The Garden, Part One: Ten Years of Rocks

The Quiet Thread
Issue No.13 – The Garden, Part One: Ten Years of Rocks
Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

This morning we walked around the garden, as we often do, and it stopped us both for a moment. It is looking magnificent this year — better, I think, than we can remember it. There is bloom everywhere you turn, and in a week or two the peonies and the delphiniums, two of our great favourites, will be out as well.

We stood in the middle of all of it and found ourselves thinking back to the beginning. To what was here before any of it.

Which was nothing. If anything, slightly less than nothing.

There was nothing here in the beginning. Twenty-seven years later, we have plenty to do.

The Weekend Arne Bought a Station

This was 1999. Arne first saw the station in February, on one of his trips up to visit a friend, and by the time he came home he had bought it.

He bought it without me. I was working in the city. This was before we had mobile phones — they were only just arriving, and we were in no hurry, holding out until 2002 — so there was no calling ahead with the news. He simply came home, and I asked how his weekend had been.

“It was wonderful,” he said. “The weather was beautiful. We went skiing. We sat in a café. I got so much done on my knitting. And by the way, I bought a train station.”

I asked him to repeat the part that came after the knitting.

He had seen it on a beautiful winter’s day, he explained, and it had appeared before him majestically, rising out of the snow — the most wonderful place either of us could ever hope to live. He was entirely sincere about this. He usually is. And Arne, when sincere, is almost impossible to argue with, so although I began the evening fairly certain he had lost his mind, I ended it, as I always do, completely won over.

He had not, it should be said, taken a single photograph. So for the next four months I lived with the house I had built in my own head, entirely out of his description and a generous quantity of snow.

Four Months Later

The paperwork was settled by early summer, and we drove up together to see it at last.

I had had four months to imagine the place. With no photograph to go on, I had built it entirely out of Arne’s description — the majestic building, the extraordinary light, the snow — and I had, if anything, improved on it. By the time we made the drive, I was looking forward to the most wonderful home either of us could ever hope to live in.

Whatever I was imagining, this was not it.

The station as we found it, 1999. As if the derelict house and the grey platform were not enough, there was also a pile of gravel — mercifully not ours, and gone within days.

It is a wooden house, and the paint was flaking off the exterior walls. There was no running water and no electricity. The house stood on a flat grey platform without a tree, a plant, or a single blade of anything growing — just grey, and more grey, and a lake just beyond it, where people came to fish.

I was standing in one of the rooms, taking in the full scale of what lay ahead, when the entire house began to shake. A car was driving past on the platform — down the long side of the house at considerable speed, around the corner, and back up the other side, without the faintest suggestion that anyone lived there.

Then it was quiet again.

I turned to Arne and told him I would never forgive him for this. I believe I meant it at the time.

But there we were. A grey, ugly platform, a flaking house, and cars using our property as a thoroughfare to the fish. Something, clearly, had to be done — and quickly. So the next day, we went shopping.

You Cannot Dig a Platform

We drove to the nursery and came home with thirty rose bushes and an assortment of other plants, chosen for no better reason than that we liked the look of them and knew nothing whatsoever about the place we meant to put them. Then we went to the mill for posts and planks, because the cars, it was clear, were not going to stop on their own. We carted it all up to the station, set it down, and stood there among the plants and the timber, ready to begin.

I took a shovel to the ground, leaned my full weight on it, and the shovel broke.

Arne, who does not accept that kind of thing lightly, fetched a long iron bar and went at the very same spot, with real determination, for the better part of half an hour. Then we both stood back to admire his progress: thirty rose bushes, a stack of fence posts, one broken shovel, and a hole in the ground roughly deep enough to bury a finger.

A platform, you see, is built with enormous care so that nothing will ever grow on it. This is an excellent quality in a platform. It is a less excellent quality in a garden, and it appeared to apply equally to fence posts, which were not going into that ground either.

The fence, finally up. By now the house had had its first repaint — the flaking white was gone, replaced with red. The fence itself took the best part of a year: it turned out you can drive posts into a platform, once you work out how.

I said — not seriously, and mostly out of despair — that perhaps we should just plant the whole garden in flowerpots.

Arne thought about this for a moment and decided it was a very good idea. By the end of the evening my joke had quietly become the plan, and I, true to form, had gone from making it in sarcasm to defending it with my whole heart. If we could not put the plants into the ground, we would simply bring the ground to the plants.

Ten Years of Rocks

The method, once we had committed to it, was straightforward enough in theory. We rolled large rocks into rough circles — nothing straight, we agreed, with great conviction and absolutely no expertise, because nothing in nature is straight — and filled each circle with soil we carried in ourselves, bag by bag, since the platform beneath us was not about to provide any. We called them islands. They were really containers: rings of stone holding imported earth, perched on top of a ground that wanted nothing to do with either.

We placed the very first island at the far end of the property, because that is the first thing you see when you drive in, and even knowing nothing, we were already thinking about how the place would greet a visitor. Had we known what ten years of carrying rocks does to a back, we would have placed it considerably nearer the house. We did not know. We placed it about as far from the house as it is physically possible to place anything on our property, and we have been walking the distance ever since.

