A Year in the World (31 page)

Meandering
around several villages and visiting two gardens fills a day. After pub lunches, we have salad and cheese at night back at our schoolhouse, treating ourselves to bowls of prime strawberries with double cream for dessert. The bad luck of renting two wretched houses has been mitigated by the enormous good luck with the weather. Except for a ten-minute shower one morning, we’ve had sunny days and blessed temperatures in the high seventies. At night we sit out in the garden with a glass of wine planning the next day. We’re appreciating the oh-so-British names, pronunciations, and expressions.
To truffle around,
to look for something.
Ke bab
, not
ke bob
.
Past ah
—like
past
—for pasta. This grates, especially since so many English people go to Italy constantly. Ed’s favorite is
rumpy-pumpy
, which we heard on a radio play. It took only a moment to realize what it meant. The image
rumpy-pumpy
calls up—a rump the color of a boiled pig pumping away—is rather horrifyingly comic. We passed Cromp Butt Lane and Old Butt Lane along the way. Crinkley Bottom is a town over in Somerset. We like
bolthole
and
clootie dumplings
and
singin’ hinney
, a bread with currants. Sometimes in the South I heard
hinney
for donkey, and we wonder if the bread brays, like bubble and squeak squeaks. Or maybe
hinney
is dialect for honey.

The market town nearest our little schoolhouse is Stow-on-the-Wold, also with a Sheep Street. If we were moving to the Cotswolds, this is where we would aspire to live, within a few miles of this friendly, bustling village. I mourn the loss of small bookstores in America. Stow has several. “No, dear, we don’t have that, but you’re not missing anything,” I’m told when I ask for a recent Booker Prize–winner’s book. On the way to the cheese shop and the wine shop, I begin to feel at ease here. Maybe it was buying a book by a writer who lives in these parts, Joanna Trollop. Like Anita Brookner, her books often feature women on their own, cast into a domestic or personal crisis. They’re well-written Aga Sagas, a term—not derogatory—for women’s relationship novels. Aga, of course, is the stove of choice for British households. I’ve already been devouring Penelope Lively, whose memoir about growing up in Egypt I liked last year. Since Lively knows this area, I read two novels, looking for clues about living here. But I find that her writerly detachment from her adopted landscape keeps the
place
at a distance. In Italy, I realize, I have not sought such detachment myself, although when I moved part of my life there, I intended to maintain just such a separation between home and Tuscany. Italy would be a place to write, a place to have friends visit, a locus for travel. Against my will, Italy slowly became home. My long internal, secret desire to return to the American South, where I was born and grew up, slowly dissolved. All my adult life I’d felt exiled and I am shocked, but the South of Tuscany became home for me, who had no Italian ancestor, not a drop of Mediterranean blood. By the time that happened, I felt a strange rapture within. Another landscape had taken over, taken me in, shaped me to its own requirements, pleasures, and history. If I lived
here
, I probably would start making cheese and collecting teapots. I have a feeling this place would
take
me. I’d get heather-hued sweaters, a golden retriever, and a large umbrella, take up knitting, and become a strictly no-nonsense, practical village woman who volunteered at the church jumble sale.

Stow has a tall limestone cross in the center of town, an old reminder to be good while sheep trading at the market. This large open center could function as a piazza for the citizens were it not filled with cars. Maybe so much rain makes parking close to the action a necessity, but the town would be drastically altered for the good if pedestrians ruled rather than cars. I collect several cheeses, bottles of damson and peach cordial to take home, and a bottle of elder flower and apple, which I’ve been drinking in place of the iced tea that is nowhere to be found in this land of purist tea drinkers. In the South where I grew up, our iced tea was mixed with pineapple juice, lemon, and sugar. Egregious, I’m sure, to the English sensibility. My grandmother steeped elder flowers for wine, which my father swore could cause blindness. In the bakery I find Sally Lunn, something my mother used to make. This legendary bread originated in seventeenth-century Bath, either by someone named Sally Lunn or by a Frenchwoman who made buns and hawked them, calling
“sol et lune.”
The tea shop remains open on North Parade Passage in Bath. In the basement Roman ruins reveal that the building was used for preparing foods even in Roman times. This Stow version of Sally Lunn is nothing like my mother’s. Perhaps her recipe mutated after years in America. Hers was a light, light sweet cake but was served with meals. Southerners like sweet touches with their dinners. This Sally Lunn is a yeast bread, rather lumpy looking, possibly improved with a slathering of raspberry jam.

