Love Thy
By Noo
- 617 reads
In-between
Welcome, welcome all to the annual Roseberry Crescent open garden day. We’ll have a wonderful tour of the gardens on this most beautiful of suburban, residential roads. We’ll pick up some tips, maybe have a cream tea (or two if we’re lucky, ha ha!) and definitely feel our fair share of envy at the green fingers on display.
So without further ado, let’s move to number 3. Number 1, you say? No. We won’t be going there!
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Moon gardening
The witch opens her patio door at midnight and goes into her garden, trowel in hand. The air is warm and scented with the plants of night time. Evening primrose, honeysuckle and angel’s trumpet. Penetrating, intoxicating.
She does her best gardening at night. Under the moon’s silver beams - the radiance of the summer, velvet sky warming the plants, deepening the darkness of the hemlock and the deadly nightshade.
She goes to her seedling border and pricks out the tiny plants. The purple haze, the blackberry jam and the café noir. The ace of spades and the diablo wine. Perfect bad seeds, ready to explode into the horrors they’ll become.
This year, she’s trying to grow children. All in rows. If she’s successful, she’ll wait for their soft, little heads to sprout and then she’ll chop them off one by one and put them in the compost. For the fun of it and the garden forward-thinking of it. Waste not, want not.
Winter is her favourite gardening season, when the earth is cold and hard and she needs to slice through the sheet of ice on the flower borders. At these times, the blackbird and the crow watch her malevolently from the crumb-less platform of the bird table. The names she’s given these birds - her pets - are apt. Jack Frost and Midwinter Fire.
In this midsummer night though, the witch puts down the trowel and picks up a spade to hack through the roots of the yew tree at the bottom of her garden. She presses the spade down into the roots’ snaking slither, as the silver of the metal gleams and the spade makes a rhythmic chuck, chuck sound.
And now she rests. Propping the spade by the shed, she wipes her muddy hands on her black negligee. Truly, the Queen of Night.
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In-between
Well, wasn’t that wonderful? I hope you noticed the marigolds in their pots. Don’t blue and orange compliment each other? Very chi-chi.
And what about the roses! Heaven scent, excuse the pun!
Our next open garden is at number 7. Number 5? Yes, I know it looks like it should have a wonderful back garden from the way the front garden looks. But number 5 isn’t for us.
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maniaco del controllo
Giuseppe’s garden is perfect. Not a leaf or a tendril out of place. It’s all orderly lines and shapes and flawless, graduated colours. Purple shifts into vibrant pink, to salmon pink, baby pink, then white. Acid yellow mellows into custard and top of the milk cream. All works. All is soulless.
Plants need to shape up if they’re going to keep their place in Giuseppe’s garden. No lollygagging or bolting or wilting allowed! There is a place for everything and everything has its place.
He spends his time cutting the rogue growth and sweeping the paths. Blossom on the soil makes him edgy, and he can worry for days about the reckless fall of the sycamore tree’s helicopters and the sly little seedlings that can take root wherever they choose.
Giuseppe always has a plan for the next part of his garden campaign. What will be sown or chopped or planted, or moved. It’s not easy creating flawlessness, you know.
A few years ago, they tried to give him a prize for the best front garden on the Crescent. But he wanted none of it. “You can stick your trophy and your gardening-glove vouchers”, he’d said. “I don’t need those to know I’m the best in show!”
In Giuseppe’s garden - in his colour coordinated, height coordinated idyll - there’s no room for the rebel plant or the sickly, misshapen outsider. Strength and conformity is all. But just occasionally, he thinks the garden is killing him, that a tiny balcony in a new build might be preferable. Then he mans up and tells himself that perfection is always worth working for.
The uptight, upright dahlias aren’t so sure. Sometimes they feel the burden of their beauty so heavily, they’re scared they might suffocate. However, the idiosyncratic convolvulus doesn’t care. It does its own thing and infiltrates under the cover of the unsuspecting strawberries.
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In-between
Magnifique, as they say in France! How number 7 managed to shape that hedge into the Queen’s face is amazing. Honestly, it humbled me to look at it. Beauty, skill and patriotism combined. Our country needs more gardeners like that, let me tell you.
