The Garden Plot (3 page)

What a wonderful woman, this Mrs. Wilson,
thought Pru, although she knew that the job would call for Sammy and his truck, and she wasn’t sure how quickly she could get him. Still, she wouldn’t argue with a £200 deposit.

At the sound of the phone, Mrs. Wilson retreated into the house with an “off you go, dear, have a look round” to Pru who, accompanied by Toffee Woof-Woof, struck out across the lumpy lawn for the wilds of the back garden, wondering if the Wilsons might be interested in an architectural water feature, just a small one, with a weeping willowleaf pear behind to echo the flow of the water.

Near the ivy forest, the dog slowed, then stopped and growled slightly. Pru stopped, too, and considered the green mass. Rats? Neighbor cat? Nothing flew out of the green tangle at her, so she dropped her bag, put on gloves, got out her pruners, and began snipping away at some of the freshest ivy stems, the easiest to cut. That made no difference at all, but it seemed to cause a head topped with reddish, curly hair to pop up over the back wall.

“Hello, I’m Malcolm Crisp. I saw you out my window. Are you helping Vernona with the garden?” Malcolm appeared neither young nor old—probably about forty. He rested his arms on the top of the wall, which was at least six feet high; Pru wondered
what he stood on.

“Yes, hello, I’m Pru Parke. Mrs. Wilson’s asked me to clean up down here, and I hope to do some design and planting after that.”

“Oh, an American. Did you train here?”

“I did a month at Wisley, and I’ve done a few study days at Great Dixter … but I did my coursework in the States and worked at a garden there,” she finished feebly, and a little too defensively. The conviction that an American could never know as much as a Brit when it came to gardening was something of a given in Pru’s London life, but she didn’t mind, as she pretty much thought the same. Why else would so many American horticulture students want to study over here? Pru hoped her own voluntary internship at Wisley, the most prestigious of the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens, had added some credibility to her own curriculum vitae.

“Did you? Where?”

“Dallas … Texas.”

“Texas?” Malcolm sounded delighted. “Did you grow lots of cactus?”

Yes, we all have cactus gardens in Texas, thought Pru. We all ride horses and most of us can lasso a steer. “We have a lot of color in the gardens there—crape myrtles, lantana, roses.”

“You grow roses in Texas? Brilliant. Roses are something of a speciality for me,” he said, warming to Pru and the topic. “I’ve fourteen climbers, twelve species, twenty-three … twenty-one shrub, mostly English or old varieties—very few hybrid teas, though. They’re all over the garden, except down here at the bottom. I’ve lost several I tried to grow up against this wall. I believe the soil is too wet for them in this spot.”

“Is that Quatre Saisons I see blooming against the wall?” asked Pru.

This apparently upgraded Pru’s credibility with Malcolm. “Well spotted. What sorts of roses do you grow in Texas?”

“All of them, but the old-fashioned ones are my favorite.” After a pause she added, “We have rose rustlers, you know.” She thought she might as well go with the Texas mystique.

“Rustlers? People steal roses in Texas?” Malcolm’s eyes grew large.

“No, they save old roses on abandoned farms and in cemeteries. The rustlers just take cuttings and grow them on, trying to ID them. And some have been reintroduced into the trade, so gardeners can grow them again.” Pru began to lose her enthusiasm for the topic as she felt the ivy mountain needed more of her attention. “I’d love to talk to you about it sometime,” she said as she made a move with her pruners.

“I’ll just let you work then, shall I?” he asked. “I’m sure Vernona’s a slave driver,
and I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.” Pru started to protest, not wanting to paint such a generous client in a bad light—at least not this early in the game—but Malcolm carried on. “First chance you get, pop round for a coffee and we’ll talk roses.” After a second’s pause and a quick glance toward the buried shed in the corner, he added, “Will you be starting on all this today?”

“No, I’m mostly just having a look around. I’ll dive in tomorrow.”

“Right,” he said. “Good. Yes. Well then … cheers, bye!” And with that, he disappeared.

Pru thought better of going farther into the ivy, and instead snapped photos of the entire back garden with her phone, turning around for a panoramic sequence. She held the phone over her head and concentrated on the ivy, the tree, and what could be seen of the shed, both to remind her of the space and help with inspiration for design. She looked at the last few shots on the screen and saw Malcolm looking at the camera from the steps leading down to his basement. She hoped he didn’t think she wanted to rustle any of his roses.

