The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,98

and Gert are already here.’

‘They’re in early,’ I said and then added, pointedly, ‘And so am I!’

But it went over his head, because he continued, ‘James is in the Potting Shed, working on the new plant stand, and Gert said something about neglecting her vegetables and wanting to pot up more seedlings for the shop.’

‘I can see you have your staff under firm control,’ I said, and he gave me a blank look, before suddenly grinning.

‘I’ve got something I want you to do before you get back to the roses,’ he said. ‘And when Charlie gets here I need him to help me put in the rest of the signboards.’

‘I think you’ll probably need a Private sign in front of the office, too,’ I said. ‘People are bound to try and look in.’

‘Maybe I should have a row of pots along the front to keep them at a distance.’

‘I suspect you’ve ordered enough scented geraniums to fill a hundred pots and several stone troughs, once James has potted them up and grown them on.’

‘That’ll take time, though. I need a quicker fix.’

‘More of those stands with ropes hung between them, then?’ I suggested.

‘Good idea – we’ve got plenty of them. In fact, we could rope off the whole corner, from the end of my office to the other side of the Potting Shed door, because none of that is open to the public. We can add the potted plants to pretty it up later.’

The job Ned wanted me to do first was to put in more of the water-loving plants around the waterfall and in the bed on the far side of the stream above it.

When I’d run out of things to plant, Gertie, who was passing, roped me in to help her with the small central herb garden. She’d brought out some she’d been growing on and my task was to put them in the beds as directed: three kinds of thyme and several of mint, though we’d have to keep an eye on that, to make sure it didn’t try to take over the whole garden.

It certainly seemed to be all hands on deck that morning, for when I finally made my escape, even Steve had arrived, presumably having opened up the monastic ruins and the convenient conveniences, and was doing a little desultory hoeing and weeding along the borders, where the first fresh weeds of the year were sticking their green fingers through the loam. Mind you, in the opinion of most gardeners, many of the things we were actually nurturing here were weeds – but then, as they say, a weed is just a plant in the wrong place.

I said as much later to Ned in the rose garden, when he came to see how I was doing.

‘Elf told me last year that the best nettles for brewing her beer came from either side of the wall at the end of Gert’s vegetable patch, so I told her I’d leave them there for her to pick. I should have some around the place anyway, even though I don’t want them in the actual garden, because they do have some medicinal qualities.’

‘I’ve heard of nettle tea,’ I said, ‘though I’m not sure what it does for you.’

‘I’m starting to think I should have kept that rhubarb in the vegetable garden too, because whatever Gert is feeding it on, it’s getting ginormous.’

It was easy to guess what was making it grow so much, because Gert had several ripe and fruity-smelling compost heaps at various stages, which she lavished with loving care.

‘I could put in some different kinds of lavender,’ Ned mused. ‘That has lots of uses too, including protecting against the plague.’

‘Do you get a lot of that in Jericho’s End?’

‘No, and the Black Death missed us out entirely,’ he said. ‘I’d better go back and see how Charlie’s doing. We finished with the signboards and I left him in the barn, unpacking the pieces of the gazebo. We’re not putting it up yet; I just needed to be sure it was all there.’

That sounded like more hours of harmless fun later on.

I returned to my endless rose pruning, trying to finish off the small top part of the garden.

The paths were nicely cleared, the roses neatly pruned of dead wood and leggy, unwanted suckers. I just needed to do a little more, then clean the beds so they could be fed and mulched.

There was a honeysuckle hidden behind the rose in the top corner, perhaps seeded from