizabeth I

      Prelude

       Sometimes I think that I can feel the garden, like a prickle of awareness on my skin. As if sight – and smell, and sound – were not enough and I want to wrap myself in it, like you wrap yourself in a fur on a winter’s day. I suppose those times should come most often in the mayday, the hay day, when the roses and the fleur de luce and the honeysuckle are in flower. When, in the knot gardens of my childhood, gillyflowers jostled strawberries, with the fruit already beginning to show. When, in the great gardens where they bring even the meadows within their walls, they’re already scything the bloomy purple grasses, fine as the silk tassel on a nobleman’s cloak. I have always loved the garden then, of course I have, but sometimes I thought I loved it better earlier, when the pinkish apple blossom and the green-white pear first begin to break out on the grey lichened branch, or before that, in the time of violets and Lenten lilies. When the grass is sparser and the great trees are still bare, and things bloom with less of a rash and threatening luxury. Or earlier still, when the first snowdrops show above the frosty ground; a promise, but only of the most modest kind. The kind of promise in which one can trust, without too much uncertainty.

       I forgive the garden the dog days, the sullen weeks between the hay and the harvest. I forgive it, even though wet days leave the tired plants spoiled and leaden, and on dry ones the gardeners have to trail twisted rags between water tank and root; and sometimes the change comes so suddenly that the ground steams, as though the earth were no more than a giant stew pot. I like the fact that the garden, then, is not for everyone; only for those who will come on its own terms, at the beginning or the end of the day. The weather has dried leaf and bud, and from childhood I remember the thrill of dead husks yielding life between the fingers – the sharp oily strength of lavender as it’s crushed. I’ve seen other ways, since, to deceive the heat – gardens with canals big enough to row a boat around, planted with overarching trees for shade. But it’s still the smell of lavender, every time I open a linen chest, or turn over in new sheets, that brings the garden close to me.

       Every husbandman loves the first sniff of autumn, when the golden days light up each separate leaf. Days when the bite in the air goes hand in hand with the sunshine, like the claws emerging from a velvety cat’s paw. Even in winter – when the only colour comes from the tied bundles of the onion tops, and a trace of gilding on the rosemary leaves left over from the last visit of the queen’s majesty, when they dip sticks in honey and sweet wine and put them in the hives to keep the bees alive – the garden was always my place of safety.

       Except when it wasn’t. Except when it was a place of puzzlement, of mystery. Of a dead bird thrown over the garden wall, of a warning given, cryptically. Of a man’s teasing face as he dodged between high dark hedges, laughing out at me. Of not knowing what or where my place should be.

       The garden in May-time is a place for lovers, with flowers dotting the grass like stars in the sky. The garden in autumn is a place of maturity. In early spring, perhaps it’s for the children, who will crouch down by each new flower and give it the tribute of a wondering eye. I used to crave the early springtime, but now it’s roses and cherry blossom, great lakes of bluebells and the lush smell of the new shrub, the lilac, they have in the garden on the Strand that fill all my fantasy.

       When I was a child, the garden seemed a magic place. Not so much for the miracle of the annual rebirth – perhaps only adults, who’ve understood death, can appreciate that – but for its smallness, its perfection, the low clipped hedges of the sweet herbs dividing and defining a bright tiny world, safe and ordered as it should be. I’ve seen other gardens since that aim at more than safety. Where plants are brought from strange new lands, and bright jewels are painted into the walls of an aviary. Where statues spell out subtle messages, where fountains run with wine, and hidden water jets spring up to soak the unwary. These too I am learning to love.

       Fashions move quickly: there was a time, not so long ago, when every man at court dyed his beard bright red, they say. Fashions change in the garden also – but then, everything changes. It’s the one thing gardeners, more than anyone else, should know with certainty.

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