Sunshine!

The sun comes out, the temperature warms up, and what do I want to do? Make the garden all pretty. Bummed by its bedraggled state after a particularly arctic winter, not to mention slightly sun-sozzled by my first long, lazy lunch of the season on the terrace of a cute little country auberge, I hopped into the car on Friday afternoon and headed over to the local garden centre. I struggled to load umpteen large bags of potting soil into the bottom of my trolley and then muscled it around the aisles, filling the upper trays with a fiesta of plants promising instant ocular gratification. As always, I gasped when the cashier demanded a terrifying amount of money for my purchases, experience having shown that in a couple of days I’d be back for more.

Saturday dawned a bright, optimistic blue, so after a late breakfast with Mr. Prescott, I pulled on my red and yellow cotton gardening gloves and went outside looking forward to a busy day. While my husband meticulously cleaned the garden furniture, I wrestled ton weight bags of soil up onto the terrace, emptied all my rock hard, nutrient depleted plant-pots and re-filled them with fluffy fresh new soil. Blame it on my semi-English heritage, but I’m a sucker for plant-pots and love arranging them in colorful clusters on the wooden deck outside our living room. I love that higgledy-piggledy, country garden look, and if it was up to me, we’d have pots all over the place, and large, rumbustious flower-beds everywhere. My husband, however, being Swiss, prefers everything all “propre en ordre” (neat and tidy). Inevitable grievances such as circular water marks on the wooden deck surrounding two sides of our house drive him crazy, so imagine my frustration last year when he forbid me from putting any pots on the large deck outside the living room. He was adamant that the sun needed to bleach out the ugly traces my pots had left, so I was forced to group them all together on the adjacent lower stone terrace. It wasn’t too terrible, but I nevertheless struggled with the flowerless surface, and so yesterday sneakily arranged a group of pots into an eye-pleasing cluster in the right hand corner. All day long I expected him to throw up his hands and veto my handiwork, but twenty-four hours later, I’m still nice and potty.

Mr. Prescott was also sweet enough to line the bottoms of the two new wicker raised beds I bought to add to the two I bought last year for growing vegetables. In previous years, I’d been highly ambitious and dug out a massive plot for my vegetables, but the exercise proved far too time consuming and the weeds far too persistent for me to tackle on my own. As much as Mr. Prescott loves to eat home-produce, he’s not too fond of wielding rakes and hoes, so short of winning the lottery and employing a battalion of six-packed gardeners à la Desperate Housewives, I’ve been forced to downscale. I made a tentative trial run with two raised beds last summer, but remembering being frustrated by the lack of variety I was able to grow, recently added two more. Still, I’m scratching my chin over the lack of space and contemplating a couple extra. There’s something wonderful about nipping down to the bottom of the garden at the end of the day to pick your own vegetables, and no matter how hard I try to convince myself that “less is more”, my father’s motto “meglium abundare quam deficere” is far more me. You see, I don’t just want one variety of tomato, I want at least three, and the same goes for courgettes. I love growing different types of salad, too, and have dedicated one entire bed to ruccola (rocket), which is my all time favourite. I’m also tempted to grow carrots and potatoes again; I’ve done so in the past and they’ve always been delicious, but given the limited space I’d definitely have to invest in many more rows of raised beds which might disturb my husband’s sense of aesthetics.

Also, I’m always envious of my next door neighbour’s bountiful crops. Mrs. Camarca is a lovely Italian lady with a wonderfully high-pitched laugh who spends most of her waking hours tending her garden. She grows everything from scratch, even extracting tomato seedlings from ripe tomatoes and coaxing them to lustrous life! I’m convinced that her old-fashioned, impeccably tended vegetable plot boasts the finest, healthiest soil in French-speaking Switzerland, produced by rotating a couple of fabulously pungent compost heaps. Always generous with her produce, she’s forever delivering baskets of the most delicious raspberries, peaches, tomatoes, pears, apples, kiwis, and goodness knows what else to my doorstep. I’ve made it through the entire winter with a couple of branches of her incendiary chillies, which never fail to give a simple plate of pasta a surprising touch of pizzazz. She and I often chat across the fence at the bottom of the garden, our conversations invariably ending in me asking her for much-needed horticultural advice. She gave us two baby white peach trees a couple of years ago, and although they’re still very small, they’ve already yielded a fair amount of seriously yummy fruit.

The latest additions to our garden include a clump of pampas grasses which I’m hoping will soon reward me with an assortment of fabulous plumes in a couple of months, as well as a flower bed planted with a variety of roses, delphiniums, campanulas and cosmos. As for the pink rhododendrons outside my front door, they’re on a mission to block the view from our bedroom window and will be blooming any minute now, taking over from the magnolia which has been particularly stunning over the past couple of weeks but is now past its best. The yellow climbing rose on the sunnier side of the front door is scaling the walls every which way, and will be showing off its wares within a month, blooming continually until zapped by the first frosts. Maybe I’m getting old, but just thinking about all this floral activity puts a smile on my face!

Smiles aside, I’ve definitely got my work cut out for me. My husband has decided we need another, larger bed of pampas grasses to the right of the garden shed in order to draw attention away from an unsightly telegraph pole which, incidentally, is regularly squatted at daybreak by a daft woodpecker who hammers up a ruckus on the metallic section! Anyway, chances are that tomorrow morning I’ll be zooming back up to the garden centre, filling my trolley not only with an array of pampas grasses, but also with all sorts of horticultural goodies I’ll be powerless to resist. I’ve also got my eye on a beautiful wooden garden swing over in the furniture section, and keep dropping my husband hints about how wonderful it would be to curl up on it with a book and rock away many a sunny afternoon. Sadly, so far he refuses to be coaxed into forking out for the swing’s considerable price tag, but I’ve not given up hope. Because, the last time I looked, the plant pots on the deck outside the living room are still there, so I’m definitely making headway, if only on a higgledy-piggledly level.