Liza was a gardener without a garden, so she dreamed of gardens in lush multi-coloured splendour, gardens full of blazing camellias in February, a heaven of clematis in August, and a golden but poisonous laburnum in June, of pruning, weeding and cutting back.

Liza, her huge ugly hands kept hidden deep in pockets, took courses in horticulture to sharpen her techniques--she liked to do things correctly--and from her balcony-less, third-floor, rented flat overlooking other houses and the cemetery, she watched other gardens growing.

Liza collected job rejection letters. She said to Dave, a friend at the allotment, who was a middle-aged man with three children, "If only I could get a job, I could get a house, I could get a garden." Once Liza had an allotment of her own, but she grew fed-up trekking to it in all weathers. She wanted a garden that could be stepped into from the kitchen, where she could run back to, still clutching her trowel, with dirt beneath her fingernails, when the rains came. A place she could wander idly, soaking up the summer sun and the heady perfume of flowers and get annoyed with the neighbour's cat and the neighbour's children. Liza's romanticism was always tempered by her practical, realistic streak.

Dave told her to wait, saying, "Something's bound to turn up," so Liza waited. It never occurred to her to do anything else.

"You'll never get a garden," said her mother discouragingly. "We come from a family of urban dwellers. Poor urban dwellers with yards to brush, steps to wipe. A tub of daffs is the most I ever wanted. You should just get on with life and stop this dreaming. Dreaming makes you sick. Dreaming is what others do. You're wasting your life. And anyway, gardens are dirty, dangerous places. Who knows what you could catch?" Only Dave encouraged her. Dave let her dream of Sissinghurst, of planting a huge garden, with room for secret winding pathways and her favourite tree, Aesculus hippocastanum, but any garden would do. A straight-laced suburban garden with a pond at one end, a few roses, a few evergreens, a little patch for some vegetables.

Dave with his fondness for dahlias--huge pom-pom dahlias in lurid colours, strokeable dahlias, whose petals sprang back as he ran his hands over them, as one might a favourite Pekinese--said, "You never know what might happen. If you don't dream, what can you do? What's left for you?"

One day she got a job so quietly, unexpectedly, that she hardly noticed it had happened. The words came on a letter in a little brown envelope with a slight black smudge on the back. "We are pleased to offer you the position of Assistant Compliance Officer."

In accepting the job, not what she'd hoped for, she was accepting keys to a house and garden. As she swamped her work desk with pot plants, Liza began to save money and look for the perfect garden. After months of searching, of visiting little plots with backyards of rubble, overgrown hedges, or not enough room to grow a radish, or a crocus, she found the right place.

Not that it was as big as she wanted, after all one could never have enough land, but it was big enough to plant a circular, Elizabethan-style vegetable patch at the far end, a log pathway down the middle, a wildlife pond to one side--she loved dragonflies; dragonflies had a special grace, a special strangeness--and, in the middle, an island herbaceous border where she'd grow rudbeckia, euphorbia, delphiniums, penstemons and auriculas. On the old walls, she'd grow both old-fashioned roses, clematis--Nelly Moser was her favourite--and Passion-flower. Then she'd set up a bench to watch it all bloom.

All day at her desk, pushing paper, checking complaints about salesmen, checking on their paperwork, she'd dream of the garden waiting for her to return home and attend to it. As for the house, it was cosy, comfortable, it had walls, windows and a bedroom. She wasn't "an attractive proposition." That's what the mortgage men told her. "Your tenure at work is insubstantial. I would wait a year," he said. "Become more attractive to us."

Liza returned to her rented flat, to her windowsill African violets. Oh, she would wait; waiting would probably be for the best. She didn't know how else her dream could be achieved. For twelve months, Liza worked hard, making herself indispensable to her office, while the African violets flowered, and the cemetery grew more bodies.

Outside, dreams were coming true: three men rose into the sky in an enormous balloon, attempting to cross the Atlantic; two men walked across Antarctica without huskies; and a woman slipped anchor from Falmouth and headed due west across the Atlantic. She was alone with thousands of miles to navigate. Across from the cemetery, new houses sprouted.

With the twelve months finally up, Liza moved to an old tiny house, the mortgage miraculously being granted, on the edge of town. The garden ended at wasteground. Dave came with the kids for a visit. He said, "It's a bit small, isn't it? I thought you thought big?"

