The Garden, Part Two: The English Garden That Wasn’t

The Quiet Thread
Issue No.14 – The Garden, Part Two: The English Garden That Wasn’t
Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

We’re back with more stories from our garden — if you missed the first one, Ten Years of Rocks, you can catch up here.

We finished the rock garden in 2010. Ten years of carrying stone — an English garden, inspired entirely by books, magazines, and seed catalogues from England, built by two people who had been to London many times and never once set foot in the English countryside.

By then the whole picture was, we can now admit, faintly absurd. Two men, on top of a Norwegian mountain that had never asked for a garden, building one from scratch, modelled on a country neither of us had properly seen. During those days, we also had ornamental chickens wandering the paths — Sultan hens in their white turbans and feathered pantaloons, miniature and full-sized Chinese Cochins, a few Sussex, and some Silkies — while our books were doing well enough that journalists had started to come and interview us. We would show them around and declare, with total confidence, that ornamental chickens were the coming thing, and that everyone should have some. Delightfully eccentric, people had begun to call us. Looking at the chickens alone, it was hard to argue.

Two chicks were born that same spring, and we named them Katla and Eyja, after the Icelandic volcanoes — we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Our beloved chickens retired to our nephew’s care after about a year — travel got the better of us. He was delighted; egg sales, he pointed out, were pure profit once his parents covered the feed.

We were happy in the garden. We still missed England — missed seeing, with our own eyes, the gardens we had spent a decade quietly copying from books. That year, at last, we had the plane tickets to finally go.

Iceland had other ideas.

Eyjafjallajökull — a name we still cannot pronounce, and could not then either — erupted, and the ash grounded every plane in Europe.

We had carried rocks for ten years to build a garden inspired by a country we had never set foot in. The tickets were bought. The hotels were booked. And then, of all things — a volcano. On Iceland, a small island at the edge of Europe, sitting between two continents. Not a strike, not a war, not anything we had ever thought to prepare for.

We were not cancelling.

Ash could ground every plane in Europe, but it could not touch the railways. The trouble was working out how, exactly, one gets from Norway to England that way — there was no single place to search “Oslo to London by train.” We spent several days going country by country instead: the Norwegian railway, the Danish one, the German one, the Belgian one, and finally the English one, piecing together a route nobody had asked for in decades. The booking, in the end, took almost as long as the research — why book one train when you can book five?

Thirty hours in the end: Oslo to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Cologne, Cologne to Brussels, Brussels to London. In London we changed stations for Tunbridge Wells — and then, somewhere around Sevenoaks, the train broke down, and we finished the last stretch by bus.

England, at Last

We arrived, eventually, and the gardens were everything we had spent ten years imagining they would be. Sissinghurst, Hidcote, Rousham — we walked through them in a kind of daze, taking photographs of things we already half-knew from books, seeing them properly for the first time.

It took a while, but we finally arrived at Sissinghurst.

We knew, even as we walked through them, that we could never grow what they grew. The soft, generous English palette — roses that bloom from May to October, borders that shift through the whole season — none of it survives at 682.5 metres. We had learned that once already, expensively, in our first years here, watching most of what we planted die.

But the plants were never really the point, we realised, standing in Sissinghurst. It was the tending — the same pleasure, whether the ground is Kent or a Norwegian hillside, of watching a thing you made keep growing. We came home with no illusions about ever having an English garden — certain, for the first time, that we already had something worth just as much.

Nothing in Nature is Straight

We came home from England full of ideas and inspiration, but it would take a few years before we could act on any of them.

The warehouse — the one that had belonged to the train station from the very beginning — was in trouble. Both it and the extension built onto it in the 1960s had foundations that were failing badly, but it was the extension itself that was truly derelict, condemned, and beyond saving. The historical part was sound, and the engineers were clear about what it would take to save it: tear the extension down, build a proper new foundation in its place, and move the old building thirteen metres back onto it. It was only once we understood that the whole space in front of the house would open up in the process that we saw what else it could give us — the thing we had wanted since England: a walled garden of our own.

The warehouse, thirteen metres from home, waiting to be set down on its new foundation.

