Gardening leave

I've lived in houses with gardens before - but small gardens, a bit of earth to turn, a patch of grass to mow. Nothing much to speak of. Gardens that were more useful as places to park the bike or to hang the washing than to grow gladioli or fennel. Nowadays we have a biggish garden, plenty of space to build a pool for instance. There may even be enough space for a tennis court. Or not. I don't really know how big a tennis court is. The last time I played tennis was a while ago, when those yellow balls were a bit of a novelty, when one of my closest pals was called Spud and when I used a bike as my form of transport. 

The style of garden is bare earth, to help prevent scrub fires, with quite a lot of fruit trees and a few bushes and plants. I don't know what most of them are called but I do know that we have olive, quince, peach, apple, pomegranate, fig, loquat, almond and cherry trees as well as various grape vines and a healthy looking passion fruit that has spread all along the fence. Some of the trees are so weedy that it's a bit unfair to suggest they produce fruit (I think there was just one cherry this year) but we have other stuff too. We have lots of ivy, we have a yucca that is taller than me, we have aloe vera type cactus and we have a bunch of trees like cypresses, mulberries and pine. We also have a splendid palm tree. I'm not much of a botanist though, my grasp of plant species has just four main divisions: weeds, flowers, bushes and trees. Maggie occasionally says something to me about pruning the oleanders or dividing the irises but if she were to fail to point out the plant in question I wouldn't be sure where to start.

My part in tending the garden is really the part that involves brute force or grim determination. Most of the time it's a controlled sort of physicality turned against the weeds whose tenacity and rate of growth leave me in awe. At this time of year I also water most of the non autochthonous stuff to keep it from withering in the summer sun. There's a lot of raking too; raking up leaves and raking up the fallen fruit. My other regular job is pruning. When I first pruned I was very careful. I would gingerly trim the thin branches using secateurs but nowadays I chop and cut with an Errol Flynn swashbuckling bravado and ne'er a care. The trees take no notice and simply grow back again. Well, most of them do.

This year lots of the plants look very unwell. The fig trees are covered in nasty little beasts, the grapevine on the wall has produced no fruit at all, the peach trees have some sort of leaf curl, only one of the three pomegranates has any fruit, the little apple tree is hanging on against the odds and the quince tree, which was splendid last year and produced lots of fruit, has a single scrawny example. Even our rose bush is looking a little sad and brown. It also seems that I've spent much more time watering, raking and cutting than I usually do over the summer. Apart from the palm tree which I have to spray every six weeks I don't usually spray; it doesn't seem like a good thing to do, bad for the bees and other small creatures that have a perfect right to their short existence. The fig tree blight was horrible though so chemical warfare seemed appropriate. Anyway my story about spraying six loads wearing overalls, gloves, mask and woolly hat from a 20 kilo, when full, backpack in the 40ºC+ midday sun, is, I think, quite amusing.

I got up early on Tuesday morning to do the watering partly because it's more efficient, water wise, before the sun gets to work, but also to fit in my various morning jobs. I was thinking as I did it how much I'd prefer not to, about how much older I'm getting and how physically punishing gardening can be at times. As Basil Brush once remarked a mix of three parts sand to one part of cement, spread liberally all over the garden, is an effective weed killer.

On our cistern

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham.

In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names that you know like Almeria, Andalusia, Alhambra (like the theatre in Bradford). No?, alright then, think Alicante airport (ألَلَقَنْت or Al-Laqant).

We have one of those words in our back patio, we have an aljibe. An aljibe is a construction to hold water, a cistern. I suppose that at one time in the past it would have been the main source of drinking water for the house. This is not a well, it's a structure that collects rainwater, like a water butt. It holds about 11,500 litres of water or around 2,500 gallons. The down drain pipes from the roof lead directly into the aljibe so, when it rains, we collect the water. We don't use it for drinking water, we use it to water the garden, and we raise the water with a pump rather than the more traditional pulley and bucket. It was only relatively recently that I realised that the shopping centre down in Elche, which is called L’Aljub, is simply aljibe written in the local Valenciano language rather than the more common Castilian Spanish.

Our aljibe started to leak. The bricky who came to have a look said that it was because tree roots homed in on the water and forced their way through the concrete. It was true, hanging with my head well inside the pit I could see the straggly roots. The bricky put me right when I called it an aljibe. "It's not an aljibe, it's a cistern," he said. I presumed he would know, being local and a builder and such, but I can't find any Internet source that agrees with him, nobody except José Miguel makes any distinction. For instance the translation of the Wikipedia article says of the etymology of the word: the term aljibe ("algibe") comes from the hispanic arabic, alǧúbb, algúbb, and this from the classic Arabic جب, gubb, which means cistern, well or pit.

I don't really mind what the name is but I do often think about the careful husbandry of water inherited from those North Africans as I'm watering the garden and I feel quite righteous in not using good clean drinking water for the job.