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Nature in all its glory
Bees, tadpoles and a snake give Martin Kirby a lot to ponder at Mother's Garden, the Catalan farm where he and his family began a new life.
On the wiggly high road to town, where small blocks of vines run in all directions over the folds of land like a one-colour quilt, we have friends whose hilltop home is known as the piano.
That's truly what it looks like – upright, not grand – with a sun terrace where the keyboard should be.
From there, at about middle C, you lean on a rail and look south to the sweep of the Terra Alta, the highlands, a scenic masterpiece of random rock and ever-changing hues. Or down, perhaps, into the watery mirror of their little round reservoir where, too, nothing is constant.
Last time it took us a while to work out if it was the dance of water and light or something else that patterned the circle with such beauty. It drew us down to look closer. Only when our noses nearly touched the surface could we see that the veneer of algae lining the base had been moulded into a momentary masterpiece.
How? The clue was there, swimming boldly close to the surface. For whatever reason, tadpoles had moulded a mesmerising maze, sending me home with a keener eye for the transient patterns of life. Another day and the algae would have bloomed in the heat, clouding the water and cloaking the wonder.
What fortune.
In truth my ears are better than my fading eyes. I hear eagles calling, but can't always pick them out of the blue. And the tiny Scops Owl in our barn can beep-beep to its heart's content but I have so far failed to spot it amid the dusty paraphernalia.
Insects are easier and I can take an inordinately long time to tend to the guesthouse swimming pool, because in the border behind the pump where I kneel and clean the filter there is a glorious dome of long-stemmed pink flowers which has a rhythm all its own.
I have counted up to six different wild bee species among the lazy swarm feeding from it, and as each insect settles so the flower dips a few inches under
the delicate weight; all to the music of
the whirr of their wings.
It is very grounding and real. Therapeutic too, because, sickeningly, I have been drawn in by the political pantomime in America that has been playing to a nervous worldwide audience.
My off-the-beaten-track midlife is like that of the spider who decided to weave a web on my wing mirror: chunks of time to quietly reflect on life within reach and moments when the world is coming at you so fast you've just got to hang in.
My tomato canes have cracked under the critical combination of weight and a mighty summer wind that whistled through the valley. I need to mend the break or the whole lot will go.
Occasional refreshing blasts of tepid rain have spared me the nightly labour of watering and have gifted a bumper crop. We have had salad tomatoes weighing in at more than two pounds each and sufficient bunches of the sweet variety to last until Christmas. These we string up in the store as they begin to turn from green to orange, creating another memorable pattern of this life and suitably festive
at that.
Talking of patterns, it is sometimes very necessary but not all that easy to be sure what you are looking at.
It takes something special to rattle Joe-Joe, so when he yelled blue murder, abandoned his dipping net and belted from our balsa back to the house like his hair was on fire we went to see.
There, cruising back and forth and occasionally hanging off the rope rigged up as a rest point for swimmers in the nine feet of water, was a very long, plump, golden-green snake which, every time I tried to get close enough to identify it from the detail on its back, coiled ready to strike. That told me something for starters, and the colouring confirmed it. It was a Montpellier.
They can grow up to two metres in length, are venomous and aggressive. At least that's what a friend told me after recounting how one had somehow climbed up to, and entered, the second-floor window of his daughter's bedroom.
We regrouped in the office, shut the door and double-checked on the internet.
It wasn't entirely reassuring to read that "the back position of its venom fangs means poison injection is unusual, and not normally enough to kill a human" and to have it confirmed that Montpelliers are notoriously short-fused. We concluded it must have been flushed out of the spring and now couldn't get out of the high walled balsa. What to do? Dispatching it was ruled out. Not our way. So all I could think to do was fish it out with the very long swimming pool net and carrying it up the land. But when we went back to the balsa it had gone, presumably by somehow climbing the siphon hose I'd left dangling in the water near the washing line.
"Hands up who wants to get the washing in?"
Maggie is in London as I write, making friends and trying to influence people at the Fine Food Fair at Olympia. Decked out in Mother's Garden logos, she and her brother Phil are flying the flag following our Great Taste Award.
Before she left we took a framed certificate to present to our friend and colleague Rafel, the olive press manager with whom we work so closely. His wife Christine, head honcho at the local tourist office, gave me my first Catalan lessons and their son, born two years ago, is called
Marti. Maybe next year we will have a Mother's Garden Extra Virgin Olive Oil stand at the Fine Food Fair and invite you all to come and meet the marvellous Rafel. We almost took the plunge this year, but there simply wasn't enough time (or ready finance) to do the job properly. Perhaps we will pop up at the Harrogate fair in 2009. I, meanwhile, am at home with the children, looking after the last of our summer guests – from Denmark this time – before we take a short breather on the Costa Brava. We have had some really lovely people with us, including a diehard Halifax FC fan and also adventurous Phil Walker, erstwhile of Otley, now teaching in London.
He, wife Ruth, daughter Ellie and son Jim, were stopping off for a restful week by the pool after trekking in the Atlas mountains of Morocco.
One morning I was doing my usual
pool checks and found him pottering about in his kaftan.
"Everything okay with the pool?" I asked.
"Ay, lovely, thank you Martin. Just like the Otley Lido!" And so we talked, of growing up in Emmerdale country, of the town that was the birthplace of Thomas Chippendale, and of Phil's father, Jim Walker the town vet. He spoke fondly of watching his dad at work on the local farms, of a popular man whose life ended too soon. Phil has been away from Yorkshire for some time now, but no doubt someone reading this will remember father or son or both.
Martin Kirby's novel, Count The Petals of the Moon Daisy, is published by Pegasus (ISBN 9781903490297).
No Going Back – Journey to Mother's Garden is published by Little Brown (ISBN 0-7515-3548-6).
See www.mothersgarden.org.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
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Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
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Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
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