Gardens in the Dunes (40 page)

Hattie watched Aunt Bronwyn and the child with the parrot on her shoulder walk hand in hand up the drive to the house. Hattie's heart felt so full of love for them at that instant tears sprang into her eyes, but she quickly brushed them away. Edward was upstairs with his notebooks. He seemed in much better spirits now that they were on their way. He had an appointment in London later that week at the Kew Gardens.

Hattie felt a bit melancholy. Surely it was travel fatigue and nothing more. At the height of the previous episode, she scarcely had the energy to walk from her bed to the commode. Right now, a walk in the garden might be just what she needed; she called out to them to wait. She strode across the lawn, testing her energy to reassure herself she was fit.

The sun was behind the hills, but the trees along the river were still bright in the twilight's glow. She joined them and followed Aunt Bronwyn and the child with her parrot through a weathered brassbound gate in the high limestone wall off the south wing of the old cloister. Inside they found themselves surrounded on all sides by high stone walls overgrown with old grapevines knotted thick as fists. Stone walks crisscrossed the big enclosure that was divided by high walls into four gardens—Indigo was reminded of a big house without a roof. At the center was a round stone pool fed by water bubbling up from a spring.

Aunt Bronwyn explained at one time the entire area had been devoted to vegetables to feed the Norman nuns, but Aunt Bronwyn didn't need all
those vegetables. Now only the sunny southeastern quadrant was planted for the kitchen. The beds were slightly raised above the stone paths that separated them. Flat smooth river stones set side by side upright formed the borders of the beds and gave what Hattie thought was an oddly formal appearance to the vegetable garden. Aunt Bronwyn took pride in old flagstone paths and raised beds and parterres that lay buried under the turf until she hired workmen to unearth them. In old church records she found maps and diagrams of the original cloister garden, its severe plain lines and sparse plantings designed to mortify the soul.

Indigo called out excitedly and ran to the corn plant: she was delighted to see baby pumpkins as well. Aunt Bronwyn took her garden trowel and dug little carrots for the parrot; she picked ripe tomatoes for them to eat while they helped Aunt Bronwyn fill her apron with baby peas and tender spinach for dinner.

The kitchen garden was the modern garden as well, she explained. Plants from all over the world—from the Americas, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and sweet corn; and garlic, onions, broad beans, asparagus, and chickpeas from Italy—grew with peppers from Asia and Africa.

She led them down the stone path to the northeast quadrant, under a rustic stone pergola that supported a flourishing gourd plant, its pendulous fruits dangling overhead like lanterns. Hattie remarked that this was a good idea to try in Riverside, where shade was always welcome. She explained the Riverside gardens were watered and trimmed but otherwise largely neglected since the death of Edward's father and his mother's precipitous decline. Aunt Bronwyn nodded sympathetically.

So far the trip had been a wonderful opportunity for gardening ideas—Indigo had a small valise full of carefully folded wax paper packets with the seeds she'd gathered. When they returned to Riverside, Hattie planned to show the neglected gardens they were loved again.

Aunt Bronwyn agreed; if a garden wasn't loved it could not properly grow! She was an avid follower of the theories of Gustav Fechner, who believed plants have souls and human beings exist only to be consumed by plants and be transformed into glorious new plant life. Hattie had to smile; so human beings existed only to become fertilizer for plants! Edward and her father would have a good laugh at that!

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Years before, when she first moved into the old cloister, Aunt Bronwyn joined the Antiquity Rescue Committee, a local group organized to protect an ancient grove of oaks and yews on a hilltop near a small stone circle.
Old churches and old buildings had defenders but few people cared about clumps of old trees or old stones on hilltops. Not long after the hilltop grove was saved, she joined hands with committee members as they made a ring around the upright stone threatened by dynamite in a farmer's field. Her English neighbors tolerated a good many eccentricities in one another, but the demonstration by the rescue committee to save the boulder earned their group some notoriety in Bath and the surrounding area.