Liza nodded and said, "But I can do wonders with it; I know I can." She pointed out what plants were intended for where, where the shed would be built, and the greenhouse. They made a start on the pond, careful not to hurt Dave's tender back. Later, they visited a busy garden centre, where Liza was astounded by the prices. "At this rate," she said, "I won't be able to fill it with any plants."

"I'll help you," Dave said. "You know that. I'll give you cuttings and such. You won't go without."

"Oh, Dave! Now what would I do without you?" She patted him on the back. "I really am so grateful. You're a true friend. A real true friend!" He looked so ordinary, she thought, but solid. "Can I ask you a favour?" she asked. "Shield me while I take this fuchsia cutting." She bent down, feeling giddy and reckless, and snipped off the top.

"You're not doing that!" said Dave. "Oh, Liza, you know that's wrong."

Liza celebrated her hard work in the garden--moving slabs, roses, planting trees--by having a Before the Blooming Party. It was the same day that the first autumn crocus hesitated into flower, and the lonesome, female sailor was blown off course by a hurricane on the coast of Florida and pulled into Havana for emergency repairs.

Liza was a wonderful, interested host, charming, smiling; her guests didn't notice how drunk she slowly became, until she had to be carried to her room by Dave. Liza laughed, Liza grinned, and then Liza was violently sick. The vomit came out of her mouth like she expelled the last of rented-flat effluence, smells, and general dinginess. To say Liza was changing, living in her new, compact Edwardian semi, was mild. Liza was said to be blooming. In fact, someone had said just those very words to her before she lost consciousness. In her brain all she remembered was the image of Liza blooming, like a new rose. Liza Blooming. In pink with a tinge of red on the exterior petals. Liza Blooming. A new season's rose, a smash hit at Chelsea, at Harrogate, exulted over by the gardening programmes on the TV. Liza Blooming. Dave left her mumbling Latin names like a litany: Wisteria sinensis, Trillium grandiflorum, Saxifraga apiculata. And, despite his desire for her, he closed the door, scared of touching her in case his wife found out.

Liza worked in the garden. In all weather she'd pull on her gloves and walk down the garden brandishing her trowel like a weapon of death, down past the blood-red acer, pulling out strangling weeds, picking up intruding pebbles, tutting on the evidence the neighbour's cat had deposited in her soil. She looked over the fence at the wasteland full of bramble, and strewn bits of litter. "What I could create with such space!" Just then, Dave popped round with one of his kids, a small brat with carrot-red hair--"from his mother"--and a sugary smile. Dave said, "Have you seen this in the paper?"

Liza put the secateurs away into their protective holder and said, "No, not yet. Too busy with pruning. The clematis will have to be moved. Don't like it there."

Dave stopped, thought about her remark, and slowly said, "Um, yes, yes, but where else would you put it?" But suddenly, as if bashed on the head with a cricket bat, he said, "But never mind about that now. There's a notice here. Your land's for sale."

"What land?"

"The land at the bottom of your garden. The wasteland."

And it was true. For whatever reason someone had finally decided to sell it. Liza grabbed the paper and began to read. "Either as small portions or as a whole," she repeated. "The whole!"

"Now, Liza, calm down Liza. That land's about 7 acres..."

"7.4 acres."

"It's far too big, even for you."

"Seven acres!" She began to dream. In the mind of a dreamer anything is possible. So much to plant in seven acres: a small orchard, a small area of woodland with colourful rhododendrons, a curving sinuous lawn, a proper walled garden, a maze. It was almost too huge to imagine. But a proper garden, a major garden, equal to Sissinghurst. . . she'd need help of course, or perhaps to give up work...

"Where'd you get the money from?" said Dave, taking her gently by the arm, and leading her into the kitchen.

"Money? Oh, Dave, what's your life's work compared to the mere want of money? This could be very important, not just to me but to the area. Could you imagine what it'd be like having a major garden in the midst of this suburban banality? I'll get the money somehow."

The summer came and foundations grew on the wasteland. Despite her cajoling and pleading, Liza had failed. They wouldn't lend her the money, or even the small amount for a strip of land to extend her garden. And now, something concrete and permanent grew there, consuming the view like a cuckoo in a goldfinch's nest.

