Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Garden That Stopped at the Gate
A retired botanist can no longer walk past the end of her own garden path, and each year the lawn she cannot cross grows a little more like the wild meadow she left behind.
- perspective: first
The path in my garden is nine yards long, laid in cracked pale flags that my husband put down the year we married. It runs from the back door to the gate in the hedge. Beyond the gate is the meadow where I used to walk the dog, and beyond that the ridge, and beyond the ridge the moor road that takes you to the research station where I spent thirty-one years on the flora of the high ground. I know the path to the gate the way I know the names of my grandchildren. I have never once had trouble with it.
Last spring I stopped at the gate.
I had gone out with the watering can, as I do every morning, and when I reached the last flag my foot would not lift. It was not a pain or a weakness. It was a very clear sensation that the next step was not part of the garden, and that if I took it I would be somewhere I had not agreed to go. I stood there for some time with the can in my hand and the sun on my neck, and when I finally turned around and walked back to the house my heart was going like a bird's.
The doctor said it was anxiety, and the physiotherapist said it was a balance issue, and my daughter said it was the grief for Harold, which I still carry in odd places. I said nothing. I know what grief feels like. This was different. It felt like a door had been closed by somebody I had invited in.
The garden has changed since then. I did not notice it at first, because I was not looking. The lawn on the far side of the path, which Harold kept cut to the height of a pound coin, has begun to lift. Dandelions first, then the thin grey grass of the moor edge, then a scatter of bell heather and tormentil that I could name without thinking. I found a single heath spotted orchid growing in the crack between two flags, a little purple thing with dark freckles on its petals. You do not get them in gardens. You get them where the peat is wet and no one has been.
I have started keeping a record. I know I am still a scientist, even if I no longer have a station to go to. Each morning I write what I see from the back step, in pencil, in the notebook I used for the survey work. The meadow is coming up through the lawn at a rate of about a yard a week. The gate is no longer quite a gate. It is a line of birch saplings with their leaves turned the wrong way, and the hedge behind it has thickened into a wall of bramble and wild rose, and when the wind is in the north I can hear, very faintly, a skylark that does not sound like any bird I have catalogued.
Last week my daughter came to visit and brought the grandchildren. The youngest, Ada, who is four, ran down the garden path without a pause and stopped at the gate, as I had, and then turned round and said in a clear voice, "Grandma, the grass is coming in."
I asked her what she meant. She pointed at the flags. Each of them was now edged with a fine green fuzz, the first growth of moss, and the cracks between them had softened into peat. Ada said the path was getting shorter. She said it as if it were obvious, and when I looked at the flags again I could see that she was right. Nine yards had become perhaps eight. Each day the back door is a little further from the gate.
I have not tried to walk through the gate since. I do not think I could. But I have begun to wonder what is on the far side of it, and whether the meadow has been waiting all this time for me to stop being careful, and whether, when the path is short enough, I will simply find myself standing in the wet grass with the lark going up over the ridge and my husband's voice calling from the house, very far off, that tea is ready.