From the halo of smoke – two ruddy pinched cheeks, a massive smile and a fluffy white bouffant of hair full of twigs. She turned to face me with a large garden fork and beamed: “I do love a bonfire don’t you?”
This was Mary and she was burning down my garden.
This was also the moment I met the woman who changed my life and gave me the greatest gift anyone can give – the love of gardening.
I was 28‚ working in TV news in London and had just bought a flat in East Dulwich, South London. The first half of our terrace outdoor space belonged to the lower ground tenant James – an IT consultant who spent most of his days lounging in his Moroccan trousers, smoking and being told off by Mary for having a messy garden and “wasting his life”.
A narrow-fenced passage alongside James’ garden opened onto our 30ft long thin sloped space with a looming established Elder Pine. It was dry, shaded, sheltered, with 6ft high brambles, ground elder and families of urban foxes in the undergrowth.
We loved it. An oasis of peace in a city of noise.
Mary took less than five minutes to This is a trained form of fruit tree (usually an apple) with a very short vertical trunk topped with a pair of low horizontal branches only about 45cm (18in) high, trained outwards to the left and right. Several are usually grown in a row, as an edging to a bed. Stepover trees are compact, attractive and productive, with easy-to-pick fruit, but need regular, careful pruning.
“We need to put a fence up or we will be bossed around forever,” whispered my husband as we walked away.
He was right. We were, but... we loved it.
In the first days we took to tacking the brambles, slicing them down vigorously, along with our skin. Our arms, hands and legs ripped apart as we hadn’t yet learnt the joy of elbow length gloves. We went to work on Monday after a vigorous gardening weekend in our new home leaving a pile of cut-down brambles, dead tree branches and weeds, to which Mary took it upon herself to burn.
We were too flabbergasted at her audacity to object. She wanted them tidied up and took it upon herself to do what she wanted.
We were also too naïve to realise it wasn’t true that the neighbours allowed her to divide their plants and share them with other neighbours. In those first months, she would offer all sorts of new plants for the garden, which she told us had been shared by the new neighbours. Nobody thought this well-spoken, beautiful and elegant 86-year-old would redistribute neighbourhood plants when on holiday: “Oh I gave them this anyway and they don't have a clue what they have in their garden,” she’d tell me.
The garden became a place of learning, a place of discovery, a new way of seeing the world and nature, as every day I’d join Mary on her white filigree metal table, drinking tea from a pot ingrained with the tea from years of gatherings. This love and appreciation of nature spread through the street as she took everyone under her wing. Howard from over the road would appear and join us. Mary and Howard would spend days scrumping fruit from public trees. The fruit would go to Sarah another neighbour who’d make and sell jam and we’d eat Mary’s scones with tea while potting up her seedlings. Hayley down the road, in her 20’s would also pop in and get tips and advice. Mary was impressed someone so young cared but we all loved Mary.
I worked on breaking televison news and the Olympics were coming to London so my weeks were intense but if I didn’t join in and laid around in bed on a weekend, she’d shout through my letterbox that we were lazy and needed to get up and out until I gave in.
Overexcited and new to gardening, I’d buy all the pretty stuff in flower. I came home with a Bougainvillea and planted it in the roots and shade of an established tree,
“You know nothing”, Mary scoffed. “I was ridiculous buying that for the UK and had too much cash to waste”. So I started taking her plant shopping. She'd shop vicariously through me, suggesting she’d always wanted a Forest Pansy – I bought it. She picked me a Tai Haku white cherry blossom and some Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’. I bought ‘Elsa Späth’ Clematis and Monarda. She introduced me to sedum and grasses and tried to talk me out of hydrangeas for such a dry garden (which I ignored and spent the next four years watering twice daily). She introduced me to RHS Wisley. I didn’t know places even existed like this. I was smitten.
It was where we spotted Magnolia Black Tulip tree in the lawn with deep red cupped tulip shaped flowers.
On our days out, we ate cake – lots of it and she told me I was too fat. With Mary, her directness was funny and as she was so compelling and warm and interesting – we all let her get away with it. I loved her stories and the shocking snippets about her life she’d throw into a conversation. She fulfilled me. I loved her. We all did.
She’d been a model, escaping her restrictive family and life in “The Argentine” by taking up a job as an au pair with a family on a boat to England. Once in London, she got a job modelling wedding dresses for Fortnum and Mason. She had drawers of elegant leather gloves and fur coats she’d show us. Her house was full of antiques and curiosities. Everything about her design and art, her paintings and curtains were fascinating.
I’d spend every moment when not at work at Mary’s house or garden, learning, chatting and laughing. “Gardening teaches you about life,” she’d say. “Some things work, some don’t, you get lucky, you don’t but there is always another year.” That has always stayed with me.