And then we carried rocks for ten years. I want to be clear that this is not a figure of speech.

We began with the stones closest to hand and got through three or four wheelbarrows in the process, a loaded wheelbarrow being, as it turns out, not built for this sort of treatment. The one that survived was, of course, second-hand. Arne’s mother — the original Queen of Thrifting — turned it up for a hundred kroner: a professional model, built for Statens vegvesen, the Norwegian roads authority, and therefore designed to be treated appallingly by people doing more or less exactly what we were doing. It refused to break. It is still with us, retired now to gentler duties, ferrying leaves and weeds down to the compost.

When we ran out of stones near the house, we crossed to the far side of the lake and brought more back in a small Mitsubishi pickup we bought for the purpose. The truly enormous ones never made it onto the truck at all — they were simply too heavy to lift — and those we rolled, a little at a time, half an hour of effort here and there, over days and sometimes weeks, until at last they sat where we wanted them. I will not pretend we always remembered, by the end, why a particular rock had seemed worth it.

About five years in. The islands built up, the rocks in place, the first plants taking hold — and the old platform still showing through in the middle.

The bricks were Arne’s doing entirely. We were perhaps three years in, with maybe a third of the rock garden built and a great deal of carrying still ahead of us, when I came down one day to find him at the edge of the lake with Lyda — our sheepdog, who loved nothing in the world so much as the sight of the two of us working, and who was beside herself that something was so clearly afoot. Arne was crouched over a small pile of old bricks. He was, he explained, saving them. Then he showed me what he had in mind: two laid one way, two laid the other, a pattern already fully formed in his head for paths we did not yet have.

He had got the idea in Klaipėda, on the Lithuanian coast. We had been there together, walked the same streets at the same time, and to this day he will tell you those streets were paved in beautiful old brick. I have no memory of any brick whatsoever. We have discussed this at length, on several continents and over many years, and have got precisely nowhere — because the trouble is that somebody has to be right. One of these days we are simply going to have to go back to Klaipėda and settle it.

The bricks in the lake were the first of them — the remains of a chimney, we think, from a house that had stood there long ago. When the lake had no more to give, we remembered a derelict house that had collapsed in the woods, and went to fetch its bricks in backpacks. We broke two backpacks doing it. The one that survived was, naturally, the old one — a metal-framed pack from the loft of Arne’s childhood farm, most likely his great-grandfather’s. We filled it, took turns carrying it the half-hour home, and discovered along the way that it holds exactly six bricks and not one more.

Believe it or not, for a good few years this was simply our life — looking for rocks in the forest and bricks in the water, and thinking it an entirely reasonable way for two grown men to spend their days. Some people called us original. Others, eccentric. The garden makes a strong case for delightfully eccentric, which is the version we prefer.

And all the while we carried, the garden was quietly beginning to live. In the warm gaps between the rocks, where there was almost no soil to speak of, houseleeks settled in and spread — small green rosettes that ask for nothing but a stone to sit on and a winter to sleep through. We had not especially planned them. They simply recognised the place, which was rather more than we had managed to do. Slowly, between one summer and the next, the grey began to go green.

Bricks and stone we carried in by hand, years on — the moss and the alpine flowers grown in over the top, as though it had always been here.

The Last Rock

After ten years, the rock garden was finished. Or very nearly — for there is a story about the last rock, and it remains one of my favourites.

There were roadworks not far from us that summer, and among the rubble we had spotted an enormous rock, far larger than anything the two of us could ever have moved on our own. Arne wanted it. He wanted it the way one wants a thing without being able to fully explain why — as a kind of trophy, perhaps, for ten years of all the smaller ones. We asked the road crew whether they might bring it in for us, and they did, lowering it into place with a machine in a single afternoon, and free of charge.

Arne looked at it for a moment and announced that now this one was here, it was the last rock.

And it was. After a decade of carrying every single stone ourselves, the very last one arrived as a gift — the one rock we did not have to earn.

Arne and the last rock — the only one we never had to carry, and the one he is proudest of.

Which brings us, more or less, back to this morning: the two of us standing in the middle of a garden that was once a grey platform you could not get a spade into, watching it come into bloom on top of every rock we ever carried, and the one we did not. We are, as we are every year about now, quietly amazed that any of it works at all.

How we learned what would actually grow up here — and what the garden taught us, slowly, in return — is for the next part of the story. We will come to it in two weeks, by which time the peonies and the delphiniums should be out and, if the weather carries on as it has been, hot by day and raining every evening, we may well be living in something closer to a jungle.

From our railway station in Valdres, where the garden is lovely today and will be lovelier still by the time we write again.

ARNE & CARLOS

The two survivors, still with us after 27 years. We went through plenty of newer, lesser things along the way — but the wheelbarrow and the backpack, both handed down, simply refused to give up.

An island a few summers on — earth held in a ring of rock, and finally something growing in it. We had brought every stone and every spadeful of soil; the yellow came on its own.

The red house, the gravel, and Lyda on patrol — happiest, as ever, when there was work afoot. The beds were beginning to take; the platform was slowly losing the argument.