Year In The World Part 9

We were herded through the Roman baths, then spent an hour in the big parish church, reading the epitaphs on gravestones in the floor and on the walls: Walter Clarke Darby, Mary Henrietta Cotgrave, Marmaduke Peac.o.c.ke, Cecilia Blake. Maybe Jane Austen perused the stones for her characters' names. Amid the tourists, one of whom was eating from a box of Cracker Jacks, a priest was conducting a religious ceremony for a group of five ancient ladies. As we pa.s.sed, we heard him boom out, "Lead us not into temptation." Four silver heads were bowed; the fifth lady, looking contemplative, examined her manicure, her hand outstretched. Of the five, perhaps she was the one once led into temptation.

We took care of the split tire and headed for Wales.

We crossed into Wales and drove up to the Isle of Anglesey, Ynys Mon in Welsh, where we had rented a cottage with the beguiling name of Mermaid, right on the water. Taking slow roads through pastureland put us there at nine at night, still the long Welsh summer twilight, with the tide rushing back in to fill the strait, and the slanted rays striking a great castle across the water. We carried our Bath provisions inside, looking forward to a picnic of various meat pies and cheeses on the terrace. On the road in, we'd stopped at an organic vegetable stand and a pick-your-own berries field. The customers chatted in Welsh, oldest of Great Britain's languages. We paused, fingering the beans, just to listen. The sound was at once musical and hard, like a vase of marbles emptied into the sink. We felt ebullient to be in Wales. Nearby was the first garden on my list, Plas Newydd, designed by my distant ancestor, Humphrey Repton. Our garden-to-garden vacation was beginning. As we unloaded the car, the rising moon looked like a big gooseberry, translucent gold in the milky sky. The whitewashed cottage, a former stable, had been remodeled recently. When we walked inside, we almost dropped our bags. It was hideous. Someone had furnished it like a cheap trailer. "No. This can't be." I walked through, peering into two cramped bedrooms. "It has a five-teacup rating from the tourist board." I'd thought the Welsh teacup system so cozy.

"Must have been based on quant.i.ty, not quality. The number of beds and spoons." Ed pushed the bed, and the mattress sank. The coverlet of pilled polyester was slightly damp, the bath done up like a two-dollar bordello, and the kitchen floor's low-grade plastic wood gave at each step. Only the unattractive living room redeemed it. French doors opened to the water view, and if I concentrated on that, I didn't notice the bad leather furniture "suite" or the plastic flowers atop the TV or the itchy-looking wall-to-wall. "Beware of renting on the Internet. Weren't there photographs?"

"No, they didn't have them yet, and I took a chance. The photo of the outside looked so wonderful, and the agent said the whole place was just redone . . . Let's don't talk about it anymore." I'm guilty.

The luscious twilight lasted until eleven o'clock. We walked along the sh.o.r.e of the Strait of Menai and decided that things would be better in the morning. But in the blank light of day, the place was still tawdry. As if to confirm my impression, a trailer surrounded by various large metal storage containers was parked outside the kitchen window. "Do you want to go? Even though we'll lose the money, I'm not sure we can sleep on that squat little bed. My feet hang off and practically touch the floor. Chalk it up," Ed said. He started looking in the guidebook for a hotel.

"Those synthetic bed linens feel like sandpaper. Let's just stay until we see what's around here." We set off. We found Wales sublime. The saturated-green air looked aquatic, as though someone just pulled the plug, draining away the watery world and leaving swaying meadows, fields, trees, and hills washed and gleaming. "Do we need to go to gardens? All Wales seems to be a garden," Ed said. The roads we took were actually lanes, with hedgerows crowding the edges and the green banks profligate with wild foxglove. For three days we left early and stayed out late, eating in pubs and pushing on toward the next interesting town rather than going "home" and cooking, imagining we lived facing that changeable strait, picking fruit down the road, as we'd like to have done.

We spent hours at the garden of Plas Newydd, which also overlooked the Strait of Menai. My distant relative Humphrey Repton, involved in the original planning, created one of his rare design portfolios called a Red Book for the property in 179899. We didn't go inside the huge house. I have an allergy to hearing anecdotes about ghosts in the hallway. Dead houses depress me. Unless one looks fascinating, I skip it. In the gardens I'm free to wander among the old guards' legacies that still grow. I can't tell what's left of the Repton design, but the garden has an especially expansive feel, partly because water views open a property as nothing else can. Grand trees and islands of hydrangeas punctuate the greenswards. In Wales hydrangeas bloom prolifically and intensely, that blue of the Madonna's dress in Renaissance painting, and deep pink globes. I've only seen such blue in the hydrangeas on the campus where I used to teach. They bloomed under pine trees, a respite in an urban campus. I always thought the blue came from the Pacific sea air, not from acid levels in the soil; perhaps that's the secret here as well.

Conwy, nearby on the mainland, is an active castle town. I wonder if someday I can take my new grandson Willie to such places in Wales instead of Disneyland. Conwy, like many Welsh towns, centered on a stupendous castle to explore or to climb for the views. We took tea with apple pie on High Street; then while Ed looked for paper supplies, I walked around photographing the window boxes and baskets of flowers that dangled from most shops, the flowers flourishing far above dog level. Riotously blooming, not a dried-up one to be seen, densely planted, these blaring bouquets made the streets gay and cared for. "What kind of fertilizer do you use?" I asked a woman outside a bed and breakfast. I would love to be staying behind her bright blue door.

"Oh, any old thing," she replied. "Can't stop them." Petunias, ivy, impatiens, geraniums, campanula, lobelia, all planted by the armful, even fuchsias mixed with geraniums, shade or sun preference be d.a.m.ned. Breathtaking, a great big yellow and apricot trailing begonia basket hanging against a pale stone wall. This simple addition to the street rescued the whole block from drabness. Mainly for the name, we buy d.i.n.ky pork pie, along with some Llanboidy cheddar. On the way out of Conwy, we stopped in at the Teapot Museum. After all, we're in England. The eccentric collection consists of more than a thousand teapots, some cla.s.sic and pretty, some kitschy, and many outlandish, such as Princess Diana with bright yellow hair, a camel, a majolica fish swallowing another fish, Elvis, and a World War II tank. Crammed into one upstairs room, the collections seemed right at home in the castle wall mews.