She learned a great deal from the old women and old men who tottered up the stairs of the old Pump House Hotel on the second Saturday afternoon of each month. For many members, the meeting of the Antiquity Rescue Committee was their only social activity other than church or visits from doctors. Aunt Bronwyn smiled and shook her head. They were all gone now, but it had been wonderful to hear the history and tales about Bath and the surrounding countryside from these fervent defenders of old trees and stones.

Aunt Bronwyn paused to apologize for going on so about her committee, but Hattie was eager to hear more, and Indigo nodded enthusiastically. Aunt Bronwyn clapped her hands with a big smile. “All right,” she said, “I'll tell you about the toads!” Some of the rescue committee members were also active in the protection of the toads during their odd migrations; Aunt Bronwyn joined them on their hands and knees in the mud to help the toads cross busy roadways safely. But it wasn't until she began to study the artifacts of the old Europeans that she discovered carved and ceramic figures of toads were worshiped as incarnations of the primordial Mother.

She imagined the reactions of her English neighbors to her participation in such activities. How typical of an American! they'd say, although she was the only American in the group; all the other members were English, and many grew up in Bath or nearby towns. Her English neighbors enjoyed hearty laughs over the odd pilgrims and foreigners who trudged through town muttering about solstices and stone rings on their way to Stanton Downs or Avebury, and claimed descent from Celtic kings and druids.

Most rescue committee meetings eventually trailed off into reminiscences and stories—how rotund Queen Anne went bottom-up when her carriage overturned on one of Bath's steepest hills; how Lord Chesterfield preferred to play with card sharps rather than with English gentlemen because the card sharps paid him at once if he won, while the gentlemen sent around a letter and apologies and never paid him. Sometimes after the meetings adjourned they continued lively discussions well into the
evening, exchanging stories about the behavior of certain stones that walked to drink water after midnight and stones that turned to follow the sun.

If plants and trees had individual souls, then Aunt Bronwyn decided to acquaint herself with as many different beings as possible. Between the orchard and the cloister odd mounds of broken stone and rubble overgrown with weeds, wild roses, and hawthorn marked the site of the Norman abbey. Here she planted her “wild grove” of silver firs, Scots pines, and yews with black walnut, hazel, and oak. Now, fifty years later, her wild grove reached the back wall of the old cloister garden and shaded the back of the south garden.

A path of pea-size river pebbles curved away from the driveway into the wild grove. Indigo ran ahead on the path with the parrot on her shoulder flapping his wings in excitement; with each breath she could almost taste the damp coolness of the grove.

At the center of the grove was a low circular wall of old stone, overgrown with velvety green mosses and delicate ferns. The water, bubbling and gurgling into itself from an artesian spring, was almost hidden by watercress, moneywort, bog orchids, and yellow iris. After some effort in the local archives, Aunt Bronwyn determined the spring and old wall were the remains of the Norman baptistry.

Indigo offered the parrot a chance to get off her shoulder and walk on the edge of the old wall but the bird nervously scanned the sky and the grove and remained firmly on her shoulder. Indigo told the bird to hold on as she leaned down to taste the water. Nowhere had she found water that tasted as good as the water from the spring at the old gardens. Just then Hattie called out, “Wait,” but Aunt Bronwyn said it was safe; the water tasted just like rainwater, so light and sweet it barely quenched her thirst.

Hattie sat on the edge of the old wall to dip her hand into the water, while Aunt Bronwyn pointed to the narrow stone rill that carried the water out of the forest grove through the orchard for the cattle and finally to the river. There were a number of artesian springs in the vicinity of the river but not all of them were hot water like the springs that fed the baths.

“This is a very special place,” Hattie said. “I understand why you stay here.”

Aunt Bronwyn nodded her head with a merry expression on her face. Yes, the family did not understand her reasons for remaining in England after her husband died; after all, she was an American—“Whatever an American is,” Aunt Bronwyn said with a wink at Indigo. She'd fallen under
the spell of the old cloister, which was nearly in ruins when she leased it from an English family that wanted fashionable locations in the heights of Bath away from the river and the mosquitoes, not to mention the crowds of tourists downtown or the odors of the baths.

