The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,21
a big Brer Rabbit briar patch, with a path through the middle.’
You could say that again. The beautiful old herringbone brick path that ran across it, the mellow colours lit by a stray finger of sunlight, was flanked on either side by a hugely overgrown and impenetrable tangle worthy of Sleeping Beauty’s bower.
‘I hope you’ve got a good pair of secateurs,’ I said.
‘I’m sure Ned has, and luckily, this belongs to Old Grace Hall so it’s his problem. The door into our garden was put in when Wen – my sister Morwenna – married Theo, so we could come and go easily. Wen was much older than me – we three sisters were well spread out in age, as if Mum and Father were trying to have one child for each decade.’
We skirted a small pond in the centre, in which the giant, ghostly shapes of fish glimmered under waterlily pads and she opened another gate in the even higher old brick wall on that side.
‘Here we are – the Grace Garden!’
As I passed her and took in the sheer scale of what I was looking at, I stopped dead on the gravel path and my jaw dropped.
‘Good heavens, it’s huge!’ I exclaimed incredulously, gazing round.
‘These houses were all built on a small plateau, which narrows towards the river, so the Hall has a lot more flat land,’ Myfy said, but I was still dumbstruck.
A path to my right led off along the wall, behind a tall bed of trees and shrubs, while another, wider one ran straight ahead. To my left were lower beds, hedged in lavender and with lawned borders and walkways.
The tops of the high, mellow, old brick walls defined the giant square of the garden, but it was impossible to see the whole of it from where we were – there were too many tall shrubs and trees for that and also, unlike most walled gardens I’d ever seen, it was not flat but seemed to gently rise up towards the middle.
I longed to go and explore it … but I became aware that Myfy was talking again.
‘Wen and Theo weren’t much interested in gardening and it didn’t help that the lower half was given over to vegetable growing during the war, though there was already a vegetable plot on the other side of the wall. Ned says there’s a huge amount of work to do, to restore it to what it once was.’
‘But how exciting, to be part of that!’ I said.
Myfy gave her tilted smile. ‘Well, I’m glad you think so! Ned did say the late seventeenth-century layout of the main paths is still the same – he found a plan.’
I thought he would need a plan, if he was to restore it all to what it once was, after years of neglect, though so far as I could see, the beds closest to us were in fairly good order and, surprisingly, there were even little painted plant name tags on spikes in front of some of the nearby shrubs … quince, elderberry and an Alchemist rose.
That last one seemed very appropriate. I wondered what was in the middle of the garden and, entirely forgetting the purpose I was there for, was about to go and find out, when Myfy summoned my attention back again.
‘Now where is everyone?’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’d better go through into the courtyard and—’
But at that moment there came the scrunch of heavy footsteps on the gravel path along the wall behind us and she exclaimed, ‘Ah, Ned – there you are! I’ve brought our new gardener to meet you, as I promised.’
I tore my attention from the tantalizing prospect before me and turned round, expecting to see the middle-aged, wax-jacketed and corduroy-clad man of my imaginings.
Instead, to my complete astonishment, I found myself staring up at a giant of a man of much my own age, clad in muddy jeans and a disreputable old blue sweater. His mane of tawny hair was rumpled and needed cutting, and framed a leonine face, with a long, wide, blunt nose and fair, bushy eyebrows over amber-brown eyes. They widened as he stared at me and recognition dawned.
‘Ned? Ned Mars!’ I exclaimed, astounded.
6
Thorny Paths
My immediate reaction, after that of astonishment, was one of pleased surprise, because Ned had been part of my happiest years, spent at Honeywood Horticultural College.
Ned, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way, because his open face assumed a strangely shuttered and wary expression.