At night we headed back to Mermaid House with the same lavish view as the great house at Plas Newydd.

Portmeirion-the entire town-is a folie de grandeur of Clough Williams-Ellis, who wanted to build the ideal village. His purpose was didactic-he meant to demonstrate that development could be for the good-but his result is peculiar. The village, constructed from 1925 to 1975, never became a real town with cheese monger and dry cleaners, but it did become a magnified toy town with an amalgamated Mediterranean flavor, quite surreal in the Welsh landscape. Now a hotel, with various tea and gift shops, the pretty village on the water feels like a TV set, which it has been. Only the garden, mostly white and blue, anchors Portmeirion in reality. I sketched the iron urns of bountiful snowy white hydrangeas and imagined having a few of their square wrought-iron structures made for Bramasole's roses to climb. As in every Welsh garden, banks of hydrangeas, these a lighter blue, drifted around the park at the town's center. A sublime climbing rose of flat white blooms and pink buds obscured the front of one house. We didn't linger; pretty as Portmeirion was, we found it artificial. I kept thinking of Asolo in the Veneto, a town even lovelier, with real people living and working there, moving easily through layers of time.

Bodnant was also someone's dream, but only of a house and large garden. We glanced at the upright Tudor mansion, perkier than most, with many pointed dormers and crisp white paint between the beams. The sublime first impression of wide terraces above the river Conwy and views of mountains only began the extravagant delights of Bodnant. We thought we were late for roses, but in July they were blooming, especially the pinks. Many were new to me: Octavia Hill's flopping pale cl.u.s.ters; Ann Aberconway, a satin beauty; Rose Gaujard, white with rosy edges; the glorious many-petaled, open-faced Prima Ballerina and, nearby, the similar Picadilly; and the cupped Superstar, exactly the color of watermelon. Another big spender was the splendid yellow rose with the unlikely name of Grandpa d.i.c.kson. Boule de Neige, a white miracle with yellow center, changed my opinion of white roses with its delicacy. I've always a.s.sociated white roses with Mother's Day in the Methodist church of my childhood. Wearing a white rose symbolized that the mother was dead. The rest of us wore red. This particular ball of snow looks distinctly felicitous, not at all sad. Another rose I immediately envisioned planting in my own garden was Glenfiddich, named for the amber Scotch whiskey or the place it's bottled, I suppose, but reminding me of a decadent, burnished yellow-silk slip my mother wore. The veined petals looked bloodshot-like the eyes of someone who drank too much Glenfiddich. I will have to tell my friends Susan and Bernice about City Girl, a saucy little social climber of apricot and pink blooming in bouquets like Sally Holmes.

Although vast, the garden felt totally scaled for enjoyment. Usually gardens are most interesting around the house. When I take outlying paths into woods and dales, my attention is not held. But following Bodnant's woodland paths seems like stepping into a "Sleeping Beauty" landscape. The hydrangeas, lining the banks of the languid little river Hiraethlyn, mimicked the flow of water. Blurry blue reflections doubled the dreaminess. The woods were silent, except for sparkling river sounds. Any minute Peter Pan might have popped out from behind a rock. We might step inside a fairy ring.

"We're in the presence of these trees," I said. Thanks, Henry Duncan. He took over this garden in 1902, continuing the tradition of his grandfather, who began planting trees in 1792. Enchanting, the sun-dappled ferns, the dark-leaved rhododendrons, and the circuitous walk over streams and through glades of straw-colored light.

At the end we came to a long pergola of laburnum. The sun shone through the filigree of leaves, and we dawdled there, imagining the dazzling gold arch in full bloom.

"Isn't that what Rebecca took a fatal dose of-laburnum? In high school I always wondered what it was. Now I know."

"Who? Oh, Daphne du Maurier? I never read Rebecca." Ed bought a postcard in the gift shop of the tunnel of bright yellow. "This must be one of the most outstanding accomplishments of any garden in the world. Imagine the bees and b.u.t.terflies it draws."

"And tourists. Any one of whom could nibble the little black seeds and croak on the spot." We'd enjoyed Bodnant with only a few others that day.

"Let's come back. When the laburnum is blooming, you must feel like you're sleepwalking under here. Or like you're standing in a shower of gold. Are you sure it wasn't laudanum she swallowed?"

Back at the house, we took a last walk along the water. The tide was out. A man out in the mud hauled in the edible seaweed we saw for sale in Bath. The late sunlight seemed liquid, a faded watercolor with pastels smearing the sky into the water already rushing back into the channel from the sea. "Ready to take off?" Ed asked.

"Yes, let's go. Try to exit by eight tomorrow."

Aiming vaguely for the Cotswolds, we drove through Loughborough, the town where my great-great-grandparents and my great-grandparents were born. My grandfather was born in nearby Leicester. We pa.s.sed a large cemetery with ancient trees. "Maybe some of the Mayeses are in there. Stop! Let's look." We combed the cemetery but found no family name. We were startled to come upon three men lying in the gra.s.s. Were they waiting for burial? But one rose on his elbow and said they were caretakers, having a nap after lunch. I was surprised because the cemetery had a forlorn appearance, with tipped and collapsed graves, caved in so that if you lifted a few stones, you might see a femur or jawbone. Not a posy in the place. I'd never seen such an abandoned graveyard, except in San Miguel de Allende once, where small boys played soccer with a skull, and I picked up one myself, a child's, and have it still. The sleepy one told us he had no record of burials but to call Nelly Callahan at the registry office in town. We finished combing the other half. I half-hoped no ancestor lay there and half-hoped that the next Elizabeth I saw-Elizabeth must have been in the top-ten names in the 1800s-would be my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Repton Mayes. But she lies elsewhere. I wish I'd asked more genealogy questions before my relatives died. Such a small clutch of stories, ending with my grandfather at nine sailing alone to America to join his father and his new wife. Elizabeth Repton, his mother, had died, leaving him and a sister, Lily. I never knew why she stayed behind when the nine-year-old Jack set off with a bag of apples and a small suitcase. Loughborough seems oddly like an American town. Short on charm, it was at least thriving and rather pleasant. I wonder about those Mayeses-what they did, where they lived. When we stopped in a pub, I asked the waitress if I could see a telephone book. I find Mayes at least sixty times. In San Francisco there are five.

