Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and
creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a
moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that
view might be.
I got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the children grew it
had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could give you the Latin name of
almost any plant you cared to point at. The funny thing was, I didn’t even do
Latin at school – mine was a rather minor public school for girls where the focus
was on cooking and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives –
but the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I only
ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: Helleborus niger,Eremurus
stenophyllus,Athyrium niponicum. I can repeat those with a fluency I never had
at school.
They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age,
and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great
circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the
relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in
the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of
the garden to its full advantage. There have been times – the times when my
marriage proved to be somewhat more populated than I had anticipated – when it
has been a refuge, times when it has been a joy.
There have even been times when it was, frankly, a pain. There is nothing
more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to
watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit. But
even when I complained about the time, the effort involved in caring for it, the
way my joints protested at an afternoon spent weeding, or my fingernails never
looked quite clean, I loved it. I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the
smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing
things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.
After Will’s accident I didn’t garden for a year. It wasn’t just the time,
although the endless hours spent at hospital, the time spent toing and froing in
the car, the meetings – oh God, the meetings – took up so much of it. I took six
months’ compassionate leave from work and there was still not enough of it.