Over copious pots of tea from her tannin-stained teapot on the white table full of seedlings, she’d tell me about her boyfriends of old and the gardens she’d visited, the people she’d mingled with as a model. The semi royal who wanted to marry her and gave her a cheque “to go and improve herself”, the crooners she’d danced with and the world travel she’d experienced.
She fed around 20 foxes and they’d sit round the garden – often trying to steal shoes from your feet. Mary’s garden was like nothing I’d experienced growing up in York where people filled squares of neat lawn with edges of bedding plants, boring shrubs and a few These are fleshy, rounded, underground storage organs, usually sold and planted while dormant. Examples include daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, lilies, onions and garlic. The term is often used to cover other underground storage organs, including corms, tubers and rhizomes.
Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.
In Summer I’d help cover her large Black Turkey fig tree fruit with her cut up silk stockings to stop the blackbirds eating them. The 20ft tree looking quite the sight from the street with luxurious ladies hosiery hanging from the fruit.
She offered half her allotment to us and through it we learned about food and the soil. She’d grow chard that she’d fry in olive oil and salt – sharing nibbles with us. We ate food we’d never tried growing up in Yorkshire – Cavolo Nero kale, Crown Prince squash and yellow 'Gold Rush' courgettes.
She propagated everything or would dig up some of her plants to share. Our garden and gardens since have became a reflection of her style, her knowledge her love of nature and her deep understanding of plants. She seeped into our entire beings and moulded who we are today.
So when she started collapsing in the kitchen, I’d help her up, call her son Julian and worry she was ill. She told us to stop fretting about nothing, but slipped into chat one day, the words that cut deep – she had pancreatic cancer.
She stayed home through her illness and there were days when she’d lie on the lawn incapacitated whilst instructing me firmly where to replant her hydrangea. Me with a spade in hand, digging and being shouted at for doing it wrong. She couldn’t even sit up and would often vomit. I’d protest that maybe it wasn’t what she should do but she wanted to garden to her last breath and I owed it to her to help her.
On one of her last days, she wouldn’t eat or drink and I tried to get her to sip tea. She shouted at me; “I don’t want it and I never liked tea anyway”. I belly laughed and still do. We must have drunk 5000 cups; “Oh Mary, Mary you’re so contrary”.
On the day she died, her son Julian called me. The grief overpowering. I sobbed uncontrollably with such hollow feelings of loss. Why did she have to be such a different age to me? We should have been born at the same time – been friends forever. Nobody loved gardening like we did together. It wasn’t fair she was so much older than me. She was one of my best friends. As I walked home down the street, a huge rainbow took over the entire street and ended at my feet. Such comfort in what nature was offering me in that moment.
Her son Julian, now a forever friend, gave me her homemade Can refer to either home-made garden compost or seed/potting compost: • Garden compost is a soil improver made from decomposed plant waste, usually in a compost bin or heap. It is added to soil to improve its fertility, structure and water-holding capacity. Seed or potting composts are used for growing seedlings or plants in containers - a wide range of commercially produced peat-free composts are available, made from a mix of various ingredients, such as loam, composted bark, coir and sand, although you can mix your own.
A seedling is a young plant grown from seed.
Mulch is a layer of material, at least 5cm (2in) thick, applied to the soil surface in late autumn to late winter (Nov-Feb). It is used to provide frost protection, improve plant growth by adding nutrients or increasing organic matter content, reducing water loss from the soil, for decorative purposes and suppressing weeds. Examples include well-rotted garden compost and manure, chipped bark, gravel, grit and slate chippings.
Her plants now thrive in my garden, and the gardens of others, after I propagated and shared them like Mary would. When her ashes were returned, with Julian we planted a rose cutting of Madame Alfred Carrière as it’s tough, beautiful, and resilient like Mary. It still flowers every year on her birthday.
At RHS Chelsea this year I spotted irises, the designer told me were heritage Benton End irises. They match some in my garden. I thought to myself – I wonder had she been to Benton End? Was this a story she neglected to tell me? Oh I wish I knew all the other antics she had got up to...
I walk down the garden brushing my hands through her Stipa Tenuissima, pleased she taught me sedum is such a staple when the heads turn deep red in autumn.
Can someone’s soul be in a garden? Mary’s very essence is in ours.
The Iceberg roses flower every year over and over – like Mary’s hair popping up amongst the perennials - bobbing white bouffant flowers. The rose – relentless and hardy. In Spring – the Magnolia Black Tulip emerges – breathtaking beauty and as grand as the day we gasped at it on the lawn at Wisley.
