The next best thing

Three potted olive trees cling tenaciously to life year after year. Despite such sorry confinement, their branches continue to shoot bravely upwards and outwards. In later months they will, surprisingly, flower. I’ve never yet seen an olive on any of them though and I’m not optimistic; on the other hand, someone told me it takes seven years for fruit to appear. If you want a provençal garden, go south. Or, try to create something lesser in Dorset.

Much inspired by a fig tree of gigantic proportions outside my bedroom window in Valence, I later purchased a ficus carica from a small man at a car-boot sale in Poole. The tree in Valence provided two crops of fruit annually. Night after endlessly hot night, we would eat at wooden tables under that tree discussing the price of melons, whilst plump figs dropped and splattered their way into conversation. My fig tree, like the olives, is also in a pot. It boasts one would-be trunk with five new branches. They are knobbly with promise and the first tiny green, pointed shoots are in evidence.

Rosemary is strong and upstanding. I have seen it growing wild, falling over ancient heat-bearing stone walls, dressed in a multitude of sharply blue flowers. Each of my plants bears a different hue of green and although there will, eventually, be blossom, it will be of the variety hindered by sea storms. I grow it to accompany lamb that is baked slowly for five or six hours. Sprigs are useless: you need a posy full. This after the lamb has been severely bruised with the yellow leafed thyme that flourishes, untended, in a nearby tub.

On the wall, I notice the soggy brown remains of last year’s geraniums which, latterly, poured from a French bread basket purchased for one euro on a long passed foreign Sunday. In the summer, the blooms were Normandy red; nomenclature that gardeners would fail to recognise unless they’d driven down the Cherbourg peninsula. A profusion of lavender grown to encourage summer bees currently displays a greyness resonant only of its unimaginative English environs. The gardener of minimal proficiency needs a fortitude borne of memory to continue.

To compensate, I dress my garden in jewels that would, indoors, appear cheap and worthless. Outside, they catch the indifferent light of the weak winter sunshine. They sparkle and send iridescent rays darting across the tiny lawn. A mirror tile attracts and distresses a loyal blackbird who views its image as a threatening competitor. I remove the tile which has added extra dimension to my small plot in preference of the real thing.