Bufo Bufo

Renewed my membership to ‘Gordon Castle Walled Garden’ on June 1^st.  Pension day.  Drove to the garden centre for long-tom terra cotta pots.  Since it's also in Fochabers, went to the walled garden too.  It was busy, but most people were in the café.  Walked around the plant beds, beguiled by purple-green spheres of alliums.  Oystercatcher from Spey Bay breached the wall.  Marble-sized apples, rosy pears already swelling on the espaliers.  Irises and globe artichokes lemon-purple in the sunshine, the lavender, spiky and still green.  Flowering rosemary smelling divine.  A woman was weeding lettuce, I said ‘They look full of light’.  She wasn’t in a good mood, I moved on.  Transpired, she was the owner.  Once married to a dish, with 5,610 hectares, that’s 2% of Dorset, she’s now married to a not-exactly-dishy 3 hectares.  In Scotland.  Infra dig.  Perhaps the mood was understandable. She is the sister of Tiggy, second most famous British nanny. 

I am two weeks older than Diana, Princess of Wales.  As a young woman I used to look at her and think, ‘Two weeks later and a couple of hundred miles south and I could’ve had the life of Riley’.  I wasn’t exactly envious, but the grass, all those many hectares of it, certainly seemed greener.  We all know better now. 

Most ladies who run estates work bloody hard, for their whole lives.  Many of them in unhappy circumstances.  Anne, Lady Glenconner’s memoirs, especially volume two, make for heartbreaking, but ultimately life-affirming reading.

There is no such thing as the life of Riley.  Unless your name is Riley, and you’re not dead yet.

Further on, amongst purple-pink elderflowers, my shoe was momentarily accosted by bufo bufo, a charcoal grey common toad. 

Wonder how many hectares he’ll inherit.

What liberation.

Never having to kiss a toad.

https://www.gordoncastle.co.uk/garden/

https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/anne-glenconner/whatever-next/9781529395754?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInNatnMC_hgMV5U9BAh0iDCnsEAQYAyABEgIMavD_BwE#GOR012697092