I was standing in the Apple Tree paddock with Miles the sheep farmer. We were doing what proper sheep farmers – or in my case pretend sheep farmers – do. We were contemplating, silently, our Lush Places’ sheep. Proper sheep farmers spend a lot of time doing what looks like nothing much, which is leaning on gates and looking at sheep. Miles, that master of under-statement, said, “They’re an interesting lot.”
I had come out to the Apple Tree paddock one morning to find that my pet sheep, Elizabeth Jane, had been shorn. Sheep are not shorn in April. She had been fly struck. In the seven years that we have had our little pet flock of four, none has ever been fly struck. Fly strike is horrible, so if you are squeamish look away now. There are maggots. And you have to get them out. Getting them out is disgusting. But also kind of fascinating.
In another life I would not have found the getting-out of maggots kind of fascinating, I’d have found it gag-inducing. Xanthe, Greg’s sheep, had also a while back developed a series of barnacle-like growths on the upper side of her neck. The largest barnacle, Greg said, was of a size the Titanic would be proud of. The sheep vet, who came for a gander early on when the barnacles first emerged, and didn’t charge because, he said, “We’re just farmers having a chat over the fence,” reckoned they were best left alone. Now they have burst. This is disgusting. And kind of fascinating. In the way that watching Alien is disgusting but also fascinating.
I have been tending to these various wounds quite expertly because, as I have been telling anyone who is interested – almost nobody – I am now a qualified pretend vet nurse.
This is the latest addition to my CV of entirely made-up qualifications. I tell people I am a sheep farmer. I have also been known to tell people that I am a journalist, which is patently untrue. I live almost entirely in a fantasy world. In my pretend vet nurse occupation I go out every morning with my official bottle of Vetadine, which is a hideously expensive bottle of iodine, and spray merrily away at EJ’s bum area and at Xanthe’s bumps. Then I get a stick and poke it about, to provoke any lingering maggots. This may not actually be a sanctioned pretend vet nurse procedure. I may be struck off.
This is the time of year that boxes of tulip bulbs I have ordered, but have forgotten I have ordered, begin arriving.
A box of tulip bulbs is a box of promise. Here is the blurb in the tulip brochure for Princess Irene: “Deep burgundy flames burst from the centre of the bloom, sending wispy brushstrokes into the bright melon-orange petals of its fragrant bowl-shaped flowers.”
We will see. A box of tulip bulbs is also a lucky dip. I don’t really like those frilly, parrot tulips but I have been known to succumb to the pretty pictures and to order them. I may have succumbed again. I won’t know until the next boxes of bulbs arrives.
I have been emailing my friend Gordon Collier, the garden-maker of the wonderland that is Taranaki’s Pukeiti, where he cultivated the world’s largest collection of rhododendrons. I have never actually met him. I have interviewed him on that old-fashioned machine I call a telefunkle, so I suppose he is a pretend friend.
If you are going to have a pretend friend, what better pretend friend to have than The Greatest Gardener Who Ever Lived? This is what, just this minute, I have decreed him. I bother him for garden guru wisdom. What can I plant in dry shade? He replied with an exhaustive list. His emails come with terribly floral puns. He greets me with a “Good moaning again,” then calls me, variously, “Sweetie Pie”, “Twinkle” and “Miss Tootle Plonk”. We might be the last two people on Earth to sign off our emails with “Toodle pip”. His emails always end with a complex calculation of how old he is at any given moment, as in, “I am 90 years, 3 weeks & 5 days.”
He gave me advice on my tulips, which he calls “two lips”: plant close together; no good in dry sun.
I hope he is not planning to hang up his spade any time soon. He is the very best sort of pretend friend one could hope to have made.
