Page 56 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘Both right. I thought I’d try lemon and lime together. I think I’ve got the sugar content right … not too sweet, so it will be very refreshing in summer.’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, finishing the rest of mine.
‘I must remember to keep aside small boxes of ice-cream for you to put in your freezer, Marnie,’ she said kindly. ‘And I’ll bring you some more over soon, Ned.’
I thanked her: a free supply of delicious home-made ice-cream is not a usual perk of a gardening job.
Elf said she hoped I wasn’t finding the work of looking after two gardens too hard and I assured her it wasn’t.
‘In fact, I wish the days were longer!’
‘But aren’t you exhausted? I know for a fact that you’ve been up at daybreak for the last two days, working in our garden!’
‘Oh, no, I’m used to hard outdoor work and anyway, in my book, gardening counts as fun.’
‘Mine too,’ Ned said, and then described how we’d cleaned up the folly and pruned back mega amounts of overgrown rose brambles together.
‘Even Gertie’s now enthused to the point where she’s voluntarily offering barrowloads of her best, well-rotted manure to mulch the rose beds.’
‘I want to get the rose garden to a state where I can leave it and go and help Ned with the water feature and wetland area,’ I said.
‘Yes, I could do with another pair of hands to help finish the hard landscaping in that corner. Then we can plant it up. I’ve ordered a lot of plants from a specialist nursery and Gert’s been growing others from seed.’
‘Yes, she said she’d been planting up a few of them,’ I agreed.
‘I ought to get back to the office and tweak the website a bit more,’ Ned said, though leaning back in his chair with a refill of lemonade, as if he was there for the long haul. ‘And I realized earlier that I should already have distributed the leaflets about the garden all over the district … just one more thing to fit in before we open!’
‘When did you say the information boards were coming?’ I asked.
‘First thing Monday, so I’ll have to fix those up.’
‘It’s going to be hectic till opening day, I can see,’ Elf said, ‘but onceEaster weekend and all the fuss of the opening is over, things will quieten down until summer and give you a chance to get into the swing of being open.’
‘I hope we’re in the swing of a lot of visitors at four pounds a pop,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, we’re sunk.’
‘You’ll probably have loads of tourists coming over from Starstone Edge when the holiday season gets underway,’ Elf said. ‘Did I say Clara rang to confirm what time you want her on Friday for the opening ceremony? I told her to get here for eleven and I’d give her coffee first: was that OK?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he said, then explained to me: ‘The garden will be officially opened by one of our local celebs, Clara Mayhem Doome. She’s an epigrapher, but you probably know her for her crime novels.’
‘Gosh, yes, I’ve got most of them! Treena used to bring them out for me when I was in France and I bought the latest one on Tuesday.’
‘Her husband’s the poet, Henry Doome, but he’s not so keen on crowds, so I don’t know if he will come with her,’ Elf said. ‘But our beekeeping friend, Tottie, probably will.’
I must have looked at sea, because Ned said, ‘Starstone Edge is a valley high up on the moors, a few miles above Thorstane, though most of it was flooded to make a reservoir. Clara, her husband and a mixed bag of family and friends all live in the Red House, part of the hamlet that escaped the drowning.’
‘Yes, and now in summer there’s lots of holidaymakers and sailing on the lake and that kind of thing,’ Elf said. ‘One of the Doomes has opened up the old manor house as a very expensive wedding reception venue.’
‘The weather can be really bad there over winter, but then there’s a bit of a population explosion from late spring to early autumn, so any businesses have to make their money then,’ Ned said.
‘You can take some of your garden leaflets over there – and there are lots more places you can leave them.’ Elf began to count on her fingers: ‘There’s the Pike with Two Heads, the cracker factory on the other side of Great Mumming … the ghost trail and the RomanBath up in Halfhidden … and there are a couple of big houses further afield that are open to the public, like Rufford Old Hall, near Ormskirk.’
‘I’d better quickly draw up a list,’ Ned said. ‘It’s not something I can put off until we’ve opened.’
‘Like expanding the shop – I think that really would make a lot of money and you did say there was an outbuilding on the other side of the wall that you might possibly be able to knock through into. I’d like to see that,’ I said.
‘I think the money would be better spent on the garden for the time being,’ he said dubiously. ‘But I’ll be about all day tomorrow, if you want to come over and look at it.’
‘I could do, in the morning, but I think my sister’s coming over later in the day,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have another walk round the Grace Garden anyway and see what you’ve been doing.’
