Thus it was against Vez’s better judgement that we descended off the elevated section of the Westway out of London that Friday afternoon, the car’s temperature gauge hovering at a disappointing +1°C. (I had become a compulsive watcher of the car’s temperature gauge, which routinely indicated a two-, three-, even four-degree difference between the bottom of the hill up to Tair-Ffynnon and the top.) By Reading, however, the digital display showed 0°C and big flakes started coming at us out of the night. Larger and larger, they made a soft, unfamiliar pfffffff…pfffffff…pfffffff…pfffffff…as they settled on the windscreen. The temperature started to drop promisingly…-1°C, -1.5°C, -2°C. ‘This is mad. We’ll never get up the hill. We should go back,’ said Vez.
‘Don’t be silly. What’s the point of having the place? Of course we’ll get up the hill. And if we can’t, I’ll get the Land Rover.’ The Land Rover now lived proudly in one of the sheds at Tair-Ffynnon.
‘We’ve got a four-month-old baby in the car and no supplies.’
‘We’ll be fine.’
By the time we turned off the main road, the countryside was white and so was the tarmac. At the bottom of the hill the temperature gauge showed a satisfying -4°C. As we turned up the unsigned lane it was hard to tell how deep the snow was, but there was enough on the ground to soften the edges between the road and the hedgerow banks. The lane led directly through the yard of a farm and we were about to join the road out the other side when the front wheels began to spin. We lost traction. I reversed back to try and gain momentum, but the wheels spun again. I tried a longer run-up, reversing all the way back to the turning. I could get no further. We were, indubitably, stuck.
Strapping on a backpack, and glowing with manly virtue, I crunched and squeaked my way up the hill through pristine powder snow. The clouds had cleared by this time, revealing a moonlit snowscape beneath an absurdly starry sky. Unfortunately, having reached the Land Rover, I found I had forgotten the keys, necessitating a slightly less satisfying trudge back down the hill to fetch Vez and Maya on foot. At length, however, we were installed in the house.
Next day I got the Land Rover out of its shed, but by then more snow had fallen and it was too deep for us to go anywhere. There wasn’t much to do except pass most of the weekend huddled in bed to keep warm. ‘I hope it was worth it,’ said Vez, a little uncharitably on Sunday, as we crouched over our fourth meal of canned soup, cooked on the old electric cooker, facing the space where the Aga was supposed to be. Eventually we trudged back down the hill to the car and returned to London.
The Aga in which we’d planned to cook our Christmas turkey was eventually installed and working in time for Easter and the spring.
Even when German bombing signalled the start of the Battle of Britain and fear of invasion spread, the Gardens Scheme carried on…
A Nurturing Nature: The Story of the National Gardens Scheme, 2002
I could now think of little besides Tair-Ffynnon. All other matters seemed an annoying distraction. I’d taken to carrying a camera whenever out of town, snapping odd things—ferns on an old chimney-stack, yellow lichen on a slate roof, rusting machines in corners of farmyards. I’d also begun tearing pictures out of magazines and newspapers, images of lonely crofter’s cottages, Icelandic turf-roofed churches, old tin frontier buildings. Lots of new things had become interesting, from old farm buildings and dry-stone walls to trees and wild flowers. I edited these cuttings into a scrapbook, which I could spend almost indefinite periods leafing through, daydreaming contentedly, shoving it guiltily away like porn if I heard footsteps approaching the door.
So I suppose I was searching for an excuse to immerse myself in the place. The garden idea came about partly because of that. But it was partly, too, that we’d had it up to here with remarks masquerading as polite interest (‘How did you stumble on this place?’, ‘I can see it has great potential’) that we were perfectly aware translated as ‘What a dump!’ My father had made no secret of his bafflement, and Vez’s mum had watched with mortification as her daughter exchanged a successful career and a warm, clean house in London for a derelict shack up a mountain. True, some people ‘got’ it instantly, but many more did not. Why couldn’t they see it? Were its charms really so obscure? I’d recently visited Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness and been deeply impressed by the way he’d seen the beauty of that place, hitherto an isolated, little-known shingle headland in the shadow of a nuclear power station. Through his minute garden, hardly bigger than the fishing hut it adjoined, he’d shown that beauty to others too. It seemed to absorb its surrounding seascape and play it back in distilled form. Why couldn’t we try something similar at Tair-Ffynnon?
The idea was no doubt encouraged, as April turned to May, by the first tentative signs of spring’s arrival on the hill, in the form of a dishevelled swallow resting on the telephone wire. The following week, two dozen more had joined it, and the place had come alive with flitting, wheeling, diving, skimming birds playing tag around the house as they noisily nested in the barns. Our home, it seemed, was others’ too. A fortnight later the hedgerows on the lane turned white with May blossom and the shady verges exploded into a riot of bluebells, Lady’s Smock, violets, red campion, cow parsley, and a hundred other wild flowers I couldn’t identify. By this time the hills were echoing cacophonously with the joys of the season as lambs and their mothers bleated relentless inanities to one another.
The moment I latched onto the idea of a garden, it seemed right. It licensed me to spend as much time as I wanted thinking about the place, and it would force us into making a plan. This in turn would give us purpose and structure and provide a deadline. Maybe it would even help me understand why the place meant so much to me. Two further comments acted like rallying cries. One, from a visiting friend as he got out of the car: ‘God, there’s nothing that doesn’t need doing.’ The other, from Jonny, who when I mentioned the plan, hooted with derision: ‘A garden? What…at your place? You’re joking.’ Followed a few moments later by: ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ At a stroke, a half-baked idea graduated into a clear personal challenge.
I’d heard of the National Gardens Scheme’s ‘yellow book’ and was vaguely aware of the yellow ‘Garden Open Today’ signs that sprouted across the countryside from around the time the clocks went forwards. I’d even thought that, one day, visiting such gardens was something I might like to do. Now, with my own garden in mind, it seemed as good a place as any to begin my research into what might be achievable. Might we be able to get into the National Gardens Scheme? I bought a copy of the book: a fat yellow paperback entitled Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity. Its 500 pages were crammed with brisk little one-paragraph entries beneath addresses of scarcely believable quaintness: ‘Pikes Cottage, Hemyock’, ‘The Old Glebe, Eggesford’, ‘Mottisfont Abbey, Romsey’.* It was a remarkable collection. Here they all were: the cream of Britain’s secret gardens. Thousands of them (3,542 to be exact) with directions and opening dates: precise instructions on how to see, at the best possible moment, the pride and passion of some of the world’s most dedicated gardeners. Scanning the descriptions at first glance revealed many to be disconcertingly grand (‘60-acre deer park’, ‘Tudor knot garden’, ‘pleached lime avenue’, ‘Victorian fernery’), though there was also evidence of more modest attainments (‘pot patio’). There was no