Alicia

22 Oct Alicia

A plant trails along the winding gravel path in my garden. Each year it extends its glossy-leaved reach, draping itself across soil, smudging margins where path meets flower-bed, softening hard edges. Each year it throws up tall brush-like flowers on slim stems in shades of pink – pale like my grandmother’s powder puff, dark like the rouge she used to rub on her cheeks. 

It’s a persicaria bistorta – a grand-sounding title for quite an ordinary plant that also answers to the name ‘knotweed’. I had no idea of either of its names when I saw it in the garden of a rental cottage in the Cairngorms a few years ago but decided I liked its ground-covering modesty and asked if I could take a cutting. The cottage sits on a hillside above Balmoral. You can see the castle towers from the front step, look across the landscape of wooded slopes rising from a broad valley where the Dee flows east to the sea and hills rise in dark pleats against a southern horizon. It’s a piece of paradise. Just to the right, the rocky ridge of Lochnagar adds a little drama. They say Queen Victoria loved to walk there – quite a climb for the old girl. As if the views were not enough, the garden of the old stone cottage, carefully restored many years ago, is sublime. At least it was.

We stayed there every year for about four years, paying guests of Alicia who lived with her husband in the adjoining house, itself restored and extended from former steadings. She had fashioned the garden over more than 30 years, planting trees to capture sun and shade, laying paths of seasoned stone so that low-growing plants could meander, setting areas of lawn between beds brimming with flowers of every colour and buzzing with insects in the high summer. 

Alicia died at the beginning of the year. We only heard about it recently. Not one of the pandemic statistics, her death was just one of those sudden, unexpected ones, we hear. I have no idea how old she was; she was impossible to age. Maybe that’s what people mean when they say someone is ageless. At a guess she was just nudging 70 but seemed younger. I didn’t know her; she wasn’t a friend. But somehow hearing she had died made me feel sad as if I had known her better. I’ve been asking myself what it was about her that made such an impact so that the sadness is out of proportion to my knowing of her and it lingers a while. 

There was something about her. Unusualness – if that’s a word. She had a striking almost ethereal quality. Tall, lean, elegant, blond, a little shy, always immaculately made-up even first thing in the morning wearing muddy brown corduroy trousers tucked into Wellington boots while she weeded or pruned, teased or wrestled the garden into its glorious state. That state was one of perfect balance between order and chaos. Alicia allowed plants to play, to ramble and explore provided they didn’t go too far, just to the edge of wildness but no further. I used to wonder if they thrived because she talked to them in her delicate voice, high-pitched but husky at the edges, the strains of her Polish mother-tongue nestling quietly beneath her perfect English. I suppose you could mistake her softly-spoken poise and carefully applied make-up as aloofness, even vanity. But you’d be wrong. They seemed to me to be a part of her luminosity, her grace, her slight other-worldliness. She was kind but remote, without that remoteness being forbidding or cold. It was as if she was a little absent, as if her mind was on something else, something mysterious or tremendously beautiful. An extraordinary quality of calm seemed to emanate from a deep reservoir of gentleness in her.

I long for a trip home to Scotland. In the late spring, when things seemed to be starting to open up, I looked up the cottage website, imagining a trip there to soak up its tranquillity, lay aside the trials and worries of the last year or more, gaze on that garden again and let it soothe. When the website announced it was closed I assumed it was because of the pandemic. I understand now it was more than that. I never thought.

I have other plants that started life as cuttings from Alicia’s garden. They have died back now, withdrawing for the winter – which seems fitting given Alicia’s passing. But they will bloom again next year. Maybe that’s the thing about taking cuttings of other people’s gardens, you take a bit of them with you so that they put down roots beside you and keep you company. Each time I look out of my kitchen window and see the persicaria going through its seasonal shifts Alicia comes to mind.