So when the builders came, that is what happened. The old foundation stones came up out of the ground as they lifted the building — large, scattered, haphazard, having shifted through a hundred years in the earth. While the builders still had the machine, I asked them to line the stones up in a row between the two houses. Arne and I built a wall of our own, running parallel to them, and filled the space between with earth: three sides of a walled garden, the fourth left open to the lake. It broke a rule I had spent ten years insisting on. Nothing in nature is straight, I used to tell Arne, every time we shaped another curve into the rock garden. And yet here it was: a bed running in a single straight line, the one deliberately straight thing on the entire property.

It has not stayed that way for long. Within a year or two, the geraniums and a few of the other perennials had already seeded themselves into the gravel path alongside it, softening the line until it barely reads as straight at all. Nature, it turns out, was never going to let a straight line stand for long — not even this one.

The wall is in there somewhere. These days you have to look for it.

The last piece was the grass. Between the two houses, we kept the gravel — but further along, toward the greenhouse, I wanted something softer. Arne did not want grass. He predicted fights about who would cut it and a noisy machine ruining the quiet we had spent years building. I won the argument anyway, and then solved the actual problem by buying a robot lawnmower. We are now on our second generation, which we call Gard, short for the brand Gardena, and also a traditional Norwegian man’s name. She has never once complained about whose turn it is.

The Garden Eventually Overruled

A garden this size, built over this many years, collects its own stories, and a few of them are worth telling on their own.

By the time the garage went up in 2019, the walled garden was already finished. The clematis has been climbing higher every year since.

There were the fans from Japan, for one — part of our own audience, more than anything, knitters and garden lovers who had flown in specifically to spend time with us and see the place for themselves. Word of the garden had apparently reached further than we realised, and one summer, while the front garden was still half finished, fifteen of them arrived. Knowing a little about Japanese garden aesthetics — the precision, the restraint, the sheer discipline of it — we panicked. For weeks beforehand we tidied and weeded and tried to force our very informal garden into something more presentable, and barricaded off the one section that was still, unmistakably, a building site. It made no difference. They got past the barricade without, as far as we could tell, even slowing down, and we found them deep in the one part of the garden we had least wanted anyone to see, photographing the fireweed. Wow, they kept saying, pointing at what was, by any definition we knew, a weed. We still do not fully understand why — but we took the hint, and the fireweed stayed. It is apparently a keeper. These days we no longer barricade the unfinished parts of the garden. We call them charming. It turned out to be the first of many lessons in the same subject: everything we tried so hard to control here, the garden eventually overruled — and was usually right to.

The rhododendrons taught us the same thing, in a different way. We planted them expecting, in time, tall and beautiful shrubs. What we had not accounted for was the snow — which lies here for months on end, a kind of blanket, warm in its own way for whatever it covers. Any evergreen that sticks out above it has no such luck; the cold here is too much for exposed growth to survive. So our rhododendrons never grow tall at all. Instead they spread low and wide, exactly to the height the snow allows, and cover the ground each summer in a carpet of colour more intense and abundant than any tall shrub could manage.

The carpet, in full colour, no taller than the snow ever allowed it to be

There was the greenhouse, which we had wanted for years, the wanting sharpened considerably by everything we had just seen in England. The real thing arrived for Arne’s fiftieth birthday: a proper greenhouse from Gabriel Ash. English, naturally, cedar-framed, twelve square metres, set on an insulated brick foundation, because this is Norway and the frost does not negotiate. We put it in completely the wrong place — out in the open, right at the edge of the lake, where it looks magnificent and catches the sun for most of the day, with the water reflecting the light and the heat straight back into the glass. Which is another way of saying it is an excellent place to fry a tomato. We solved that one, more or less, the way we solve most things here: by copying someone smarter than us. A nursery we visited had hung its greenhouse glass with burlap for shade, and we stole the idea within the hour. It helps. It does not fix the real problem, which is the site itself. It is still, all these years later, one of our favourite places on the whole property. I have suggested, more than once, that it would work far better moved into the shade of the rock garden. Arne is reluctant. I do not have the votes.

The greenhouse, burlap draped over the south and west sides where the sun does the most damage — the north side, mercifully, needs none.