Mrs. Callahan called me back after an hour of searching and said no Mayes is buried in a munic.i.p.al cemetery. She directed me to the Leicester Historical Society and to local parish churches. Ed looked alarmed. The Mayes clan's graves will have to wait for their armfuls of roses.

By late afternoon we'd checked into a country house in Hambleton, a hamlet with a church and graveyard that could have been a model for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," where those whose hearts were "once pregnant with celestial fire" slept in their narrow cells. After the drive from Wales, we walked to unkink. Thatched, calendar-perfect homes with bountiful gardens of yellow hollyhocks and roses lined the road. This was the day for churchyards. Among Hambleton's leaning stones and majestic trees, mourning doves cooed in iambics, and I thought of Gray's "moping owl." The poem seemed dreary and sentimental to me when I read it in college. Later, I saw some of the hard perceptions which his soft decasyllables perhaps glossed. The homiletic inscriptions on the gravestones, he wrote, "teach the rustic moralist to die." At the end of one verse, Gray asks if anything can salvage you: Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

The answer is a resounding, nihilistic no, despite the poem's reputation for romanticism.

Death has a whole different construct here than in Italy, where photo- and flower-bedecked graves keep a continuum with life. The Cortona cemetery, just below the town, replicates the walled town. The graves are lighted at night by votives. You can imagine the dead rising as though from siesta to converse with their friends. These hallowed English stones go solemn immediately and provide no comfort of denial. Even recent burials blend quickly with the most ancient dead.

Like the priory where we spent the first night in England, the hotel where we sought refuge was a manor. We were guests of the lord, paying guests. In the bar, luxuriating in the tempting menu while we had a drink, the owner joined us. He was happy to see Americans. The terrorist scare had kept them at home. "The field is thinning," he said. "There just are not rich Americans driving up with their chauffeurs anymore." Having driven there in a rented car of the anonymous sort, we simply smiled and nodded. A man and woman at the bar discussed a rally in London in support of fox hunting. "Does four hundred years of tradition mean nothing?" I heard her say. "They're the ones who are barbaric," he scoffed. Scotland recently banned hunting with dogs, and pa.s.sage of the same law was imminent in England. The House of Commons voted 2530 in favor of abolishing hunting foxes with dogs-then the bill mired in committee regulations. The foxes feel frisky; soon they'll be free. The woman, middle-aged with fluffy blondish hair, wore a bright flowered dress with big sleeves, belt, and gathered skirt. "Where did she get that dress?" I wondered to Ed. "I haven't seen a dress like that since the one I wore to the junior-senior prom. I loved that dress. I like hers! It's so anti-chic. Mine was white organdy, floor length and strapless, printed with violets."

"She got it out of the same closet where he got that rusty vintage jacket. He looks like the Duke of Windsor. You know they send people out to fill the foxholes the night before a hunt? That doesn't seem sporting." The waiter refilled our champagne gla.s.ses. "What do you think of the fox-hunting law?" Ed asked him.

The waiter smiled. "I'm from Romania. Foxes are vermin there."

Ed raised his gla.s.s to me. "Tally-ho." He looked at the couple. "Do you think his jacket reminds him of being 'in the pink'?"

"That dress reminds me of all the gardens here, all splashy and glazed after a rain. Maybe the English just love their gardens so much they want to wear them. Ah! Come to think of it, maybe all the flowered chintz sofas and chairs and beds come from the same impulse-to bring the garden inside the house. A counter to the rainy weather."

"I'm happy. I'm happy that we don't have to have an opinion on fox hunting. I'm happy to have, at least, pa.s.sed over the ground of my ancestors." The waiter brought a plate of delicate morsels-sliced zucchini with a dab of ratatouille on each, a twist of pastry with duck inside, potato puffs, kebabs of chicken and cuc.u.mber, and silver spoons filled with tomato mousse.

Soon we moved to the dining room, Ed quoting Oscar Wilde on fox hunting as we walk down the hall: "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."

This pastoral landscape and the Rutland Waters, a large man-made reservoir that looks like a piece of the Lake District, turned out to be so lovely that we decided to come back for a week someday. From here I could make the journey to Leicester to check out the family tree.

We explored nearby towns, walked twice a day, and read in our big bedroom decorated with a raj motif. When we found nearby Stamford, we wondered if could live happily ever after there. A dignified, intact town full of its own life, Stamford has kept pure its inheritance of gray stone. Narrow streets, like Italian vicoli, cutting between larger streets, add medieval shadows. I liked the tiny shops, where from the middle desk a person could reach almost anything. Right in the center of town we came upon a cemetery, which doubled as a small park right across from the library and the bank. In most places on the globe, that cemetery would have been dozed long ago. A man read his paper on a bench just beside William Hare, who departed this life aged twelve and had been resting there calmly since 1797. We stopped for nut and ginger biscuits with tea, pa.s.sing up a variety of traybakes-chocolate, tipsy, apricot almond, and sultana. "What is a traybake?" I asked the lady at the cash register.

