A tall hedge – a privet – marked the boundary between our front garden and our neighbour Marianne’s. The hedge afforded both a measure of privacy and an illustrative contrast in maintenance regimes: Marianne’s side is always neat and straight; ours shaggy and bulging into the walkway.
A couple of years ago the hedge started to die. At first it was easy to ignore, to hope that the remaining greenery would spread into the bare spots. But it got worse, not better. The time came for a difficult conversation with Marianne.
“It’s not bouncing back, is it?” she said from her side, through the hole in the hedge.
“Whatever it is, it’s spreading that way,” my wife said, pointing toward the road.
“Privet can die of many things,” I said, having looked briefly online. “But the advice seems to be to get rid of it, and don’t plant more privet in its place.”
Marianne has lived in the street a lot longer than we have, and the hedge was already here when she moved in. She thinks it may be as old as the houses, although a rusted stanchion buried in the hedge suggests there was originally a railing in its place. The hedge could well be the product of a neighbourly falling out from a century ago.
Mark the builder, who is fixing our rotten front windows, agrees to pull it out. It is, I will later learn, a terrible job: gnarled roots a metre deep, all grown into one another over many decades.
We’re away the weekend it happens, so we’re in for a shock on our return: the two front gardens have become one.
“How weird,” my wife says.
“So much light, so much space,” I say. “Let’s buy Marianne’s garden.”
The contrast is again sharp: both gardens consist of raised beds surrounded by gravel, but only ours is accessorised with tall weeds and old pallets. The two tiled paths are identical, but ours is wavy and broken.
Things stay that way for a while – no one wants to be the first neighbour to say, “Let’s get some kind of barrier in place, pronto!” Also, we have to source a replacement. After some discussion my wife and Marianne settle on a honeysuckle relative with a hedgy habit. It arrives as 40 bare-rooted plants, in a big box.
The night before we are due to plant it out, I am sitting on the sofa with my phone, reading a mildly alarming article about oestrus in dogs. The sofa, like all our sofas, is temporarily covered in an old sheet.
“In the first stage the other dogs aren’t interested,” I say. “In the second stage the other dogs are very interested, but she isn’t.”
“And the third stage?” my wife says.
“Stage three, everybody’s psyched.”
“We’re not there yet,” my wife says. “But we’re not far off.”
The next afternoon my wife and I kneel head to head, her on our path, me on Marianne’s, planting in a zigzag formation.
“Yours are too close together,” she says.
“Thirty inches, you said,” I say. “Yours are too far apart.”
The dog is sitting on the raised bed, sniffing the wind intently. From all across the neighbourhood, I hear urgent barking. Marianne comes out of her front door.
“Does anyone want a cup of tea?” she says. “I feel as if I’m not contributing.”
“You can trim the tops level when we’re away,” my wife says to Marianne. “Just a few inches.”
“You’re trusting me to do that?” says Marianne.
“Yes,” my wife says. “It’ll make you feel invested.”
My wife has kept back four plants as replacements; bare-rooted hedging, she says, has a 10% failure rate. As a gesture of solidarity she offers two of them to Marianne for safekeeping.
Early the next morning Marianne sends us a picture of the new hedge with a big hole dug into the middle of it, loose soil spread across her path, asking whether animal vandalism counts as part of the 10% failure rate. It’s the kind of damage you blame on foxes, because nobody owns foxes. But it looks like the work of a cat. Possibly our cat.
By the time I get outside, Marianne has already tidied things up. My wife comes home an hour later, after a walk in the park with the dog.
“We’ve definitely reached stage two,” she says. The dog walks in behind her, looking mortified.
“She was popular?” I say.
“She was very popular,” my wife says.
I develop a strong urge to sit on my doorstep all day, keeping vigil.
