Saturday 24 July 2021

Very Important Places.






This is the place where I last sat with a dear friend. Quite recently. Now it will be enshrined in memory.
Many others will sit here, and we will have afternoon tea, as we did then. Tiered cake-stand in fine bone china, patterned most appropriately with forget-me-not flowers. Home-made cakes and scones, of course. Cucumber sandwiches, of course, and there will be honey still for tea, but I doubt if anyone else will make a special request for sticky jam sandwiches. I doubt if anyone else could face death with such bravery, compassion and thought for others. Forget-me-not.




This is the place where people can walk into a new section of garden, cool, quiet, fern-filled. Soon there will be a special table for outdoor meals (as well as for me to do a bit of potting up). Children will need to watch out for frogs and possibly trolls under the bridge. But the trolls will have to be small, and certainly not of the breed found on the internet. The lower support rail of the bridge is formed from the adventurous and successful growing of a giant Echium last year in my front garden. I was so proud of it. It reached my bedroom window with its great spire of bee-filled blue flowers. It eventually blew down in a gale, and the stem was like a tree-trunk. I couldn't bear to throw it away. So it was incorporated into the bridge.
The small ginger curly head crossing the bridge is not a grandchild, but a very charming poodle visitor who has just been on holiday here and approves of the garden.

                                                                               



This is the place where my husband created a door many years ago. The door is  still there, but the summerhouse that surrounded it has gone. It's a suitably eccentric door with glass panels, one of them painted by our son. The door opens on to a totally overgrown and inaccessible railway embankment, but my husband fixed a 'Private' notice on the outside just in case (or perhaps because he had it and needed to fix it somewhere). It's all still there.
I found it difficult to lose the hard work my husband put into creating the summerhouse. But it had to go. The door didn't.
 Every garden needs a door into another secret garden.





This is the place for a different sort of door - a fairy door of course, with solar-powered lighting and a staircase inside the opening door. It's positioned so that it may be checked at night from the bedroom where the fairy-watchers sleep. It has been built into the dry-stone walling by the team of stone-masons who did the garden reconstruction work recently, as was the very rustic bridge, created from special timbers. They seemed to quite like it, but they could just have been humouring me.

The fairy-watchers haven't found it yet. I hope they haven't already out-grown it. 
The garden will grow, new memories will be created.
But old ones will be treasured, as will the people who created them.

Special thanks to my bridesmaid of some decades ago, Hellen, who took the photos when I wasn't looking.


18 comments:

  1. A beautiful garden even without the summer house.
    I love the door to ...wherever...like the Wardrobe door??

    A fairy door with a staircase.. brilliant inspiration ♥️

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  2. gz: thank you. My grand-daughter told me that fairies do all their singing and dancing at night, so I judge that the light is essential to stop them falling downstairs after a night out. Humans sometimes have the same problem, I think.

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  3. LOVE your memory packed garden, and particularly the doors... My sympathies for the loss of your friend - who has a permanent home in your heart.

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  4. E.C. Thank you for your very kind comment.

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  5. This is a beautifully haunted space.

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  6. Zhoen: there's a sad truth in that, and I have to remember that there's a lot of companionship and happiness too.

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  7. That looks like a lovely garden for children to have adventures in. I love the door to nowhere. And I'm so sorry about your friend.

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  8. Pam: thank you. Yes, a lot has been designed for children, but adults seem to enjoy it too, even the men who were asked to change their usual work techniques (trays of tea, coffee, biscuits and cake help a lot to foster enjoyment).
    My very ill friend described the garden as a cocoon, which I found very touching.

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  9. Long ago, when I was dabbling in calligraphy, I did a quote that went something like this: "Blessed is he who plants a tree. Generations that he doth not know shall bless him." The same could be said of someone (you) who creates such a beautiful garden.

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  10. Molly: that's a lovely quote, thank you.
    I also appreciate Thomas Edward Brown's, My Garden:
    'A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot, Rose plot, Fringed pool, Ferned grot'.
    Then there's Emily Dickinson's 'A bird came down the walk, He did not know I saw. He bit an angle-worm in halves, And ate the fellow raw.'
    The garden can inspire at every possible level, can't it?

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  11. Love those quotes too. I found one in a cemetery, last time I was home. It was on a plaque honoring a lady who had tended the flowers in the cemetery for many years. There were several lines to it but the ones that stayed with me are: "You are nearer to God in a garden than anyplace else on earth."

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  12. Molly: The kiss of the sun for pardon,
    The song of the birds for mirth.......that one?
    Or how about: Your mind is a garden,
    Your thoughts are the seeds.
    You can grow flowers,
    Or you can grow weeds.
    We mustn't get competitive over this Molly. It could go on for quite a time!

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  13. My condolences for the loss of your friend, and I am glad you have the good memories. And I sympathise with your pain about losing the summerhouse. About 15 years ago I had to say goodbye to a house whose residents had played a huge and beneficial part in my childhood, and many of my memories were tied up with actually being there, too. It was so very hard - but then I realised that I had it all inside my mind, in such detail, whereas when I looked at it in "real life" it had become dilapidated and empty. So I'm glad that I still have it now, peopled with the sounds and smells and sights of the loved ones who lived there when I was young.

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  14. Jenny: thank you for you kind message You are right about the memories. The summerhouse had certainly seen its best days and what has replaced it is a stone-paved patio area for dining at the bottom of the garden. My neighbour is making a special table for it as I write.

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  15. What a wonderful garden, full of possibility. I wonder what the rituals are for passing through those doors? Even if I didn't meet the doorkeeper's criteria and wasn't considered eligible, I'd be happy to wait in such a marvellous place (ideally, with tea and scones) for the explorers to return and tell their stories.

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  16. P.Pete: Thank you for your comment. No rituals, just good imagination needed. I hope you would approve of the changes to the garden? People have visited without realising that so much alteration has taken place, as it's been possible to preserve all the essential elements while adding a few new ones. Tea and scones always available - you know that.

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  17. Ratana: that's great! I hope your garden will be full of professional approach like mine!

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