The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,133

bees were more active and humming happily round the flowers. I expect they’d be buzzing off next door to the roses, too, when their usual lavender-rich diet palled.

I went back up to the flat to fetch my rucksack and flask, just in time to see Caspar’s furry rump vanish through the cat flap, on his way to breakfast. Then off I went to the Grace Garden, squashing down the feeling of impending doom. If it was going to happen, I’d dance like a butterfly right up to the brink.

Ned was in the Poison Garden, well covered up and weeding the beds around the angel’s trumpet and the Irish yew. I hadn’t actually been inside the claw-like enclosure yet – the thought of the rosary pea vine, just one berry of which was fatal, had slightly put me off. I had a mental image of it suddenly jumping out of its wrought-iron cage and grabbing me.

Ned said I was mad and there was nothing to fear, as long as you wore the right protective gear for the job and disposed of any harmful material on the bonfire.

‘Come on in and have a look – just don’t touch anything,’ he invited me. ‘It’s not at its best at this time of year, but wait until the angel’s trumpet’s in flower, and the aconite and the foxgloves – I’ve got more of those coming, in pink, red and purple.’

‘I’m sure it will be lovely,’ I agreed, cautiously peering at the quite pretty ferny leaves of the rosary pea, which had red berries … all the better to kill you with.

It was enclosed in the Victorian ironwork aviary, and the mandrake was in a smaller one, though I couldn’t imagine that escaping and wreaking havoc.

When he’d finished, he locked the gate carefully behind us. ‘I’ll start giving tours of the Poison Garden in summer, just to small groups of adults and maybe only at weekends,’ he said. ‘I can’t really ask Roddy to do them, but if it’s just one group a day, it won’t take too much time up.’

‘They’ll be really popular,’ I said. ‘You might have to have a pre-booking form on the website. You should add a sign-up page for the Friends of the Grace Garden now, anyway, and perhaps another for volunteers.’

‘You talk to Roddy about it,’ he suggested. ‘You’re the one with all the ideas!’

‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘When are the rest of the wetland plants you ordered arriving?’

‘Early next week, I think,’ he said, pushing the hair back from his face. ‘You might ask him to chase that up too, while you’re at it.’

‘Your hair wants pruning,’ I told him.

‘Stick to the gardening, Ellwood, you’re not coming near me with the secateurs,’ he said and, picking up the barrow handles, he headed for the gate to the vegetable garden where the bonfire patch lay.

Perhaps it was because it was the last weekend of the Easter holiday that the garden was almost as busy as the last one, but I was conscious of the ebb and flow of the visitors as I dug my way down a long narrow plot with Ned working from the other side, to meet, as we so often did with garden tasks, in the middle.

I didn’t return after checking the River Walk, but instead went back to the flat to wash and change, ready to go over to Ned’s later and get stuck into actually reading some of the papers we’d rough-sorted.

First, though, I whipped up a big risotto, which I ladled into a lidded container, wrapped in newspaper and put inside a freezer carry bag before setting off.

It had worried me that Caspar hadn’t yet put in an appearance at the flat, but I found him sitting waiting on Ned’s doorstep, like some misshapen heraldic beast.

‘What kept you?’ he said – or I assume that’s what he said.

We ate first, while the risotto was hot, finishing off with some of Elf’s ice-cream from Ned’s freezer and coffee, before going through to the library and setting to work.

First, we put all the bundles of letters to one side, for later examination, except for one that had been labelled ‘Tradescant’, presumably by Ned’s uncle Theo, and which we thought might contain some interesting insights into the early days of the garden. Of course, there’d probably be loads of interesting things in the other letters too, but it would take ages to read them.

That still left several other heaps on the table. Ned suggested we divide them