I figure I should blow my own horn and list the few (so far) accolades I’ve received for my writing. My Middle Grade novel, The Eco-Warrior and the Princess, was just named a runner-up for the 2023 Watson, Little x Indie Novella Prize. Couldn’t believe it! It was also shortlisted for the Hachette Children’s Novel Award in 2022. I’m actively trying to ‘get it out there’ as I write this.
An excerpt of my screenplay for my own novel, Two Scoops of Summer, was shortlisted for the BAFTA Rocliffe new writing competition in children’s media 2019. That was very exciting. The full screenplay of Two Scoops of Summer made it to the semi-finals of the Shepperton Screenwriting Festival. Proof! It also made it to the quarter-finals of the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition. More proof! I’m working on making this list longer, believe me.
The American Lost in an English Garden
I have to be perfectly honest. I have yet to grasp the concept of this English garden thing. After ten years, I am still coming to terms with owning a rectangular box for a back yard. Fenced in with precision. Living with constant embarrassment that our neighbours with the perfect bowling green-worthy garden have to look down onto ours of the, what I like to call, white trash variety.
I must preface this by saying I live under a roof where the favourite saying is, “We’ll get it done by Christmas.” No one ever says which Christmas, exactly, but a Christmas, for sure.
Where do I start. The “lawn.” It has turned into a work of modern art, really, complete with a crazy golf-course of bumps and dips, a damp sponge of moss, and crop circles not made by aliens, rather by the dead ground left behind from last summer’s round paddling pool. But if you squint from a distance, hey, it’s green. Ish. And we will tear it all up, flatten it, and lay down a new one, once everything else is finished. I role my eyes at this and mow it anyway even though half of it is missing due to being a football pitch.
But to replace the lawn, we’ll have to get everything off of it. Take what looks like a giant black spider caught in a net that occupies a good chunk of it. That would be my son’s trampoline. A lockdown upgrade, if you will. Then there’s my husband’s weekend project: the garden room. For this, we have his panic buy of extra-long 2 x 4s covered by blue tarps that snap in the wind and pressure-treated sheets piled on the inherited patio that we will have built our 1-room extension over, you know, by Christmas. And don’t forget the BBQ, the super-sized one that hubby just had to have. The one we forgot to clean at the end of last summer only to scrape layers of blue fuzzy mould off. Cleaning that was a fun test of a marriage.
We do have a nearly-finished new patio, out in the back corner, lovingly laid by said hubby. While he spends hours out there mixing cement and lifting slabs of slate much too heavy for him, I scour the internet looking for a loungy outdoor corner couch that can be delivered by, you guessed it, Christmas. People are really into garden furniture of late. And next to that patio is the slab for the garden room. Hubs has built the base, at least. And the back wall. I’ll give him that much. But now needs a crew of body-builders to get that wall off the floor so it’s actually, you know, a wall. I like to quiz/torture him about how he will accomplish said things.
Now, my attempts at owning a garden with pretty and colourful flowers are sprinkled around in pots. Otherwise, we’d have to just dig them all up for that future perfect lawn. So, as I have been living in a temporary stasis, I have planted a few pansies here, a couple of something-or-others there. I loved the Agapanthus (I just Googled purple ball-like flowers so I could write that impressive name) that my neighbour gave me a couple of years ago. But it didn’t rebloom last summer! Did it think I just didn’t care enough for it to bother? Did it need a mate somewhere else in the garden so it could reproduce, I mean, is that even a thing? Perhaps it was too embarrassed to show its face in our ‘garden.’ I simply do not know. I see its green shards breaking through the soil again this summer, but I will not get my hopes up.
We did manage to grow a crackin’ crop of lettuce last summer. You know, we worried that grocery stores would run out of the green roughage due to Covid or Brexit so we decided to grow our own. Okay, I lie, we bought lettuce already growing, replanted it, and called it ours. But we didn’t kill it! It may have been flattened half a dozen times by my son’s errant footballs but it all still eventually landed in a bowl on our table smothered in Paul Newman salad dressing.
But with all the talk about maintaining pristine English gardens, ones that are soothing to the soul, I find myself counting on one hand how many warm enough days we typically have to actually sit out there without a jumper on to enjoy it. When I browse online for overpriced rattan furniture, I genuinely wonder how often I’d actually use it. I envision myself lounging in the shade on a sunny hot day, feet up, with a sweaty glass of iced tea on the table that I spent a whole day contemplating before purchasing, trying to keep my eyes open on an overdue library book, feeling cold but too lazy to go inside to grab a cardie.
I don’t hear my neighbours out in their perfect garden much at all other than when he scarifies the lawn or power-washes his patio. I bet they sit inside and look out at it more than anything because it’s just too dang cold! Or, maybe they don’t want to watch my son launching himself so high in his trampoline that he can wave to them over the perfect hedge wall (theirs, not ours).
Hopefully someday, when we have our finished garden room, our furnished patio, and our flat moss- and dip-free lawn, I will understand the necessity and the pride of owning a lovely English garden. Until then, I will keep telling myself, it’ll get done. By Christmas.