Taking to the hills

JUST occasionally, the weather gets the better of me

JUST occasionally, the weather gets the better of me. Last month the bad-tempered days and weeping skies drove me out of the garden and up into our conservatory. The brightest - or at this time of the year, least dark - room in the house, it is filled from corner to corner with chilly, milky light. A comfortable couch, a woolly blanket and a blasting heater make its isolated space the perfect launch pad for any number of flights of fancy.

Thus it was that during the dreariest, windiest spell of October, I found myself transported to the luminous landscape of Provence, where the winter sunshine "has a golden glow even on the coldest day". I was in the company of quite an interesting bunch: the artist Francis Bacon, writers Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, poet Sir Stephen Spender and a clatter of other notable names. Some, admittedly, are rather dead in reality, but they are suspended forever in life in the pages of Natasha Spender's beautiful memoir, An English Garden in Pro- vence.

We all know that feeling - especially as winter approaches - of being gripped by the far-off-hills fever, when anywhere is better than here. In the case of Natasha Spender, a retired concert pianist, and her late husband, Stephen, the far off hills were not green, but a blinding white limestone, whipped into fantastic shapes by the mistral.

Limestone hills had long enticed Lady Spender. For many years she had admired 14th- and 15th-century Italian paintings of lone, suffering saints in deserts overlooked by sharp, white crenellations, and works such as Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece of the wonderfully pompous Magi journeying to Bethlehem through a pale landscape "like linen-fold woodcarving".

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Eventually, the Spenders acquired their very own ruined Provencal farmhouse, deserted since the first World War, "within the tiered folds of landscape which seemed to enclose it like encircling arms". Rocks, pines and olives added their ascetic character and colour to the surroundings. And despite the "few dead vines in an almost barren field of chalk-pale earth, an anaemic-looking marl", Natasha Spender envisioned her future garden as "a mini-Mediterranean Sissinghurst".

This fond dream is soon crumpled when a soil sample (from the first patch of earth she ever owned in her life) comes back after being examined by the Royal Horticultural Society in London: "Quite the poorest soil which they had ever analysed". But ongoing building operations, progressing in spurts coinciding with the Spenders' visits, allow plenty of time for planning - and ploughing and planting cover-crops of vetch to feed the hungry soil.

The Spenders take to the hills - sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of eminent artists and writers, who pop casually in and out of the text - to investigate the local flora. Cistus, euphorbia, honeysuckle, verbascum and a host of other sturdy, drought-resistant plants cover the thin, chalky soil. Cultivated varieties are searched out in Britain, as Provencal nurseries of the time, the 1960s, are awash with hybrid tea roses and other unsuitable gaudery.

A design is worked out in Natasha Spender's head and finally committed to paper (and included in the book on page 45 - an often-revisited station for the reader). As she discusses the importance of vistas, garden "rooms", and the quiet corridors that link them, we find ourselves thrashing out the problems with her, and effortlessly learning a thing or two along the way.

With doggedness and good humour she learns to cope with conditions a less resilient person would find unbearable: drought and intense heat from May to September; a miserly well; the relentless, flagellating winds of the mistral; no mains electricity; a thin skin of limey, lean soil over the omnipresent rocks. In time the Spenders get mains electricity, and with it the wherewithal to pump water from a newly-dug well, 109 metres deep. The reader breathes a sigh of relief when the saving whoosh of water finally comes, not just for the parched garden, but for its owners' pockets: every metre drilled beyond the 100 metre point is charged at double the price.

The garden gradually takes shape, gently blending in with and echoing the surrounding terrain. Native plants, such as red valerian (Centranthus ruber) and the sculptural, whorled Euphorbia characias are welcomed into the border (much to the horror of the postman and plumber) along with plants from California, South Africa and other dry climates.

Much of the work is done by Natasha alone, although occasionally parties of friends are seconded in, with varying success. One such enterprise, planting the Lilac Walk, is a men-only autumn expedition to Provence by Stephen Spender and artist friends David Plante and Francis Bacon. While Bacon spends the days wandering - like a saint in the desert - in the footsteps of Van Gogh, the other two grapple manfully with the rock-hard, frozen ground until they are rescued by a local nurseryman.

Natasha Spender, who was widowed in 1995, recalls these times with a memory as bright and as focused as the sharp Provencal sunshine. Family snaps by Stephen Spender and pure, ungimmicky garden photography by Jean-Marie del Moral illustrate this appealing, hybrid volume: part personal album and part literary memoir.

But the story has a terrible, dark coda. Just a couple of months after the book's publication a forest fire (possibly the work of an arsonist) swept mercilessly down from the Alpilles, propelled by the mistral's cruel energy. House and contents, garden and plants were all consumed. Only the ruined house-shell remained - reduced again to skeletal walls - and an olive grove, protected by its ploughed perimeter.

Lady Spender, with true heroism, has already set about restoring the house and garden. A fund is being set up to raise money for this purpose. Watch this column for details. But in the meantime, you could help by buying her uplifting, gorgeous book, printed on heavy, creamy paper between dark linen covers. It's just the thing to provide a light-filled - albeit bitter-sweet - interlude during a damp Irish autumn.

An English Garden in Provence by Natasha Spender is published by The Harvill Press, price £25 in UK.