I went out into the paddocks late on Thursday afternoon. I looked over the gate from Apple Tree Paddock into the Narrow Paddock where four lambs were playing. Farming, even the pretend farming I do, involves a lot of leaning on gates and looking into paddocks. The lambs leapt and cavorted, then a two-week-old ram attempted to roger another ram lamb. They quickly become exuberantly ram-like.
The next day, we stopped the car on the drive to enjoy the sight of another four lambs chasing each other, bouncing, and, yes, humping, around and around an alder tree. If the sight of lambs playing doesn’t make your heart sing you don’t have a heart.
It also made me a bit sad. I was remembering Xanthe and my beloved Elizabeth Jane arriving here at Lush Places as day-old lambs, all long wobbly limbs and baaing for milk and the love of mamas. We were the mamas. We city folk were instantly in love and they, not knowing we were city folk who had never been properly introduced to a sheep, fell in love with us. We played with them all day long.
They are east friesian sheep, from a long line of milking sheep. They are companionable. They are chatty. They are used to people and like them. They recognise faces, for years. I have had rams recognise mine after a year of having not seen each other.
Once I cycled past Miles the sheep farmer’s top paddock while wearing a bike helmet and sunglasses and the rams came rushing up to the fence, talking. Or as our delightfully dotty and adored rural postie June liked to say, “They’re singing to you.”
Now we have romney crosses in our paddocks. I said to the romney sheep farmer and our neighbour, Geoff, with the confidence of the pretend farmer that I’d have them tamed within two weeks. He laughed. Romneys are a different proposition. Though we come in peace they look at us with their alien-like lozenge-shaped eyes as though we are about to murder them. I just want to be friends. I said, bewildered, to Geoff: “They don’t talk.” He thought for a moment then said: “No. They’re just … there.”
I read recently in the London Times that the latest gardening trend is “mullet gardening”, which, like the hairdo, is “business at the front, party at the back”. Mullet gardening means clipped buxus hedges in front of your herbaceous borders, say, and chaos in the back.
It’s not a bad concept for a garden. But it’s hardly a recent landscaping innovation. I have long embraced this concept of garden “design”. I have strict borders. A fair few consist of fairy agapanthus. You are not supposed to grow agapanthus because they get into forests and take over, like triffids. We are not near any forests. Birds carry the seeds. Birds are territorial. So I figure any birds carrying the seeds are more likely to drop them back into my garden. Or the neighbours’. You are very welcome.
I also have borders of nepeta, which the cats love to roll in because it is a catnip, and star jasmine. We have formal old roses, mostly climbers on pergolas, and topiary camellias. We have a variety of hedges that are supposed to be clipped. Every year we say: “We must get those hedges clipped.” Then spring springs and the birds begin nesting ... and who would disturb a nesting bird?
Those might be the ingredients of a garden trying to be a bit posh. I know a pair of very good gardeners who say, sneeringly, about such gardens: “Pah. Tidy gardens.” My garden could not be called a tidy garden. I let echinacea, aquilegias, bluebells, hellebores and nigella self-seed where they will. I have buttercups flourishing. I like them. They are bright as sunshine and I pick them and pop them into an old marmalade jar and put them on a kitchen windowsill. Also they are buggers to dig out and I am a very lazy gardener.
I might get myself a mullet hairdo to go with my mullet garden. Mullet hairdos are very popular in Masterton.
