gloria
When I was working on a communal front garden in East London, I had a neighbour keeping an eye on me. She wasn’t subtle about it either. That summer was blistering, and she’d stride out with a jug of squash and a plate of biscuits like a ward sister on rounds. “You’ll peg out in this heat if you don’t take five,” she’d bark, then shove a glass into my hand.
She was an ex-nurse, and it showed — brisk, brassy, a touch bossy, but under it all endlessly kind. We got chatting, and before long she was showing me the council patch out back that she’d been fussing over with the Cameroonian family downstairs. It was scruffy, half-fallen apart, but she waved her hand like it was Kew Gardens. “It’s got potential, love. You just need the eye.”
Her secret weapon was a dragon’s hoard of bricks, pebbles everywhere and unbonded patio slabs, plus a son who worked as a landscaper and could be roped in to lug the heavy bits. I sketched a few ideas on the back of an envelope. She snatched it, squinted, then cackled. “That’ll do. I’ll get started.”
And she did. She tore the place apart with the determination of someone who’s pulled three back-to-back night shifts, then calmly put it all back together, recycling nearly everything. Her motto was simple: “If it’s not nailed down, it’s fair game.” A neighbour handed her a dying fig tree. “It’s not dead, it’s just sulking,” she declared — and sure enough, a year later it was fruiting.
She was gloriously quixotic too. Bargain hydrangeas from Lidl crammed into the trolley alongside bottles of juice.
A pond cobbled together from pebbles and render, unveiled with the flourish of a stage magician. “Ta-da! Who needs Chelsea Flower Show?” One afternoon she marched in waving a packet of canna lilies like a trophy. “cheap today!”
She’d chat to the plants while she worked, shout at the cameroonians, hum Bob Marley while knocking up cement. And she never stopped. She’s not a spring chicken, but try telling her that. “I’ll rest when they put me in the ground,” she’d grin, wiping soil off her face.
Now the garden’s nearly ready for its big moment — a proper burst of planting this autumn, so by spring it’ll be thick with life. And I know she’ll be out there in her gloves and headscarf, rearranging everything for the tenth time, laughing at her own daft jokes, turning rubble into beauty.
That’s why I love it. Not just the garden, but the woman herself: brassy, quixotic, a little bit bonkers, and proof that grit and imagination can turn the most ordinary patch into a slice of paradise.
