Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

Author:Diana Athill
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

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NO LESS INTENSELY than drawing, but much more consistently, gardening has been an activity which has given me, and still gives me, great pleasure. In my early youth it was something done for you by employees: a head gardener with two men under him in my maternal grandparents’ household, and one man in ours–a full-time man to start with, becoming increasingly part-time as money dwindled. But even my grandmother, who certainly did no digging with her own hands, knew exactly what was happening in her garden and how and why it should be done. Certain things she always did herself: cut back the lavender, for instance, and spread it to dry on sheets so that the flowers could be rubbed off for lavender bags, which were kept with her linen; and spray her roses against greenfly with a big brass syringe which lived in the flower room (a little room with a sink where she arranged flowers for the house, and where the dogs slept). Her spray was nothing more lethal than a bucketful of soft soap dissolved in warm water, and the roses were always pristine. As children we loved the roses, watched eagerly for the first snowdrops, stroked the velvet of pansy petals, had our other favourite flowers, but the garden was not simply a place to be looked at. We inhabited it: climbed its trees, hid in its bushes, fished tadpoles and newts from its stream, stole its peaches and grapes (which was a sin and therefore more exciting that eating its plums and apples from the branch, which was allowed). And we were given regular tasks such as picking the sweet-peas for Gran and the strawberries and raspberries which were to come to the table that day. Towards the end of each season such tasks became a bit of a chore, but they were never disagreeable, and because they always involved delicious tastes and smells and pleasant leafy sensations, a garden was naturally accepted as a source of sensuous pleasure as well as a place full of beauty.

That was also true for my mother and her sisters before me (it was a family in which the women were more concerned with gardening than the men). All four of them became enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners, and they did more gardening work than their mother had done because none of them married a man as rich as their father. As I grew up, however, I moved away from my childhood and their continuing involvement. I went away, first to Oxford, then to London, and although on my visits home I appreciated the several gardens my mother made over the years, I looked at them rather than inhabited them, and I never worked in them. I never so much as pulled a weed or sowed a seed, and I became ignorant. Once, when I was staying with a friend who had just moved into a new house, she showed me a clump of leaves in a neglected flower bed which she wanted to restore, and asked what I thought they were.

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