Aunt Bronwyn had more she wanted to show them; a quick look now and they could return for a better look tomorrow. They followed the gravel path to the back of the old cloister along the high outer wall overgrown with ivies and wild clematis. Aunt Bronwyn pushed away the vines to reveal a narrow ironclad door in the wall; she gripped the iron latch firmly and pushed her shoulder hard against the door while she kicked it with her foot. The door seemed stuck for an instant before it slowly opened with the sound of wood dragging against dirt: she had to kick the door to get it open wider. The door was part of a late-eighteenth-century renovation. In the days of the Norman nuns, the cloister garden could be reached only through a door from the kitchen.

The late afternoon light scarcely penetrated the wild grove that shaded the back wall of the west garden. Fortunately the renovators of long ago did not tear out the old raised beds shaped in circles and rectangles—they merely buried them under topsoil. When Aunt Bronwyn began the garden restoration, workmen discovered the intricate river pebble borders and carefully unearthed and repaired them.

The low stone walls that divided the interior garden into four parts were planted with lavender; Indigo buried her face in the blossoms, while the parrot snipped off shoots with its beak. Hattie could see at once each quadrant was quite different from the others.

In the north quadrant, Aunt Bronwyn planted the old raised beds with indigenous English plants—kales, hellebores, dandelions, pinks, periwinkles, daisies. Little white flowering violets cascaded over the edges of the raised beds. The east side of the garden was planted with all the plants the Romans and Normans introduced: grapevines nearly obscured the weathered wooden pergola that slouched down the path between the raised beds planted with cabbages, eggplants, chickpeas, and cucumbers. Hattie was surprised at how few food crops and flowers were indigenous to England; the climate here did not seem unfriendly in the least as compared to the dry heat of Riverside.

The south garden and west garden were planted with plants from the Americas, Africa, and Asia. As soon as Indigo saw the tasseled corn plants along the back wall of the south garden ahead, she broke into a run that caused the parrot to flap his wings excitedly. Indigo stood before the corn
plants, which were planted apart from one another—to let the sun reach all of them, she thought. At home they had to shade the plants and help them withstand strong winds, so they planted their corn close to one another, like a big family. Here the corn plants had the protection of the high outer garden walls as well as the old stone walls that formed the garden quadrants. Indigo ran to the hollyhocks along the south edge of the raised beds, and this time the parrot lost his grip. At the last instant Indigo felt him let go, and off he flew, flapping his clipped wings madly for about ten feet before he landed and clung to a pink Persian rose trimmed into a small tree. Indigo ran to the rose tree and returned the parrot to her shoulder.

“Look, here's where all the flowers came from,” she called out to Hattie. Aunt Bronwyn broke into a big smile; as she wiped her eyeglasses on the edge of her apron, she explained the roses, the lilies, the hollyhocks, and the pear trees did not originate in England but in the Near East and Asia.

“Your people,” she said, “the American Indians, gave the world so many vegetables, fruits, and flowers—corn, tomatoes, potatoes, chilies, peanuts, coffee, chocolate, pineapple, bananas, and of course, tobacco. Indigo felt suddenly embarrassed. Sand Lizard people barely were able to grow corn, and they had no tomatoes, peanuts, or bananas. The Sand Lizard people gathered the little green succulents called sand food; sand food could never grow in England or New York or even Parker. Sand food needed sandstone cliff sand and just the right amount of winter snow, not rain, to grow just under the surface of the sand. Indigo missed sand food with its mild salty green taste better than cucumbers.

Aunt Bronwyn explained a number of the food crops of grains and vegetables and a great many flowers were unknown in England until the arrival of the Romans; thus cattle and pigs, still highly prized for their milk and meat, were once so important they had been gods; even now it was possible to find old churches with the figures of sows and piglets carved in the stone doorways.

In the sunny west garden big dark red dahlias grew at the feet of giant sunflowers with faces like dinner plates. Indigo never imagined so many different sunflowers, some with red petals, some with white flowers—all sizes, with many-flowered branches and single flowers alone. Indigo whispered to the parrot she wished they might have come later in the year, after the plants had gone to seed. Still, she looked carefully on the ground under the plants in case there were any early seed pods. She knew just the place to plant these sunflowers, not far from the spring above the dunes.