The little patch of earth sat there as a direct challenge to all our creative energies. Over the years we had seeded it, turfed it, covered it in wood chippings, planted it with flowers and even, at one point in our daughter’s younger years, buried it under nasty artificial grass and a big plastic playhouse but now, once again, it seemed just an empty…nothing, serving only to make the back wall of the house extension, recently painted white, look like a disused cinema screen upon which the main feature would never begin.
It haunted and plagued our thoughts through spring and into the early part of summer. Try as hard as we might, Rachel and I simply couldn’t think of what we should do with the patch until, out of nowhere, it seemed to simply click for both of us at the same time. Sitting there in the sunshine, staring at the space and sipping a glass of wine, we turned to each other simultaneously and said “Height!” So that’s what we had been missing all these years! All those shrubs and flowers we had planted in that spot over the years had failed not because they weren’t pretty enough or bushy enough, but because they simply lacked the sufficient height to fill the space properly. We topped up our glasses and raised them to each other with the resolution that we would visit the garden centre within the next couple of days.
Hand-in-hand we strolled the paths that crisscrossed the garden centre’s outdoor area, scanning for the very thing that would finally plug that gap.
“How about this one?” one of us would suggest, before a shake of the head and a collective “Nah” ruled it out.
“Okay, what about this…?” as a reaching hand cradled the leaf of another candidate, tilting it to the light. Nope. We both knew that wasn’t the right fit either.
Eventually, our meanderings fetched us up at the tree section. Now here was some serious height in the making. We browsed through banks of fruit trees, picturing small harvests, pies and pots of home-made preserves, phrases like “Could we…?” and “Might this…?” still marking our indecision until we reached the end of the row, and there it was.
“What is it?” Rachel asked. I fingered the tag and read aloud the name: Cotoneaster, looking first at the dark, glossy leaves, then at Rachel. For all its extraordinary ordinariness, and despite the fruit-laden promises made by its surrounding cousins, we both knew straight away that this was the tree for us. Paying little more than the price of a Chinese takeaway and a couple of nice bottles of wine, we somehow manoeuvred the little tree into our little car and made the journey home to introduce it tour little garden.
To say that we planted it would be less accurate than to say we plugged it in to the garden for, the moment it was in the ground, it seemed to jump into life, animating everything it too. What had previously been an empty, dead space was filled with the flex and rustle of turning leaves and swaying branches as the little tree took each gust and translated it into whispers of its own, as though finally and suddenly letting us in on some secret to which, until now, we had never been granted access.
The physical presence of the cotoneaster also seemed instantly to add something, giving outline and definition where before there was none, and providing the starting point for dozens of spiders to build upon as they hung the airy mesh of their webs and gathered up the droplets of dew left behind at the end of each summer night.
Now, the year has slipped down a gear and trundles inexorably toward its final days, but the cotoneaster is firmly established. It has danced its way through the autumnal storms and clothed itself in the year’s first frosts with no fuss at all. In fact, in the darkening days and lengthening nights, our small tree remains one of our bright points, its vivid red berries blazing in the gloom and lighting a path through the winter days until spring, and we along with it, can return to the garden once more.