Toffee Woof-Woof, who had retreated to a late-afternoon sunny spot in the kitchen next to a tin of dog treats, met her at the back door. She stepped in, but before she could call out her rearrival, Mrs. Wilson’s voice drifted in from another room.

“Are you back in London?” Mrs. Wilson said. “No? Well, Harry’s at work, and he said nothing about a letter.” A slight note of irritation crept into her voice. “I don’t know what Jeremy said about it, and really, isn’t this your husband’s business?”

While she stood and waited, Pru glanced down at a small writing desk. A letter from Hodges & Hodges Appraisals to Mr. Harry Wilson caught her eye. She wondered how much the Wilsons downsized before they arrived at the town house; perhaps they auctioned off furniture that wouldn’t fit. If so, they hadn’t got rid of enough. A small seating area had been nestled into the kitchen, and through a door from the kitchen into the dining and sitting room, Pru saw a table set for eight with three sideboards lining the walls.

“Well,” Mrs. Wilson said, “that’s it, then. We’ll see you when you return.”

After a pause, Pru said, “Well, Mrs. Wilson, I’m finished for today, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Is eight o’clock all right?”

Mrs. Wilson’s head ducked around the dining room doorway, her eyes wide. “Pru? I didn’t realize you were there.” She dusted off the front of her skirt and touched her hair, which looked as if it hadn’t moved for the past two decades, then stepped back into the kitchen.

“Oh, don’t bother to arrive before nine, dear. Mr. Wilson prefers to be out of the
house before any work begins, and besides, I hope to make this a little surprise for him—he’ll be so pleased I’ve actually got to work on the garden. You’ll still be able to transform the place before Thursday, I’m sure. That’s when I have a luncheon here, Thursday, so I know you’ll do your best to have the back garden in proper order by then.”

Thursday? In no way would the back garden be “in proper order” in two days’ time, £200 bonus or no. And yet, she could feel that check already being nibbled at by various bills.

“Shall I start in now, then? I’m happy to work as long as it’s light.” She should justify the advance, she thought, and two full days didn’t seem long enough for the job.

“Mr. Wilson prefers a quiet evening when he gets home, so we’ll just leave it until tomorrow, shall we?” Right, enough work to do in the meantime.

Pru began to mentally rearrange her schedule as she started toward the front door. “I met your neighbor Malcolm while I was out there. He says he’s a rose gardener.”

“Malcolm? Did he now?” Mrs. Wilson said, with a slight edge to her voice. “Don’t let him distract you from your work, dear. He’s a bit of a chatterer, and he … had a spot of trouble last year, as well. Not that he isn’t friendly, but really, you don’t want to get mixed up with him.”

“What does he do?” Pru asked. “I mean, does he have a job?”

“He’s ‘retired,’ or so he says. He doesn’t do anything, as far as we can tell.”

“How did he retire so young?”

Mrs. Wilson shook her head, as if baffled by the whole idea. “Harry says he started some computer software company and then sold it and made a great deal of money. Now his sole occupation is other people’s business.”

Deep in thought as she rumbled along on the Tube, Pru felt good about the extra work, yet the rejection from Damson Hill weighed on her mind. She couldn’t be a jobbing gardener forever, yet she couldn’t go back to the States, either; that life was finished. Born and raised in a happy home in Texas, an only child of only children, she always had kept Texas life at arm’s length; she felt more at home in her English mother’s stories of life in Britain.

The year before her mother died, Pru, just shy of her half-century birthday, went on her own to England, her mother already too ill to travel. On her return, her mother had seemed hungry to hear Pru’s tales of the gardens and countryside.

Her mother always had seemed to float above the surface of Texas, tethered only by her husband and her daughter, and after her husband died, by Pru alone. Her mother’s love of her native England had infused Pru’s life and so, although they remained in
Dallas after her father’s death, in her mind, Pru spent her mother’s last years living in stories of the past—gathering elder flowers in May and making damson jam in late summer. It left Pru with nowhere to call home, except for faraway England. She avoided permanence in anything except her job—she was too practical to give that up, until she made the big move—and when personal relationships appeared to be heading down the path to commitment, she abruptly made a U-turn.

