The herb garden

Valentín has a dry sense of humour. And like many of the villagers he looks at me struggling in the garden with Carmen with a mixture of puzzlement and condescension.

'There's hardly enough work here for two people,' he says laconically, leaning out of his car and watching us fighting with the raspberries that have run wild in the vegetable patch. This is country machismo. For him a spade is just a toy shovel: the Spanish male likes to heft a weighty tool and the pica they use is an impracticably heavy chunk of metal on a crude post. It is curved and pointed: great for digging holes; lousy for anything delicate.

Gracina is out in her vegetable patch as well and Severo, walking by to tend his horses, looks at me then across at her. 'I've always looked after the animals,' he says. This is the village wisdom. The huerto is the kitchen garden and, as an extension of the house, it is female territory. The men look after the big animals like horses and cows. The women deal with the lambs and the chickens.

Everyone knows that if you want to find out when to plant or pick you should go look at what the older women are doing, because they are the guardians of all the traditional knowledge.

Valentín is a burly man with sandy hair and a blue eyes. His face turns pink in the sun. He could be English. 'What's that?' he asks Carmen.
'It's supposed to be a laurel,' she replies, 'but Severo keeps cutting it back with the scythe. It's never going to grow.'
'What do you want that for?'
'Well, you can use the leaves for cooking...'
'It's a weed. Anyway, there's loads of it up the mountain.'

The very idea of ornamental gardening confuses the villagers, so when we dug over part of the field to start a flower garden it fell well outside of the expectations of our neighbours. Flower gardening is limited to the omnipresent hydrangeas, the occasional rosebush and a few potted geraniums.

We could justify nasturtiums or capuchinas because you can eat both leaves and flowers. Even so Severo's face was a picture of bewilderment when he saw me put one in my mouth. It is eccentric to plant things just because they look good. God knows what people will think of the flower garden if it starts to come together. And if I work in the flower garden I will be some kind of pansy.