It is a beautiful spring here at Lush Places. The avenue of trees framing the long driveway is a leafy tunnel. There is new growth: the lime green blossoms of the golden elms; the fresh new leaves of the claret ashes. We see, from the kitchen window, tiny lambs leaping and playing. They run together, springing in the air, often sideways. It makes for a pretty pastoral scene.
So does this. We have pots of the nearly black tulips. In the garden beds are the last of the fragrant daffodils, the creamy primroses, and the first of my favourite black and white William Guiness and Blue Angel aquilegia.
There are, throughout the garden, the plants I might love the most: euphorbias. I have what I grandly call a collection, which is really a random self-seeding because I am too lazy to deadhead them.
Some are three-feet tall with quite mad giant lollipop-like flower heads. Greg keeps telling me to cut them down because they loom and peer into the living room. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
The pear tree orchard suggests something you might see in one of those dreamy wedding portraits: wispy tulle and a pale satin slip of a frock and white pear petals adorning your chignon. If you wanted to get married amid sheep shit. As I’m always looking for ways to make Lush Places pay: apply here for bookings. But, truly, it is beautiful. We have never, in our seven years here, seen blossom so prolific.
This is an idyllic pastoral scene.
We should have been having a celebratory week. Elizabeth Jane, the girl sheep I raised on a bottle, was due to have her lambs. When she was about to have her first lambs, six years ago, I was in a right state. I no doubt drove Miles, the sheep farmer, into a right state. She was lying down. She was standing up. She looked funny. She didn’t look funny. I was a first-time sheep grandmother.
This time, I wasn’t remotely worried. I did check on her six times a day. This, actually, might be the definition of not being remotely worried. She was an old hand, after all.
Miles had predicted triplets. Triplets are trouble. Triplets are a lot of lambs to deliver. I went out into apple tree paddock. She was on her side, groaning. This is not unusual. Sheep labour, like any labour, is painful. There was one lamb, healthy and on his feet. There was another lamb, stuck, Miles pulled her out. Dead. He felt about and found the triplet, a girl, weak but alive. She was floppy but breathing.
The worst of this was that Elizabeth Jane, exhausted and with a pinched nerve, couldn’t stand. If she couldn’t stand she couldn’t feed the surviving lambs. She was in terrible distress. I was in terrible distress. Miles took the lamb to his home farm. In my mind I named her: Elsie. I didn’t tell anyone this. I had a mad and ridiculous and not even half a hopeful belief that if she had a name she might have a chance.
Miles stayed up most of the night trying to save her. He returned to give Elizabeth Jane three injections of anti-inflammatories. This in the midst of lambing, the busiest and often most harrowing season of a sheep farmer’s year.
I sent a text at 6.39pm on September 19. Has she died? The replies came.
8pm: Near dead.
9pm: Up and feeding.
5am: Up and stronger. Still 50/50 chance.
4.57pm: Ewe lamb not doing well.
A minute later: Sorry, lamb has just died.
Can you mourn a lamb you didn’t know? Yes. If you have loved the mama sheep for seven years, you are mourning her five months of pregnancy, the anticipation of happiness, the hard birthing, the crappy ending. Still, Elizabeth Jane adores her surviving lamb, who is as pretty and as purely white as the pear blossoms. There you go: a bit of country whimsy. That there is a surviving lamb and that there are blossoms gets us through.