Well, we’re half way through our little tour and we’ll skip number 9 to move swiftly on to number 11. Are you keeping up at the back?
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The stealer of cats and the thrower of fish
And lo, the fish landed on the patio step of the garden that backed on to hers. The Timmons’ family who lived in the house, would find it (as they had others) and put it down to a distracted cat, or a careless, passing heron. But Frances knew where it had come from. Her pond, floating on its side, dead in the way only fish can do dead.
She’d picked it up by its tail, took the run up from her washing line by the kitchen and power-threw the fish over the fence into the Timmons’ garden. And she’d not got a bad arm on her for a woman of sixty eight.
In reality, Frances didn’t know why she did it - the throwing of fish. She didn’t like the Timmons, that was true, and the thought of their squealing piglet of a daughter finding the dead fish after its flight, made her smile. But it wasn’t really that. She hadn’t overanalysed it, but she supposed she just didn’t like the fading orange blobs floating in her pond. Besides it was good arm exercise.
As she dispensed with fish, so she collected cats. She had three of her own, but other cats just seemed to find her and she couldn’t very well refuse if they wanted her as an owner, could she? She lured them (the wilful hussies) with fine, lean meat and fish treats, letting them eat where and when they wanted. And so they kept coming, over fences and under hedges. Fourteen at the last count.
And so they sat, fattened and baleful, glaring out of her living room window at their previous owners with barely any recognition in their flat, green eyes. In her La-Z-Boy recliner, Frances watched the surly angle of the back of the cats’ heads and she saw that it was good.
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In-between
I’m sure you’ll agree there were lots of ideas in that garden! Rhododendrons and garden gnomes together. A little Outside The Box for my liking, it has to be said, but somehow a winning, thought-provoking combination.
What’s that you say? There are gnomes on the fence on the left, peering over into next door? Granted, that’s a little creepy, but they’ve got a sturdy, high fence. And what did the poet, Robert Frost, say? And I quote, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Believe you me, we don’t want to go anywhere number 13, so let’s go and admire the nasturtiums at number 15. Onwards and upwards.
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Bitter and dark, like old tobacco
The old man hated everyone, but he particularly hated Gloria Du Pont, the woman who lived next door to him. Gloria, with her airs and graces and her fancy car. Gloria with her low cut tops and her look of horrified disdain when anyone glanced down at what was clearly on offer.
But the old man’s lust had long left the building – both from Gloria’s rejection of any past advances and the sure and certain knowledge he couldn’t have acted on it even if he’d wanted to.
What occupied him these days was the planning and carrying out of acts of revenge. And the revenge he favoured was always of the small and bitter variety. The sort that couldn’t necessarily be traced back to him and that could even be seen as possibly accidental happenstance. The mean mound of leaves he’d arrange on the front doorstep she’d just swept on her way out. The moving out of line of the plant pots under her bay window. The throwing back of the cuttings of her trees that glanced over on to his side of the garden fence.
He went too far though, when he began to delight in the spitting of the tobacco he chewed on to her newly power-washed drive. He loved the look of the brown stains on the sparkling pavers, a bit of his DNA mingling with her neat-freak front.
What happened next followed a well-worn, neighbours-at-war track. The installing of video cameras, the police warnings and the serving of antisocial behaviour notices. The old man didn’t care though. There was a certain thrill in where this might go next, he felt.
His coup d'état moment, though, was the crocus bulbs he planted in his front garden in the autumn, ready for a spring show. The border was on the edge of Gloria’s drive, so she could see it clearly as she parked her car. Yellow and purple spears peeking through in February, the message loud and clear. ‘Fuck You’ in flowers.
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Comments
This is a lovely light piece
This is a lovely light piece that would make highly satisfying live performance. I'm very interested in all your Wiccan based pieces because I'm technically a hedge witch.
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Glimpses into the gardens of
Glimpses into the gardens of our neighbours, I bet all of that is going on. So funny, packed with wonderful moments and descriptions.
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