Sharing the Garden

 

Having spent so long doing up my Czech house I am at last turning my attention to our enormous garden. Well, I say 'garden' it's really an overgrown orchard - very overgrown. As long-standing readers of my blog will be aware I started the hard process of mowing some of it a few years ago. At first my only option was to hand scythe, but each year I have managed to get more of it to a point where my electric strimmer can take some of the strain off my shoulder and arm muscles.  

The improvement is such that this year I decided to start planting some shrubs. My friend Hannah had always urged me to improve the garden. She was a great one for planting decorative shrubs and plants with edible fruit (very Czech) and what little was left of her busy life was spent gardening, including removing snails from her strawberries and throwing them over the fence. I pointed out that that was all very well if you are in the Czech Republic all the time, but I am not and so the battle against pests would be lost almost as soon as it began. Now with Hannah's death I found myself rethinking my position. With a large population of snails and ground riddled with mouseholes it was a no to strawberries and runnerbeans but more substantial shrubs might be possible.

I returned from the garden centre (Czech garden centres are very different to English ones - less flowers and more trees) with an aronia bush, two sea buckthorns (male and female to allow pollination), an edible amelianchior, raspberries, thornless blackberry and cranberry. After a day's digging the shrubs stood proud on a bank half way down the garden, where the blossom and bright fruit will be visible from the window by my desk.

A few days later I inspected the plants to discover that someone/thing had chewed the bark of my aronia. This was unexpected - snail damage on the raspberries yes, rabbit attack on the blackberry - but not a large shrub. Look closely at the photo above and you will see the culprit - a deer. I knew they regularly strip my plum trees of fruit on the lower branches, but I was not expecting them to eat bark in early summer. During the day I never see them in the orchard (this photo was taken at dawn from the window hence the lack of clarity), but I do see their droppings.

I checked the internet and discovered that the answer to this problem was human urine. Apparently they are scared off by human scent. So urine it was. I leave you to work out how it was delivered to the aronia bush!

Whether to Get a Czech Lawnmower

There is a German phrase “Like a Czech village”, meaning ramshackle and untidy. Whilst it certainly is true that Czech village buildings are usually in a less than pristine condition, often with peeling paint, channels cut in the walls to take cables left open and with old floortiles (because someone will use them one day) stacked outside under corrugated iron sheets, generally the garden lawns as well as the grass in the orchards will be cut. Capek in his book on gardening talks about the Czechs aspiring to English lawns, but they are not graced with English weather (summer rain) to permit this perceived perfection. It must therefore be a cultural shock for my Czech neighbours to see the overgrown grass in our yard and orchard.

I have singularly failed to get on top of it. The orchard is full of tall weeds and requires scything – something the Czechs are good at and I have no experience of at all. The garden slopes up away from the house and still is littered with builders rubble, ready to blunt anything that tries to cut it. My friend keeps on at me about it. First she suggests I get a powered lawnmower, it was seeing hers when I was helping her move some compost that reminded me to blog about it. And there are loads in the local shops in all sizes and types.

Then she comes back to her favourite suggestion – get some sheep or a goat. The Czechs regularly have sheep or goats on their smallholdings and, not being squeamish about such things, eat their Czech lawnmowers at the beginning of winter. We have space enough, that much is certain. But I have my objections, firstly I can't believe it is that simple. My mother's family were farmworkers by trade and many of my childhood days were spent with my Uncle John at the farm where he was cowman and shepherd and I certainly did not get the impression that keeping animals was that easy. Another objection is that I spend too much time in England away from the place and so have a vision of returning home to discover my sheep has died through lack of water or garotted itself on the wire fence, or perhaps worse still has made a bolt for it and eaten its way through my neighbours' vegetable patch. As for killing it at the end of the year, at the moment I think I might manage to bear it but it seems a palaver and we would be eating mutton for months. Ah well, it is too late to do anything about it this year, the grass will die back without help from me.

On one point of note, there is one house in the village which is impeccable, freshly painted, with not a weed to be seen and the lawn manicured to the last inch. It is of course owned by some Austrians.

More on the Castle Gardens

Many visitors to Cesky Krumlov Castle never make it into the Gardens. If they do they very seldom get beyond the formal gardens nearest the Castle. In so doing they are missing out on one of my favourite haunts. The formal gardens are very fine with formal flower beds, terraces, sculptures and fountain, but beyond these are more informal areas.

It is here that you will find both the summerhouse and the revolving auditorium featured in my last post. As you will have gathered the summerhouse is a rare rococo gem and well worth viewing, although many walk past it without a glance. Below is a photo of the summer house from outside the gardens, which show the level of decoration.


Beyond that crouched in the trees is a little pavilion - its ceiling decorated with 18th century frescos. These frescos, shown below, like the masquerade hall in the castle, betray a sense of fun and amusement so in keeping with the time in which they were created. The gardens are for walking in and giving pleasure. The walks are treelined to proffer shade in the summer leading to a pond. You will not find many tourists here, but you will find the locals - walking with their children to feed the ducks and squirrels, sitting on the grass engrossed in a book or lying asleep among the wild flowers. It is place to visit in all seasons - in spring when the first flowers appear, in summer to escape the sun's glare or in autumn when the leaves are falling. Sadly in Winter it is closed to visitors.


And as you walk you can feel the shades of the castle's former residents walking and laughing too. This is a garden of pleasure and mystery. In these modern days we have lost the ability to read the puzzles of garden design that so amused our 18th century forebears, with their references to classical mythology, masonic and alchemical symbols. What we enjoy is a shadow, but a very fine shadow at that.

Gardens and gardening

Just like the British the Czechs are never so happy as when they are gardening. The desire to grow things and to have some small part of this earth that they can shape and tend is very deep in them.

One way the communists kept the Czechs under control was to allow them all their allotments and their little huts. It doesn't matter that these might be along the side of a railway line on the wrong side of town, each rectangle of land is carefully tended with apple trees and lines of vegetables and flowers. The little shed may be made of a rickety affair made from odd scraps of wood but it exudes a certain pride. This is where the family comes at weekends to help, to sit around fires and cook sausages and drink beer or homemade plum brandy (made from the plums of the tree they are sitting under). And from your passing train you see briefly into their little kingdom and then they are gone again, but as you pass through each village, town and city this scene is revisited time and time again

It is not an accident that possibly the best book on gardening was written by a Czech - The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek (illustrated by his brother Josef see above). No writer I know so brilliantly describes the joys and trials of gardening or with such poetry. For example he writes of buds "You must stand still; and then you will see open lips and furtive glances, tender fingers, and raised arms, the fragility of a baby, and the rebellious outburst of the will to live, and then you will hear the infinite march of the buds faintly roaring." And all the time he talks of the soil "I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. . . . He lives buried in the ground."

But the Czechs are not blessed with England's glorious temperate weather and as a result cannot have the infinite variety of plant options that the English have, garden centres here seem meagre affairs after the cornucopia of the English ones. I find it incredibly hard to find plants that will survive here - that will survive both the harsh winter and the hotter dryer summers. Lavender? No. Bluebells? No. I must learn to garden like the Czechs and to know and love the sharp differential of seasons, as Capek did, and the limitations they bring.