The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise. Antony Woodward

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      Uncle William was the great gardener of the family, and my mother’s half-brother. He and my Aunt Jeanette lived in a secluded nook of the Dorset Downs not far from Sherborne. Ranged around a seventeenth-century chalk and flint cottage (its thatched roof pulled well down over its eyebrows, at home in any book of idyllic English country cottages) was a garden that even I couldn’t fail to notice was a plantsman’s delight. The last time I was there, one August, summer was in its dusty and desiccated last gasp. Yet in Uncle William’s garden greenery, foliage and flowers were positively clawing their way out of the ground. Apart from a lawn behind the house, there was hardly a square inch of space that wasn’t bursting with trees, shrubs, climbers, pergolas and pots. In his extensive fruit and vegetable garden, the runner beans, raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes were so bowed down with the weight of provender they gave the impression that, however fast anything was picked, there was not the slightest chance of keeping pace with the output. The place had what I would learn was a hallmark of a plantsman at work: narrow paths rendered almost impassable due to the rainforest density of vegetation spilling from either side. Should you dare level a criticism at Uncle William’s garden, it was that you couldn’t see the garden for the plants.

      If green fingers existed, Uncle William’s were of the most livid, fluorescent, Martian hue, and chlorophyll coursed through his veins. It was known far and wide that he had only to be handed a plant for it to perk up. Gardening rows between my parents concerning any matter of practical plant husbandry—where a particular plant was best placed, why it wasn’t doing well, what the best treatment should be—invariably ended with a defiant, pursed-lipped: ‘Well. We’ll ask William.’

      As a child, I’d found Uncle William slightly intimidating.^* He was a naval captain and had a deep, husky voice that exuded peremptory command. I always imagined the huskiness had come from roaring orders across the wind and spray-swept flight deck of HMS Ark Royal, of which he’d been second-in-command in the 1970s, not that I’d ever heard him raise his voice or even seen him in his naval role (though he was wearing his uniform, holding an umbrella over them, in my parents’ wedding photographs). It was a voice that implied that, once a task was stated, it might be regarded as done. I couldn’t imagine any member of the plant kingdom defying it. He was a pillar of the local establishment and churchwarden in his local parish. I was sure he must open his garden to the public, and, on a hunch, looked him up in the Yellow Book. Sure enough, there was his garden: ‘Planted over many yrs to provide pleasure from month to month the whole yr through.’

      If anyone knew what would grow on a windswept hill-side 1,300 feet up, it was Uncle William. I hadn’t spoken to him for years and was summoning the courage to make the call when, out of the blue, he called us. He gathered we’d bought an unlikely property in the hills and had ideas about making a garden. (Clearly, word had spread of our offbeat acquisition, though I did wonder how my father had described Tair-Ffynnon to trigger quite such prompt interest.) As it happened, he said, he and Aunty Jeanette were visiting a garden near Usk in a few weeks time as part of the local gardens society (I later asked him about his role in this: ‘Chairman, for my sins’), and he suggested coming on to see us.

      Which was how, one Saturday a few weeks later, Uncle William came to be pottering about Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky and bracken-invaded acres. He seemed amused by the whole enterprise, as he poked cheerfully about with a stick. ‘Well, your soil’s alright,’ he said, jabbing at the thick clump of nettles growing round the wood pile. ‘Nettles only grow in rich soil.’ The hundreds of molehills he thought were a good sign, too. ‘Excellent potting soil if you collect it up. If you put bottles in the vegetable garden the sound of the wind in the glass discourages them.’ We took him up to the gully where the spring ran. More jabs with the stick. ‘You can increase the sound of the running water by adding stones,’ he said. I’d briefed him about my Yellow Book plan as we progressed around the place, hovering behind him hopefully, biro and notebook at the ready for any suggestions about what we should plant. However, little apart from these general comments had so far emerged. Looking up and down the gully now, his gaze alighted on the stands of foxgloves. ‘Foxgloves,’ he said. ‘There you are. You can grow foxgloves.’

      ‘But foxgloves…foxgloves СКАЧАТЬ