"Oh, just something baked on a tray. Like that." She had a voice like a bicycle bell. She pointed to the pans in the window. "Trays." Another one of those little differences between English English and American English. She was pointing to what was essentially a small cookie sheet with slightly higher sides. English desserts-all that voluptuous cream and ripe fruit. Even the names imply that you will be comforted and cosseted by a plate of sticky tealoaf, sticky toffee pudding, oatmeal biscuits, or jam roly-poly.

Oakham, too, was a town of character. We bought a st.u.r.dy plaid market basket, had lunch, and meandered. In the pharmacy, while Ed bought Band-Aids, I looked at the baby food. Since Willie joined our family, I've liked looking at the foods for infants for sale in different countries, a microview of the country's cuisine. Here I find pea and parsnip, carrot and parsnip, peachy porridge, creamed porridge, oats and prunes, banana, and cream fool. In Italy, it's prosciutto and peas, pasta, pigeon, veal, even minced horsemeat. What cultural message does the baby absorb? Perhaps the English baby is lulled by mild flavors, while the bambino gets the message early on that the world tastes savory and varied. That might change with a little Winston's first taste of bangers and mash or bubble and squeak. Even during his first months, Willie was treated by Ed to aroma training. He held espresso, shrimp, ribs, and toast under Willie's nose. He looked consistently startled and interested.

A speciality of this area, pork pie is baked in a crust made with hot water. Such a st.u.r.dy pie won't break if carried in a saddlebag, I read. Local pigs are especially succulent because they're raised on the whey left over from the Stilton-making process. When we bought a fluted pork pie to taste, it was lardy and dense-maybe good to eat after filling in foxholes, but not appealing on a warm July day.

A gardener famous on British TV opened his garden called Barnsdale a few years ago. Early in the morning we had it to ourselves except for a couple of workers who were rendered catatonic by their hoes' rhythmic chopping of weeds. This was a teaching garden, divided into areas such as cottage garden, typical suburban backyard, kitchen garden. We found several ideas for our own plots. In the orchard CDs on strings twinkled from the branches and bamboo poles, keeping birds from eating the fruit. They looked rather magical. Asparagus, planted in an ornamental bed of flowers, looked soft and ferny. Recycled plastic water bottles had been halved, and the top part, with cap off, placed over new plants like the gla.s.s cloches in French gardens. This protects them from slugs while keeping in moisture and warmth and allowing them to breathe. I'm going to try this next spring when I plant tomatoes from seed. Crisp white bee boxes were used as focal points in divided gardens, instead of the usual nymph or shepherdess. Ed admired a compost box about five by twelve feet divided into three parts, one side of which had boards that slid up for removal of soil. We watched several voles darting from border to border, adorable and probably the reason for the recycled water bottles. I stood eye to eye with swaying yellow hollyhocks everywhere, sunny and cheerful. I wished I were in my own garden, fertilizing the lemons and training the morning glories up the pergola. I love how the British gardens all have so many places to sit, so many arbors, armillaries, arches-how furnished they are. I photographed an urn dripping with lantana, fuchsia, petunias, impatiens-who would think to combine those? Then I realize that in my two climates, you couldn't. Lantana and petunias like sun, while the unprotected fuchsia and impatiens would shrivel in one day in the heat of Italy or California. The cool and rainy English climate seems to encourage strange bedfellows.

At the urging of Mr. Hart, our host, we visited Burghley, a supergrand house in a vast deer park. We went, despite my allergy to such places, which I developed one year after seeing one too many French chateaux. In Burghley's kitchen some strange soul saved all the turtle skulls boiled clean when soup was made and arranged them in a pyramid on one wall. Immense copper pots and long work tables conjured a vision of mincemeat pies and of a pig roasting on a spit. I read that the smallest man in the world once was served in a venison pie as a surprise for the resident earl and his wife. Outside the kitchen we pa.s.sed through a room with one wall covered in bells, each one labeled with a room designation so the servant would know where to hie himself. A long tour through corridors and wings, under the tutelage of a knowledgeable guide, confirmed my resolve to avoid these tours. Even though the house is filled with lively portraits, the lifeless rooms with impeccably restored bed hangings, porcelain objets, and don't-touch atmosphere made me want to run. Surprisingly, at the end we came to an immense horror-house stairway painted with the huge open maw of h.e.l.l. Skeletons, death holding a mask, winged demons, and a vile eagle eating the liver of Prometheus completed this bit of interior decoration. The guide explained that the populace, seeking audience with the master, was suitably cowed on the way into his august presence. I wondered. We'd seen the opposite, the pious family chapel. Then turtle skulls and a dwarf baked in a pie. I thought the earl was just a real kinky guy. The last room, lofty with a fantastic Elizabethan ceiling, had a silver wine cooler large enough to bathe even a normal-sized man. After the stag hunts, it must have been filled with a thousand bottles of claret.

On the Friday our next rental began, we drove to Chipping Norton on the edge of the Cotswolds. My book pinpointed dozens of gardens I wanted to see in this area. The house would be large for us, but it was a last-minute rental and we thought, looking at the photo of Old Chalford Manor Beech House, that we would cook a great feast and invite friends from London down for a day in the country. In the photographs the exterior was stately and inviting, while the interior looked gracious, with marbled hallway, and enough bedrooms for a sorority. As we followed the directions out of Chipping Norton, we were not exactly in idyllic countryside. We were zipping down a two-lane major trunk road to Oxford. "I hope we won't be able to hear this traffic," Ed said. "How far off the road is the house?"

"Oh, I think it will be fine. It says take a left off this, then a right."

"Did the agent say it was in the country?"

"Well, I told them I only wanted a quiet place. I explained that we are writers. And that you hate any noise at all."

"Good." Then we found the left turn, then immediately the right. The house was spitting distance from the busy road. We stared at each other.

