Wednesday, 29th January 2014, mid-afternoon. Four degrees Celsius under a lowered, purplish-grey sky, not a breath of wind to stir the still-standing grasses in the square borders. It’s fine enough weather for working outside, as long as I go hard at it and keep up a sweat. If I stop to fumble about hand-dividing a plant, or take my gloves off to write labels, my fingers stiffen and start to go numb within a few minutes. It’s frustrating, but easily, if temporarily, resolved. Tea solves everything.

The water in the nursery is off in case a frost bursts the pipes so I brew up in the house. Two teas, one with barely a splash of milk and half a spoon of sugar, the other milk, no sugar, as it comes. I pull my windproof jacket and boots back on and head back up the garden, two mugs in one hand, three Ginger Nuts in the other. Peter has his head down in the newly cleared Lane Border, lifting the last of a huge swathe of Lysimachia clethroides. (It’s going back in, but only after it’s been cleaned of the tangle of weeds which have wriggled their way into it.) He stands up slowly, knuckles pressed into the small of his back. 
‘Back a bit stiff?’ I ask, considerately.
He shakes his head, never one to admit to any physical frailty. ‘Heartburn’, he says, taking his near-black tea with one gloved, soil-encrusted hand. ‘It’ll be them WagonWheels I had after lunch’. He pulls off the other glove under his armpit and takes the proffered two Ginger Nuts. ‘I could eat a whole packet of these. Sometimes do, when I get home’. I think about going back in for the rest of the packet for him, but he always declines more than two, here. We stand about for a few minutes, our teas steaming gently in the cold air, and watch a robin flit down from the hedge, its black eye cocked at the newly turned, soft dark soil. Peter breaks off a bit of biscuit and throws it a few feet from the robin. Just close enough for him to spot it, not so close as to frighten him off. In spring he will know where every bird’s nest is in our garden hedges.
He sinks his fork in the ground and resumes his doubled-over weeding stance. I carry on re-planting the Eupatorium clumps lifted from elsewhere in the border. A flock of long-tailed tits tumbles and chatters raucously through the hedge. Our neighbour John’s tractor clatters by, patches of blue paint occasionally visible amidst the rust. 
A few minutes later a clump of earth lands at my feet.
‘Do yer want any of this kept?’
I eye up the jointed, dead stalks sticking out at jaunty angles. ‘Dunno Pete, what is it?’
‘Pink stuff, all over the stock beds.’
I peer closely at the clump, fruitlessly willing it to tell me its name.
‘Bit like a carnation, but the petals don’t open’
‘Nope, can’t place it…’
Pete shrugs, keeps digging. I wrack my brains, mentally scanning the stock beds for a pink flower. The beige stalks in front of me give nothing away. Pete gives a little ‘huhu’ which I take for a laugh. I think he quite likes it when he recognises a plant and I don’t.
And it dawns on me. ‘OK – all over the place, Saponaria – soapwort. No, ditch it – I don’t want it in here. But there’s a nice double clump near the Thalictrums that I do want.’
He nods without looking where I’m pointing – he knows exactly where it is.

‘So, what about this one then?’ Pete speaks into the soil, doesn’t lift his head. Once bent down and working, he likes to stay there.

‘What is it?’
‘A geranium. Like a geranium. Yeller fluffy flowers.’
‘There isn’t a yellow flowered geranium’.
There’s a pause. 
‘Fluffy. Yeller. Bit like a geranium. All round the back of the tunnel. Seeds everywhere.’
A longer pause. And a proper laugh this time, which I catch and can’t help but echo.
‘Pete, I can’t guess from that. Throw me a bit of it.’
A clod of earth flies through the red stems of the newly planted Cornus ‘Baton Rouge’. I leave it where it lands a few feet away. ‘Just looks like more Lysimachia to me’
‘It’s all mixed in.’
I look closer and spot a single brown, half-decomposed hairy leaf between the stiff, yellow stems of the Lysimachia. 
‘Ah – Alchemilla – Ladies Mantle?’ 
‘Aye, that’s it. I know it when I hear it.’

He does too. Most of the plants in the garden he can’t name, but he knows them by sight, every one of them. He knows when they will flower, how and when to cut it back. He knows their seedlings and will painstakingly hand-pick goosegrass imposters from a drift of poppy seedlings. He knows them by their dormant winter roots, patiently teasing one from another so that we replant clean clumps. He doesn’t know their names, but that’s of no consequence. Any bright spark can learn names. But a rare few know the ways of plants in the way Peter does.

I know some gardeners like to listen to a radio or iPod while working. I prefer the company of the birds, the rattle of occasional tractor, the rustle of boots passing by on the canal towpath. And of course the entertainment of  Pete’s musings on the wildlife, his idiosyncratic plant descriptions, stories from his misspent younger days and his thoughts on whatever derring-do he read about in the Express over his Wagon Wheels. He reached state retirement age last January and now has a pension income. One day he’ll decide not to come in any more and winter in this garden will never quite be the same. 

January 31, 2014