Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Read Free

the south which rises up steeply towards the tangled hedge marking the
     end of the open land. It had been a little neglected in the immediate years before our arrival, which, for any aspirant gardener,
     is a pretty ideal situation. Charlie especially was entranced. He had grown up in the country and had always regarded the
     city as a diversion in a life that would, eventually, find him back in the countryside. He had long been a frustrated city
     gardener, growing peppers and tomatoes in pots on his sun-drenched terrace in Shepherd's Bush.
    But here work was needed; in particular, several trees needed cutting down or cutting back to open up the views to the parkland.
     We consulted Chris Wilson, the estate manager, who lives with his wife Rosie in a stone farmhouse on the other side of the
     park. He dispatched Mark Bellew and Phil Wright, who worked on the estate, to help out. They arrived early one morning, armed
     with a chainsaw and a fund of knowledge. The chainsaw hummed as the branches fell, our first steps to putting the garden back
     to rights. But as each branch bit the dust, the scale of the work needed became more apparent. Charlie had been resistant
     to having any help with the garden. In a fit of false heroics, he reckoned that, with my help, he could look after it all
     on weekend afternoons. Sure, we needed some help with the trees, but that was only because we did not own a chainsaw. I wasn't
     so sure: the garden was complex and richly planted and clearly high-maintenance. Over mugs of coffee, Mark told us that his
     brother was a gardener and might be interested in helping us. Two days later, after walking the garden and discussing the
     possibilities, David started work.

    Two years later, we had restored the main flower garden, planted an orchard, created a vegetable garden, and embarked on an
     ambitious scheme to transform a wildly overgrown wood into a woodland garden, complete with a large pond, paths, a living
     willow house, willow arches and huge sofas carved out of fallen oak trunks which had been positioned to look out over the
     park. Then in the autumn of 2004, just as the main work was completed, David asked us if we would be interested in investing
     in a plant nursery, which he would run as the full-time manager.
    We didn't think about it for long. Both Charlie and I were already spending some of our happiest weekends digging, pruning,
     sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings. Charlie loves growing plants and vegetables and he seems to have a knack of making
     them flourish. Green fingers, my father used to say, as he'd watch Charlie tidy up his much loved and once immaculate garden
     on the weekends we used to spend with him.
    We were too old to have children together and, even though we had the dogs - my daughter Daisy's old Battersea rescue dog
     Bingo, and Dylan, the Labrador that Charlie had bought as a puppy for his daughter Francesca - there was something hugely
     appealing about the prospect of a project which we could build together. We had first met in 1965, in Ludlow, where I spent
     most of my childhood. Charlie was an old school friend of the vicar's son, Robin, and when his own parents divorced he became
     a regular visitor to the tall Georgian vicarage which stood beside the River Terne in the village of Ashford Bowdler. My own
     father, frustrated that he had never had a son, liked organising cricket matches on the village green and one summer Charlie
     pitched up for a game. He turned up every summer after that and when Charlie and Robin decided to travel round America in
     the summer of 1969, I asked to go too. I was only eighteen but, after a great deal of persuasion, my protective and cautious
     father decided to embrace the proposed adventure with surprising gusto and helped us plan our trans-continental journey with
     military precision.
    Before I left, he handed me a Greyhound bus ticket, valid for three months, for use in any state of the union. In the event, I