Liza planted fast growing conifers, the ubiquitous Leyandii, to block it out. As the garden grew, she tried not to think of what modern suburban necessity was spawned behind the fence. Meanwhile, the round the world female sailor had reached Australia to be greeted by a flotilla of tiny boats with big hooters, a mass of flags, and a torrent of rapturous shouting. It was on the news; she had started the last leg of the trip. The two balloonists hovered precariously over Morocco, waiting for the right winds. And the men had reached the South Pole: minus a few toes and nursing a soured relationship.

Later that summer Liza decided to take a two-week holiday touring the northern famous gardens of England and Scotland, where, surrounded by the middle-aged, the frumpy, the old men and their disgruntled, lily-handed wives, she was offered a job.

While standing over a rare rhododendron telling Burt, a widower, in his fifties, who'd latched on to her as the only other single in the party, how to best grow them and that you could now grow them in alkaline soil with the right addition of fertiliser, when a man strolled by, tall, with dirty finger nails--Liza noticed that dirt immediately, as she later told Dave. Burt called out to him. "Do you know anything about rhododendrons?"

The man stopped, looked at Liza, and then back at Burt. He smiled perfunctorily but with perfect calm. "I like to think a little."

"Now my companion here, though young in years, knows something about gardening, but I have to disagree with her; she suggests that I could grow them at home, where I've never been able to grow one of these buggers. Got the wrong soil, see. That can't be right now can it?"

The man looked more carefully at Liza. "I'd have to say the young woman is perfectly correct."

"Oh, no, oh no. I've been gardening twenty years. It can't be right. I say you can't be right. What do you know about it? Have you been gardening as long as I have? By the look of you, you're not much older than her."

"I happen to be the head gardener here," said the man quietly, perhaps a little embarrassed at his obvious qualifications.

Burt said nothing, turned, and headed up into the lime walk where a group of like-aged companions stared at the trees. Then the man asked her if she was a serious gardener, and, of course she said yes. She gave him the list of her horticultural qualifications.

"Not many people want to work here. Because it is so remote, stuck down the little side of Scotland that nobody knows."

And on this small coming together of need and coincidence, Liza was offered a position. They shook hands over it before Liza caught a train home to put her house on the market.

"It's a big move, Liza, a very big move," said Dave, head-down, not wanting to catch her eye. "You've got one garden here, that should be enough for you."

"But if I can't make a dream garden here, then I can help make a dream garden there." Dave noticed how she didn't seem to think about him at all. Perhaps she had never cared about him.

The bank manager told her to "lower your sights" as he turned her down for a bridging loan. Her house wasn't selling as quickly as she'd hoped, and he didn't understand why she had to trek across Britain for a position "that would bring in less salary than you're currently getting."

She was still not an attractive proposition for this sort of risk, and he advised her to cut her expenses, asking, "Do you need to buy quite so many plants each week?" He'd never seen anyone before whose monthly out-goings included a budget for gardening, and a hefty budget at that. "Perhaps if you must, you could get a job like this closer to home, then you won't need to sell your house. But I wouldn't advise it. You have a secure and satisfying position. Compliance is an excellent area of work." At which point, Liza close to tears, felt like strangling him. If she had a pair of secateurs, she'd have snipped off his ears and the mean pinch of his nose, then cut his supercilious tie in half. Instead she, still a compliance officer, left the bank with his words, "Try to save money instead of spending it," "Everything comes to those who wait," and "Lower your sights" ringing in her ears like gunshots.

The house didn't sell; how she needed the capital! No second mortgage they'd said. She thought these things as she wandered her garden, deadheading the apricot "Remember Me" roses, dreaming of Scotland, of escape, then the dark red "Loving Memory," some of which had grown out of control. She dreamed of happy coincidences while breaking the heads of dead cornflowers, throwing their stems and the dying roses to the ground. What money she did have lazed like a sleeping cat in her bank account that she hated, and not paying attention to what she was doing, she picked up the pile of cuttings to throw on to the compost and was stabbed viciously by a thorn.

Her wound became a deep oozing gash, but Liza barely noticed. She thought of Horse Chestnut trees, of their shape, height and beauty, and continued her jobs, removing faded annuals from the border, and spraying insecticide on the greenfly. Soil and chemicals mixed together and infected her wound. And still, without caring, she neglected to tend it. By some other unhappy coincidence, she'd not had a tetanus jab for years.

On the day Liza died of septicaemia--the gardening equivalent of being knocked over by a fat red bus--the round the world yachts-woman pulled into Falmouth harbour, exhausted and half mad, but exultant in her triumph.

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