Inside we could hear the constant vroom, vroom of motorcycles and see the tops of trucks whizzing by the wall that separated the house from the onslaught. Fascinating how a house inescapably reflects the owner. At the entrance we were greeted with a sign in boldface: PROPERLY PARKED? REMEMBER TO PARK ONLY WHERE DESIGNATED. In the foyer we faced NO BICYCLES, SCOOTERS, ETC. ARE ALLOWED INSIDE THE HOUSE, OF COURSE. I especially liked that of course! There were even "no smoking" signs tucked into the hunting prints that decorated the hall. Inside the cupboards were taped lists: TWENTY EGG CUPS, SIX WOODEN MATS, TWO TOAST RACKS . . . My favorite was PENALTY CHARGES WILL BE LEVIED FOR RUBBISH NOT CLEARED. Ed pointed out PLEASE DO NOT ALTER THE TIME CONTROLS and DO NOT MOVE THE FURNITURE and PLEASE DO NOT STICK ANYTHING ONTO THE WALLS. He opened the fridge and called me. "I'm fascinated by the mind that created this instruction: DO NOT PUT SODA CANS IN THE VEGETABLE BINS." Ed thumbed through a notebook full of admonishments and instructions. "If you're a hammer," he said, "all you see is nails."

These oh-so-a.n.a.l admonishments we could ignore, but the traffic astounded me. I reluctantly walked to the house next door and learned that the owner was away. "In Tuscany," her daughter (no sign of damage from uber-Mama) said blithely, "and no one ever complained before." Isn't that a well-known psychological strategy? Quickly pull the rug. Who rents a vacation house on a highway?

And so we left. And so we find ourselves comfortable at last in the little schoolhouse, which our U.S. agent arranged, even though the Beech House owners refused to give a refund. How might I have avoided this? The agent was appalled. She had not been told about the road noise in all the owner's elaborate description of the place. Mental note: agent must have physically visited property.

Basta! Onward.

Ed has adapted to driving down a mirror quite easily. I occasionally feel the urge to put on the brake or accelerate from my side of the car because we remember the friend of a friend on her first day in England who looked the wrong way before crossing and was mown down by an oncoming truck. As we drive the lanes of the bucolic countryside, patched with hamlets of b.u.t.terscotch-colored thatched houses and hollyhock gardens, my vocabulary has shifted poles from the austere words-essential, stony, stark, elemental, harsh, lonely-that described Spain. Cozy, cosseted, charming, adorable, sweet, I'm saying. As I point to a storybook house with shining mullioned windows and an energetic climbing rose arching over the door, Ed says, "You have to watch that word cute."

"Okay," I answer, "but really, wasn't Lower Slaughter the sweetest place on earth? Even the rivers are well behaved, as if they flow through only for ornamentation." Everywhere described as "honey-colored," the stone houses are that color, but some are dark like chestnut honey, some pale like acacia or linden honey. Every few miles the geology shifts enough to change the shade of the limestone. Like Tuscan farms, the houses seem to have grown out of the land rather than been built. Because of their serene beauty and their ease in the landscape, the Cotswold houses are among the most pleasing domestic buildings in the world.

"They give awards around here for the 'tidiest' villages. I wonder if it's just too tidy for words." He slows to look at a field of blue lupin with a fold of sheep sleeping under a beech tree. "Even the sheep look clean here. Remember the knotted old herds in Portugal gnawing on dead weeds?" He brakes. Across the road three horses in wavy gra.s.s look up at us. "Perfect," Ed says. "Why has no one ever ruined it?"

"I know-that's horrible. We expect ruin?"

"Well, much of the world has been ruined. Not here. I just didn't expect so much beauty. I've slept like someone administered knock-out drops. Maybe it comes from counting all these sheep." He drives on, down the green-tunneled road. A golden light sieves through the trees. "Let's find a tea shop. Time for plum and ginger pie or strawberry and apple crumble."

"'Gravy and potatoes in a good brown pot. Put them in the oven and eat them while they're hot.'" I'm thinking, not for the first time, about the books my daughter memorized when she was three.

"I can't even guess what that's from."

"I believe you've heard a direct quote from Miss Tiggie Winkle in a Beatrix Potter book. Plum and ginger pie reminded me. That's something Jemima Puddle-Duck might have liked, or Peter Rabbit. Or maybe gooseberry tart with clotted cream."

"The desserts are worth a detour around here."

"Except for spotted d.i.c.k."

"Should I ask what that is?"

"Raisins in a steamed dough. Raisins are the spots. d.i.c.k is the pudding they're in, so-spotted d.i.c.k."

"Sounds like a disease the British Army picked up in colonial jungles."

"'d.i.c.k' relates to dough; dog and duff, too. You've heard of plum duff, haven't you? They're old recipes, some with suet. They're covered in custard sauce-which makes anything good. Actually, a big supermarket chain tried to change spotted d.i.c.k to spotted Richard because women customers were squeamish about asking for it."

"I'll stick to plum and ginger pie, mille grazie, just the same. Custard sauce-blaaa."

"Think creme anglaise, and it'll taste better. Just north in Mickleton the hotel Three Ways House is totally devoted to English puddings-even their bedrooms are named Oriental Ginger Pudding, Summer Pudding, Sticky Toffee and Date Pudding, Lord Randall's Pudding."

"That sounds as if it would promote sweet dreams."

"They have the Pudding Club there, which anyone can join. They meet on the first and third Fridays for dinner, which is served with seven traditional puddings. 'Lashings of custard' are promised."

"Seven? One is enough. So rich."

As we drive to gardens, we listen to radio plays on the BBC. They're addictive. We don't get out of the car when we arrive at the garden. We have to hear the end.