If she examined that time closely, it seemed as if her mother, Jenny Parke Walker, had had a plan. She had drawn Pru into her girlhood and made the Parke family so real that it seemed natural for Pru to change her last name. “It’s your mother who was the Parke?” Jo had asked—as did others. She did it, Pru told them, to “help me find my mother’s people,” although in truth, she didn’t believe her mother had any people left to find. She meant no slight to her father, whom she had loved, but he had been a distant parent, not only emotionally, but physically, as his job with the highway department took him all over Texas for weeks at a time. She felt like a Parke, and so she became a Parke.

Pru found the experience of her trip abroad impossible to describe to friends in Dallas; in England, she truly felt as if she had returned home. With her move to London—her “sudden” move, as friends described it—at age fifty, just after her mother’s death and the messy end of a long-term relationship, she felt both settled and slightly at sea with day-to-day British life.

She’d made only a few cultural mistakes; although vocabulary could be confusing.
We all speak English, but not really,
she thought. She called a long-sleeved sweater a pullover, when she should’ve called it a jumper; a pullover was really a sleeveless sweater vest, but she learned not to say “vest,” because that turned out to be underwear.

One day in the shops, Jo had saved her. When she wanted to point out a display of specialty cheeses made near where Jo’s relatives lived in the Cotswolds, she said, “Look, Jo, over there by the fellow with the fanny pack.”

A dozen pairs of eyes turned to her, but Jo came to her defense. “She’s American,” Jo said quickly. “She didn’t know.” The excuse worked, although Pru didn’t know why at the time. Most of the people smiled or sniggered and turned away. Pru was mortified when later Jo explained that “fanny pack” wasn’t the right term in the UK, as fanny referred to a certain part of the female anatomy—just not the part Pru thought it did. “Bum bag,” she learned to say.

Oh, there was the time she got confused on the Tube about which way the Circle line went—if it’s called the Circle line, then, really, shouldn’t all the trains keep going in a circle? She’d wanted to head to High Street Kensington and, daydreaming that she’d
been invited to visit Highgrove, Prince Charles’s garden, she’d got on a train headed to Hammersmith before she realized her error. Instead of retracing her journey and spending almost an hour on the Tube, she’d gotten out on the street and taken a cab home—not the cheapest mistake she’d ever made.

Pru phoned Sammy on her way home and begged help first thing in the morning, passing on some of her bonus to add to his fee. “I need ten large terra-cotta pots, enough soil and I’d say thirty or forty six-inch pots of pelargoniums, red or deep salmon, something to stop the eye—not that bubblegum pink. We’ll put them in a semicircle around the edge of the patio—the terrace,” she corrected herself. “And enough tarps.” Even though they would have access through the basement service entrance, Sammy could be a tad too casual with his hauling, and Pru didn’t know how many more tiny tea tables and piles of mementos might be in the way. “It’s a quick fix—we’ll do more later. I hope.”

With Sammy sorted, Pru took time to make sure the rest of her week’s schedule didn’t show a conflict. She changed her appointment with the Hightowers, where she needed only to cut and edge the lawn, and decided to talk with Wilf, the owner of the Cat and Cask, about shifting her work to Friday. Or perhaps she could get a bit done every evening this week, adding it all up to her usual three hours.

Pru tended the window boxes and pots for Wilf’s pub. She felt grateful he hired her instead of one of the large companies that serviced so many pubs in London, supplying each of them with huge hanging baskets and pots of flowers throughout the year. Wilf, she discovered, preferred to do business on a person-to-person basis and didn’t mind bartering and negotiating, so her payment of a couple of dinners a week worked for both of them. It helped Pru keep her food budget within reason while giving her some time out in the community.

She led a solitary life; her wide and shifting client base meant she didn’t work many hours in each place but instead spent lots of time traveling among edging, deadheading, watering pots, and sweeping leaves off walkways.—Jo said she spread herself too thin, but Pru thought digging into a good deep job of designing and building a whole garden for the Wilsons would give her a sense of accomplishment. It would also look great on her résumé, and it might help with finding a more permanent position.

The next morning, Pru stuck long-handled loppers and a folding pruning saw into her bag. Sammy collected her after he’d stopped at the wholesale landscaping supply for all she’d need today. “It almost had to be pale yellow osteospermums,” he said as she
crawled in the cab of the truck, “but I found a stash of pelargoniums in the last greenhouse.”