Working from home has both good and bad points. There’s no commute, so in theory I can start work from the minute I open my eyes in the morning and carry on until I fall asleep at night. That’s a recipe for burnout, so I try and schedule some time out in the fresh air every day. Dog-walking takes up at least a couple of hours each day, and I love escaping out into the garden.
The trouble is that the rush of spring brings its own pressure with weeds springing up all over the place. They keep growing, and the writing deadlines keep coming. While I’m sat at my keyboard I’m aching to get outside. When I’m outside, I’m fretting about that I should be writing. It’s all pressure, even if I love the tasks I must do.
This week, it got even harder to concentrate on my novel as I found myself caught up in the ancient story of the Town Mouse and Country Mouse. A little creature almost hitched a ride with me into town, and got me thinking about a new project.
For the past few weeks rain has been falling on Tottering Towers in amounts rarely seen outside of arty Japanese films. I’m in the early stages of writing a new novel. Work went well while the weather was bad because I wasn’t tempted outside. Then the sun came out for the first time in what felt like years.
Much as I love the characters I’m creating, it’s hard to concentrate on fictional family feuds while real life is speeding up outside. I wanted to get out and do some gardening. When DD asked for some help in her own little plot, it was the perfect excuse to leave writing behind for a few hours. I couldn’t get there fast enough.
DD’s cottage in Tewkesbury is the cutest little house you’re ever likely to see. Today it would be called Brownfield Infill. When it was built in fifteen-hundred-and-something, a canny landlord called it a way to make money out of a tiny wedge of land between two rows of cottages. He (or she—the women of my family have a long history of land-grabbing, and I bet they aren’t unique) didn’t even have to go to the trouble of building a whole house. All they did was build a brick wall five metres wide, tied into the properties on either side, and high enough to reach the neighbours’ eaves. Topped off with a roof, the gap became a three-storey house for the price of a few hundred bricks, two exterior doors, and six window frames. Grand Designs, eat your heart out!
The only drawback is that DD’s property is wedge-shaped: each of the three floors is the equivalent of only one room wide. Its tiny garden is no more than the gap between the walls of her neighbours’ properties and narrows to nothing six metres beyond her back door. There’s no rear access, so everything needed in the garden, from patio furniture to compost, must be carried through the house.
The garden is so small there’s no point in paying for a green waste bin which would only be filled once or twice a year. There aren’t any flowerbeds as the whole area is covered in decking. Previous residents had left behind a collection of ceramic containers which were overflowing with rainwater after the recent storms. Carrying them through the house risked spills and slips, but I’ve got several 30 litre containers which once held industrial quantities of fruit juice. They have water-tight lids, so it would be easy to fill them in the garden the transport the water through the house without making any mess.
There are always odd jobs to be done so as well as the containers I decided to fetch my packed shuttle tray of tools from the greenhouse. As I picked it up, a mouse jumped out and shot into the dense cover of parsley and lettuces edging the path. When my heart had started up again, I investigated the tray. The mouse had made a cosy nest in one corner by shredding an empty seed packet. It must have been busy all night as I’d only sown the seeds the afternoon before. If it hadn’t escaped, I might have accidentally taken it to Tewkesbury!
Imagine being a mouse carried away from the glade and steep ridges of Tottering Towers and arriving in the middle of a town. The Roman poet Horace wrote about the speed, noise, and danger that terrified country mouse Rusticus when he visited the home of his sophisticated friend, town mouse Urbanus.
Mice are a terrible pest in my own garden, but they’d have difficulty getting into the enclosed space behind DD’s house. She’ll never need to worry about tulip bulbs and seeds being eaten before they’ve had a chance to grow. I’d like to think her tiny garden is a mouse-free zone, but they are tricky little devils.
Lockdown has inspired many people to take more interest in their surroundings, whether it’s making them more beautiful, or growing things to eat. DD hardly has the room to swing a Mus Urbanus, but she could still make use of the stepladder idea for displaying plants, as shown in the photo.
Window boxes are a good idea that work in the tiniest spaces, too. I grow all my lettuce and salad leaves in them, as slugs and snails make short work of any lush greens planted in the open garden. That’s the problem with gardening for wildlife—a lot of it prefers eating my fruit and vegetables to their usual diet of weed seeds and waste.
I used to write a regular column about gardening with children for Nursery World magazine. Thinking about growing things in small spaces made me wonder if Rusticus and Urbanus could become gardening mice. They could show children how to make the best of what they’ve got, whether in town or country.
As I drove home I was feeling quite friendly toward local yokel Rusticus mouse, who had made a nest in my tray. That feeling passed off when I checked the pots of seeds I’d planted the day before. While I was away, wretched Rusticus had dug up all the melon pips and eaten them!