Chipping Campden's houses are the color of toast, of the wheat ripening in the nearby fields, and many are thatched. They are shockingly beautiful and mellow. This area is the ancestral home of the famous Cotswold sheep, known as the Cotswold Lion, whose fleecy wool was sold all over medieval Europe. Even today more sheep make up the census than humans. Chipping, from Anglo-Saxon ceapen, means "market." Many of the Cotswold towns still have the lively market air they must have had when wool merchants made their fortunes and the farmers herded their flocks down the many Sheep Streets to sell. The fine country churches, indebted to those merchants, are known as "wool churches." Chipping Campden has an excellent bakery, numerous tearooms lavish in their use of clotted cream, and cheerful shops adorned with hanging baskets. Also, one of the most famous gardens in England, Hidcote Manor, lies just outside town, with Kifsgate and numerous others nearby.

Hidcote lavender attracts all the b.u.t.terflies in Tuscany to my garden. The name comes from here. For the avid gardener, Hidcote deserves several visits. I always think about garden "rooms." This garden abundantly ill.u.s.trates that concept. Tall hedges outline rooms, with doors cut into them. Within a room a plethora of flowers madly spilling and bolting and climbing creates an intimate s.p.a.ce, like a room in a Vuillard painting. Big sweeps of lawn break up the room idea, as does the simple dignity of an aisle of hornbeam trees. These extravagant lawns keep the ten-acre garden from becoming claustrophobic. Hidcote was developed by Lawrence Johnston, who used to winter with Edith Wharton on Hyeres. He was influenced by her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens. I spot the influence in the architecture of the hedges and the staginess of the lawns, one of which ends with a raised bed where theatricals might have been performed if there had not been a beech tree planted right in the middle. The hedges sometimes ascend into a topiary cut, a stylized bird that makes you smile when you see it. That, too, is an Italian touch. Starting from farmland, Lawrence Johnston had fun sculpting these walls. Did he begin with foot-high plants? In odd contrast to the cla.s.sic lawns with busts and yew borders, Hidcote does several flip-flops and also features elements of cottage-style Arts and Crafts gardens. A ginger cat curls under a bamboo teepee of sweetpeas. Every English garden should have a sleeping cat. We suddenly spot a rose similar to our mystery rose at Bramasole. We've searched every book, as well as Cavriglia in Tuscany, the largest private rose garden in the world, and have not found this rose, which survived the thirty years of neglect our house suffered. A peonylike form, our rose blooms only once in early summer, but the flowers are profuse and the scent divine. I step out every morning and press my face against many blossoms, breathing in enough heart-of-rose scent to last all summer. The few renegades thrown out later in the summer lack that ethereal perfume. The one we find at Hidcote is Empress Josephine. Ed thinks the leaf is different. Then we spot another similar rose: Surpa.s.se Tout, also a Gallica. The bud looks more like our rose's ball-shaped bud. I write down the names and will order them for a comparison. Probably neither will be exactly the same. Maybe the nonna I always imagine grafted a friend's rose onto one of hers.

Roses have unattractive feet, but often I've been told not to underplant because the rose won't like it-advice I've ignored. At Hidcote short lilies surround the roses. Hurrah! They look spectacular. I, too, have lilies under a few roses. I'll become bold. One hundred yellow lily bulbs; I can already imagine the bees. I love the blue metal benches, the small poles with eye hooks in the beds for the clematis to climb-a moment of height. A pink rose garden is planted with mixed blue and purple flowers cl.u.s.tered beneath. Lovely. Iron arches, around four feet high, give the roses something to lean on without the rigidity of a stake. I have wanted to make a bed of roses, a literal bed. I see that I can simply make the head and foot from two arches and add crossbars. Hidcote has a cla.s.sic ha-ha, basically a broad ditch that prohibits animals from escaping. The genius of a ha-ha is that it does not break into the view separating the garden from the fields. From a few feet back, they simply merge.

Across the road from the entrance, we drive into the privately owned Kifsgate Garden, which has a more intimate feel than Hidcote. This garden is rare-a project of women plant collectors and guardian angels since 1920. The position, lovelier than Hidcote's, looks toward the poetically named Vale of Evesham. But why compare, just because they're across the way from each other? Both are remarkable gardens. I marvel at the long yellow border spiked with blue and the paths not edged but utterly romantic with profligate lavender and mallow and cotton lavender. The famous Kifsgate rose, reputed to be the largest in the world, must be glorious in early summer. I write in my notebook: Love the pink valerian mixed with campanula. If deerproof, plant Allium rosenbachianum in California. These tall fist-sized pink b.a.l.l.s are a type of garlic plant. They're fun exclamation points in a flower bed. A smaller, darker version grows wild on our hillsides in Italy, and I've always picked it to mix in bouquets. This taller version would be wonderful in my California garden, which is planted to look like a natural hillside.

Meandering around several villages and visiting two gardens fills a day. After pub lunches, we have salad and cheese at night back at our schoolhouse, treating ourselves to bowls of prime strawberries with double cream for dessert. The bad luck of renting two wretched houses has been mitigated by the enormous good luck with the weather. Except for a ten-minute shower one morning, we've had sunny days and blessed temperatures in the high seventies. At night we sit out in the garden with a gla.s.s of wine planning the next day. We're appreciating the oh-so-British names, p.r.o.nunciations, and expressions. To truffle around, to look for something. Ke bab, not ke bob. Past ah-like past-for pasta. This grates, especially since so many English people go to Italy constantly. Ed's favorite is rumpy-pumpy, which we heard on a radio play. It took only a moment to realize what it meant. The image rumpy-pumpy calls up-a rump the color of a boiled pig pumping away-is rather horrifyingly comic. We pa.s.sed Cromp b.u.t.t Lane and Old b.u.t.t Lane along the way. Crinkley Bottom is a town over in Somerset. We like bolthole and clootie dumplings and singin' hinney, a bread with currants. Sometimes in the South I heard hinney for donkey, and we wonder if the bread brays, like bubble and squeak squeaks. Or maybe hinney is dialect for honey.