The tomatoes, this week, are proving the point for us. We were away for a night, and by the time we left, Arne had all but given up on them — stalled, he said, going nowhere. We came home to find they had grown after all, right on schedule, just before a heatwave arrives that will very likely finish them off unless we get some shade over the glass, or move the pots out entirely. We are, as ever, discussing it.

There was the kitchen garden, more recently, a honeycomb of hexagons — Arne’s design, genuinely beautiful, the kind of thing visitors photograph before they have noticed a single vegetable. It is a kitchen garden in name. The potatoes come up reliably; this year the strawberries did well, most years they do not. Everything else is a negotiation. We cover the beds with fleece against the cold, and the insects move into the warmth underneath and eat whatever we were protecting. We will not use pesticides, so the compromise is marigolds planted in among the vegetables, to draw the insects off somewhere else — which raises a question we have never quite resolved. If we are already planting marigolds for their sake, and the marigolds are doing rather better than the vegetables they are meant to protect, at what point does a kitchen garden simply admit what it wants to be? We have not decided. Kitchen gardeners, in any case, we are not.

And there was Arne’s philosophy about weeding, which is this: the more you cram in, the less you have to weed. He is, annoyingly, right, and also the reason we now spend a good part of every summer moving things around instead — the plants, packed in that tightly, turned on each other, and we have been refereeing the survivors ever since. A garden, we have learned, is never finished. Ours is mostly just being endlessly rearranged.

A Job She Never Had

Lyda was our very first dog. She came to us in the second summer we spent at the station — a rescue, part Border Collie, part blue merle Collie, and part something we will never know. She had never been bred or raised to work, but something of the instinct was in her all the same, and it surfaced every time we picked up a tool. The moment we were busy, she was busy too — she simply had no real job to put it to, and never had.

Lyda resting, which was never really her strong suit.

It was the trees that suffered for it. We had planted a young windbreak along one side, for privacy — we wanted a sanctuary, somewhere the outside world could not see in — and Lyda ran that line up and down, up and down, every time we worked, tearing up the saplings we needed to survive. She was not being destructive on purpose. She was answering an instinct with nowhere proper to go.

Eventually the trees needed the fence more than she needed the freedom. We closed off the rock garden and built a gate, and for a time kept her on the other side of it while we worked. I still remember her there — not barking, just standing at the gate, watching us with the saddest eyes, waiting to be let back into the job she loved and had never quite learned how to do properly. Of everything in this chapter, it is the one solution I still feel a little sorry for.

The trees grew. We have our sanctuary now, exactly as we wanted it — tall enough, in fact, that we are quietly discussing which of them might need thinning, which feels like a strange problem to have after spending years willing them to grow at all.

Lyda has been gone a long time now. Arne built her a small resting place not long after — brick, with a flower pot on top — facing the very fence she used to run. We still think of her every time we walk past it.

None of it happened the way we planned it, and all of it, somehow, became the garden. A wall built for straight lines that the plants immediately began to soften. A greenhouse sited for beauty that mostly grows cacti and burlap. A kitchen garden that cannot decide what it wants to be. A stand of trees we now have to thin, having once begged them to grow at all. There was no gardening culture here to teach us any of this. We worked it out ourselves, one problem at a time — which is, we have come to think, exactly what a garden is for two people trained in an entirely different field, handed a hillside, and left to work it out.

Which leaves the people who did teach us — the ones who fed us, inspired us, argued with us about manure, and slapped our hands away from the flowers. That is the next part of the story, and we will come to it soon.

From our little railway station in Norway, where the fireweed is thriving and about to bloom, the marigolds are outgrowing the radishes. And once again, it’s exactly the season we spent all winter waiting for.

ARNE & CARLOS

If you’ve ever wondered what a Sultan hen looks like: Exactly this. The other two are Katla and Eyja, our resident volcanoes.

The hexagons, mid-season — some thriving, some undecided, one already quietly becoming something else

Ludvig, our Bantam Cochin, who ran the coop the way his namesake ran an expedition — with total, unearned confidence.

Every household has its awkward teenager. Ours was Ørnulf, a young Cochin rooster.

The rarest of photographs. Lyda at rest. Arne on the phone, momentarily not working, is the only reason it exists

Not tending to much — the rhododendrons manage that themselves. Mostly just enjoying the view.