The butcher, the baker—this way of shopping is my favorite. The scale is right. I meet Ed, coming in from a countryside walk. He takes my packages, and because we are currently garden-mad, he buys a bunch of delphinium, larkspur, and foxglove for the schoolhouse dining room.

In
Woodstock we skip Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, having seen it years ago. In an old, old pub, The Bear, we have lunch in the bar, then walk. Each town’s little shops speak for life there. We see a sign,
HATS FOR HIRE.
The butcher shop is adorned with flowers. I am so happy to see the Winchester Glove Shop and Harriet’s Tea Rooms. There’s even an Aga store with a purple stove in the window and a teapot shaped like the stove.

From Woodstock we drive to Rousham Gardens, entering near a conservatory path crowded with apricot lilies and lavender. The crenellated house with statues in niches looks Jacobean with Italian overlays. Even from the forecourt, Rousham seems like someone’s personal garden, and it is. Since 1635 the property has been in the same family. The garden, first designed by Charles Bridgeman (inventor of the ha-ha), was taken over by William Kent in 1738. He began life as a coachman but somehow got to Rome, where he lived and painted for ten years. He made a living buying paintings and selling them to the English aristocracy, then gradually metamorphosed into an architect and designer. Rousham survives intact and offers a textbook lesson on the fascination of the English for Roman culture.

We walk first through the gardens nearest the house. Walled gardens are the ultimate garden rooms. At eleven I loved
The Secret Garden
, locked and overgrown, a place for transformation. This one we glimpse through a lacy iron gate. Flower beds are backed by ancient apples, formerly espaliered, now just on their own with their leafy arms spread as if they were protecting the winsome carnations, yarrow, Peruvian lilies, and sweetpeas that climb teepees made of twiggy branches. At home in Italy, Beppe, our farmer, makes these same teepees for the beans and peas in the
orto
, our vegetable garden. All the gardens I’ve seen have variations of this teepee. Some are iron; most are willow. The willow or twig teepees suit the casual grace of the ever-blooming, abundant style of English garden design. Rule of green thumb: plant twice as much. Another rule: forget rules, forget order—blowsy is best. Another: no sharply edged beds—let the flowers creep and flop onto the path or grass border. Some beds are backed with espaliered plum trees, clusters of ripe damsons like great garnets ripening against a stone wall.

So many ideas. The caves and playhouses formed inside thick hedges would be paradise for children to play spooky games. Rousham has a cutting garden within the kitchen garden, where they’re growing enough asparagus to feed the Cotswolds. The strawberries grow in a patch of straw, with a screen cover staked at the four sides. Light dawns—that’s why they’re called strawberries. With each plant separated, you can see exactly how many bowls of luscious berries you have for dinner. I see Ed studying this method, too. “Ours is a mess. The birds get more than we do. What if we move it up a terrace higher and build this kind of frame?”

“I’d love that. I hate putting down my hand in there—I’m always thinking I’m going to touch a snake.”

A later Rousham designer loved circles. A small round pond stands at the center of a large circle of roses. Four iron arches at the cardinal points lead in and out. Between the arches the circle is maintained by a few poles, with wire running between. Some roses are trained on the poles, some are free-standing. Quite simple, and a very clever design! This circle garden could transform a plain square backyard. I give wide berth to a peacock strolling through the rose garden dragging his train. He stops by the delphinium because his feathers sport the exact same blue. I was once attacked by a peacock at Warwick Castle, and the memory forms part of my old bird phobia.

A characteristic Cotswold dovecote, like a chopped-off tower topped with a conical roof, anchors one area. Against it grows an espaliered cherry bright with fruit.

Almost three hundred years later Kent’s design philosophy, “Nature abhors a straight line,” still guides well. Around the house the garden is similar to others, although I find it more vivacious, but away from the house we suddenly see Kent’s mind at work. “This is exciting—early, early landscape design,” I say. We pass statues and a folly, a serpentine, stone-lined rill that mysteriously quotes the Arab gardens in the Alhambra. “This is theory in action. He was in love with Roman gardens.”

“And England was once all Roman, of course. So it has double roots.”