The market town nearest our little schoolhouse is Stow-on-the-Wold, also with a Sheep Street. If we were moving to the Cotswolds, this is where we would aspire to live, within a few miles of this friendly, bustling village. I mourn the loss of small bookstores in America. Stow has several. "No, dear, we don't have that, but you're not missing anything," I'm told when I ask for a recent Booker Prizewinner's book. On the way to the cheese shop and the wine shop, I begin to feel at ease here. Maybe it was buying a book by a writer who lives in these parts, Joanna Trollop. Like Anita Brookner, her books often feature women on their own, cast into a domestic or personal crisis. They're well-written Aga Sagas, a term-not derogatory-for women's relationship novels. Aga, of course, is the stove of choice for British households. I've already been devouring Penelope Lively, whose memoir about growing up in Egypt I liked last year. Since Lively knows this area, I read two novels, looking for clues about living here. But I find that her writerly detachment from her adopted landscape keeps the place at a distance. In Italy, I realize, I have not sought such detachment myself, although when I moved part of my life there, I intended to maintain just such a separation between home and Tuscany. Italy would be a place to write, a place to have friends visit, a locus for travel. Against my will, Italy slowly became home. My long internal, secret desire to return to the American South, where I was born and grew up, slowly dissolved. All my adult life I'd felt exiled and I am shocked, but the South of Tuscany became home for me, who had no Italian ancestor, not a drop of Mediterranean blood. By the time that happened, I felt a strange rapture within. Another landscape had taken over, taken me in, shaped me to its own requirements, pleasures, and history. If I lived here, I probably would start making cheese and collecting teapots. I have a feeling this place would take me. I'd get heather-hued sweaters, a golden retriever, and a large umbrella, take up knitting, and become a strictly no-nonsense, practical village woman who volunteered at the church jumble sale.

Stow has a tall limestone cross in the center of town, an old reminder to be good while sheep trading at the market. This large open center could function as a piazza for the citizens were it not filled with cars. Maybe so much rain makes parking close to the action a necessity, but the town would be drastically altered for the good if pedestrians ruled rather than cars. I collect several cheeses, bottles of damson and peach cordial to take home, and a bottle of elder flower and apple, which I've been drinking in place of the iced tea that is nowhere to be found in this land of purist tea drinkers. In the South where I grew up, our iced tea was mixed with pineapple juice, lemon, and sugar. Egregious, I'm sure, to the English sensibility. My grandmother steeped elder flowers for wine, which my father swore could cause blindness. In the bakery I find Sally Lunn, something my mother used to make. This legendary bread originated in seventeenth-century Bath, either by someone named Sally Lunn or by a Frenchwoman who made buns and hawked them, calling "sol et lune." The tea shop remains open on North Parade Pa.s.sage in Bath. In the bas.e.m.e.nt Roman ruins reveal that the building was used for preparing foods even in Roman times. This Stow version of Sally Lunn is nothing like my mother's. Perhaps her recipe mutated after years in America. Hers was a light, light sweet cake but was served with meals. Southerners like sweet touches with their dinners. This Sally Lunn is a yeast bread, rather lumpy looking, possibly improved with a slathering of raspberry jam.

The butcher, the baker-this way of shopping is my favorite. The scale is right. I meet Ed, coming in from a countryside walk. He takes my packages, and because we are currently garden-mad, he buys a bunch of delphinium, larkspur, and foxglove for the schoolhouse dining room.

In Woodstock we skip Winston Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, having seen it years ago. In an old, old pub, The Bear, we have lunch in the bar, then walk. Each town's little shops speak for life there. We see a sign, HATS FOR HIRE. The butcher shop is adorned with flowers. I am so happy to see the Winchester Glove Shop and Harriet's Tea Rooms. There's even an Aga store with a purple stove in the window and a teapot shaped like the stove.

From Woodstock we drive to Rousham Gardens, entering near a conservatory path crowded with apricot lilies and lavender. The crenellated house with statues in niches looks Jacobean with Italian overlays. Even from the forecourt, Rousham seems like someone's personal garden, and it is. Since 1635 the property has been in the same family. The garden, first designed by Charles Bridgeman (inventor of the ha-ha), was taken over by William Kent in 1738. He began life as a coachman but somehow got to Rome, where he lived and painted for ten years. He made a living buying paintings and selling them to the English aristocracy, then gradually metamorphosed into an architect and designer. Rousham survives intact and offers a textbook lesson on the fascination of the English for Roman culture.

We walk first through the gardens nearest the house. Walled gardens are the ultimate garden rooms. At eleven I loved The Secret Garden, locked and overgrown, a place for transformation. This one we glimpse through a lacy iron gate. Flower beds are backed by ancient apples, formerly espaliered, now just on their own with their leafy arms spread as if they were protecting the winsome carnations, yarrow, Peruvian lilies, and sweetpeas that climb teepees made of twiggy branches. At home in Italy, Beppe, our farmer, makes these same teepees for the beans and peas in the orto, our vegetable garden. All the gardens I've seen have variations of this teepee. Some are iron; most are willow. The willow or twig teepees suit the casual grace of the ever-blooming, abundant style of English garden design. Rule of green thumb: plant twice as much. Another rule: forget rules, forget order-blowsy is best. Another: no sharply edged beds-let the flowers creep and flop onto the path or gra.s.s border. Some beds are backed with espaliered plum trees, cl.u.s.ters of ripe damsons like great garnets ripening against a stone wall.

So many ideas. The caves and playhouses formed inside thick hedges would be paradise for children to play spooky games. Rousham has a cutting garden within the kitchen garden, where they're growing enough asparagus to feed the Cotswolds. The strawberries grow in a patch of straw, with a screen cover staked at the four sides. Light dawns-that's why they're called strawberries. With each plant separated, you can see exactly how many bowls of luscious berries you have for dinner. I see Ed studying this method, too. "Ours is a mess. The birds get more than we do. What if we move it up a terrace higher and build this kind of frame?"

"I'd love that. I hate putting down my hand in there-I'm always thinking I'm going to touch a snake."

A later Rousham designer loved circles. A small round pond stands at the center of a large circle of roses. Four iron arches at the cardinal points lead in and out. Between the arches the circle is maintained by a few poles, with wire running between. Some roses are trained on the poles, some are free-standing. Quite simple, and a very clever design! This circle garden could transform a plain square backyard. I give wide berth to a peac.o.c.k strolling through the rose garden dragging his train. He stops by the delphinium because his feathers sport the exact same blue. I was once attacked by a peac.o.c.k at Warwick Castle, and the memory forms part of my old bird phobia.

A characteristic Cotswold dovecote, like a chopped-off tower topped with a conical roof, anchors one area. Against it grows an espaliered cherry bright with fruit.

Almost three hundred years later Kent's design philosophy, "Nature abhors a straight line," still guides well. Around the house the garden is similar to others, although I find it more vivacious, but away from the house we suddenly see Kent's mind at work. "This is exciting-early, early landscape design," I say. We pa.s.s statues and a folly, a serpentine, stone-lined rill that mysteriously quotes the Arab gardens in the Alhambra. "This is theory in action. He was in love with Roman gardens."

"And England was once all Roman, of course. So it has double roots."

We stop for a pastoral view. "This looks like a painting. The rural distance seems placed there for our benefit." Kent created landscape tableaux: a cold pool for dipping, an "eyecatcher" fake ruin, cunningly placed statues of Venus, Apollo, and Pan, a pond, a small columned temple looking down on the river Cherwell. "I remember that Kent also was a set designer for the theatre. It makes sense."

"Some gardens back then had resident hermits to add to the picturesque."

"Maybe each garden should take a few homeless people."

"We haven't seen a single homeless person in the Cotswolds."

"Is this your favorite? I like it the best."

"After Bodnant, yes. No, maybe I like this one more. Do I have to choose?"

"No, but let's go find a pub. I'm starving."

After lunch, sleepy and saturated with gardens, we press on regardless to Waddeson, the grandiose house and garden built by Ferdinand de Rothschild, that was picked up from the chateau country of France, whirled through Renaissance Italy, and miraculously set down in Buckinghamshire. The garden must live up to the fairy-tale architecture. The terrace level just behind the house makes another foray. A flamboyant fountain with horses reminds us of the Piazza Navona. The formal garden surrounding the fountain features built-up, squared-off mounds planted with primary red, with a few dashes of purple. Gray-green foliage tempers the effect somewhat, but it looks harsh and munic.i.p.al. In fact, they love red here. New Guinea impatiens beds, surrounded by hens-and-chickens, also look quite bad. The weather is threatening, but no rain falls. We wander among the vast, hypnotic trees. Lots of naked boys holding grapes aloft and other cla.s.sical statues punctuate the park. Friends are picnicking with folding tables and champagne gla.s.ses or lounging on the gra.s.s. Ed spots the grave of Poupon, a Rothschild dog. I'm not thrilled to come upon a wedding-cake aviary, though I like the confectionary demilune design. Ed visits all the birds, and I stand back. I do respond to one bird. Perhaps fifteen feet high, wittily placed in front of the aviary, the wire bird's plumage is made of clipped lavender, hens-and-chickens, and many other plants that cleverly outline feathers and wings. Two immense crowns in front of the house are also "carpet planted." A nineteenth-century idea, carpet bedding, now called Instaplant, is plotted by computer. The plants in trays slide into a form. Jeff Koons must have designed his giant flower puppy this way. Another playful focal point is an oversize-maybe twelve feet long-woven basket planted with herbs, nasturtiums, artichokes, and asparagus. The humor refreshes.

Scrawling on my garden guide, I note the names of several magnificent roses new to me. Gorgeous apricot Crown Princess Margereta grows in cl.u.s.ters. Mrs. Oakley Fisher reminds me of a flat rose I have in California, only Mrs. F. is creamy apricot. A must-have Crocus Rose radiates that happy icy salmon color.

I lean close to each, for the possibility of heady perfume. Most are what the rose books call "lightly scented," which usually means you can't smell a thing. In the gardens I've seen in England, scent does not figure as a major concern. Maybe you need fecund southern gardens for those hits of perfume that can make your head reel. I've always felt dizzy in the presence of gardenias. Is there some sedative element in the fragrance? The first gardens I knew, my mother's, our neighbor's, and my grandmother's, remain a secret joy. High-as-the-house azaleas to hide under; ruffled pink camellias to float in a bowl until the edges of the petals turn brown; dwarf nasturtiums to gather so the dolls could smell their volatile, spicy fragrance; tough St. Augustine gra.s.s lawns to cartwheel across; c.r.a.pe myrtle with bark-pearly gray on one side, russet on the other-to peel; tea olive to inhale in my bedroom when there blew the slightest night breeze on a calm summer night; bridal wreath to tie into crowns; daylilies to shelter my dog, Tish, napping on the cool side of the house; the honeysuckle where every summer the bees built their swarm.

I tell Ed all these memories. Except for red geraniums in urns on the porch, his parents' Winona garden was given over to vegetables-his daddy was a farmer until the age of thirty-five. They grew and pickled beets. Their potatoes and kohlrabi lasted into the cold weather, marrying well with the kielbasa, head cheese, and dill pickles his Polish mother made, along with several big loaves of bread every week. His strongest scent memory is lilac. He times his trips back to Minnesota to coincide with the lilac bloom. In California around Easter he always comes home with armfuls of lilac the minute it appears at the farmer's market. The California lilac's scent is faint but identifiable enough to transport him back to the lilac hedge behind his home in Winona.

We talk as we fall into the ritual of afternoon tea. I've never been a tea drinker, but I'm pouring several cups a day. Maybe the tannin counterbalances the sweet we inevitably order: today, peach creme brulee with lime sorbet, and a little plate of cookies. Salad tonight.