We stop for a pastoral view. “This looks like a painting. The rural distance seems placed there for our benefit.” Kent created landscape tableaux: a cold pool for dipping, an “eyecatcher” fake ruin, cunningly placed statues of Venus, Apollo, and Pan, a pond, a small columned temple looking down on the river Cherwell. “I remember that Kent also was a set designer for the theatre. It makes sense.”

“Some gardens back then had resident hermits to add to the picturesque.”

“Maybe each garden should take a few homeless people.”

“We haven’t seen a single homeless person in the Cotswolds.”

“Is this your favorite? I like it the best.”

“After Bodnant, yes. No, maybe I like this one more. Do I have to choose?”

“No, but let’s go find a pub. I’m starving.”

After
lunch, sleepy and saturated with gardens, we press on regardless to Waddeson, the grandiose house and garden built by Ferdinand de Rothschild, that was picked up from the château country of France, whirled through Renaissance Italy, and miraculously set down in Buckinghamshire. The garden must live up to the fairy-tale architecture. The terrace level just behind the house makes another foray. A flamboyant fountain with horses reminds us of the Piazza Navona. The formal garden surrounding the fountain features built-up, squared-off mounds planted with primary red, with a few dashes of purple. Gray-green foliage tempers the effect somewhat, but it looks harsh and municipal. In fact, they love red here. New Guinea impatiens beds, surrounded by hens-and-chickens, also look quite bad. The weather is threatening, but no rain falls. We wander among the vast, hypnotic trees. Lots of naked boys holding grapes aloft and other classical statues punctuate the park. Friends are picnicking with folding tables and champagne glasses or lounging on the grass. Ed spots the grave of Poupon, a Rothschild dog. I’m not thrilled to come upon a wedding-cake aviary, though I like the confectionary demilune design. Ed visits all the birds, and I stand back. I do respond to one bird. Perhaps fifteen feet high, wittily placed in front of the aviary, the wire bird’s plumage is made of clipped lavender, hens-and-chickens, and many other plants that cleverly outline feathers and wings. Two immense crowns in front of the house are also “carpet planted.” A nineteenth-century idea, carpet bedding, now called Instaplant, is plotted by computer. The plants in trays slide into a form. Jeff Koons must have designed his giant flower puppy this way. Another playful focal point is an oversize—maybe twelve feet long—woven basket planted with herbs, nasturtiums, artichokes, and asparagus. The humor refreshes.

Scrawling on my garden guide, I note the names of several magnificent roses new to me. Gorgeous apricot Crown Princess Margereta grows in clusters. Mrs. Oakley Fisher reminds me of a flat rose I have in California, only Mrs. F. is creamy apricot. A must-have Crocus Rose radiates that happy icy salmon color.

I lean close to each, for the possibility of heady perfume. Most are what the rose books call “lightly scented,” which usually means you can’t smell a thing. In the gardens I’ve seen in England, scent does not figure as a major concern. Maybe you need fecund southern gardens for those hits of perfume that can make your head reel. I’ve always felt dizzy in the presence of gardenias. Is there some sedative element in the fragrance? The first gardens I knew, my mother’s, our neighbor’s, and my grandmother’s, remain a secret joy. High-as-the-house azaleas to hide under; ruffled pink camellias to float in a bowl until the edges of the petals turn brown; dwarf nasturtiums to gather so the dolls could smell their volatile, spicy fragrance; tough St. Augustine grass lawns to cartwheel across; crape myrtle with bark—pearly gray on one side, russet on the other—to peel; tea olive to inhale in my bedroom when there blew the slightest night breeze on a calm summer night; bridal wreath to tie into crowns; daylilies to shelter my dog, Tish, napping on the cool side of the house; the honeysuckle where every summer the bees built their swarm.

I tell Ed all these memories. Except for red geraniums in urns on the porch, his parents’ Winona garden was given over to vegetables—his daddy was a farmer until the age of thirty-five. They grew and pickled beets. Their potatoes and kohlrabi lasted into the cold weather, marrying well with the kielbasa, head cheese, and dill pickles his Polish mother made, along with several big loaves of bread every week. His strongest scent memory is lilac. He times his trips back to Minnesota to coincide with the lilac bloom. In California around Easter he always comes home with armfuls of lilac the minute it appears at the farmer’s market. The California lilac’s scent is faint but identifiable enough to transport him back to the lilac hedge behind his home in Winona.