Excerpt from Chapter 2, "February", from Seed to Dust: A Gardener''s Story by Marc Hamer Climbing Hydrangea I''m heading back to get the big three-legged ladder from behind the sheds to start pruning the hydrangea that grows up the front of the house, I reconsider for a moment, Miss Cashmere is out and a fall could leave me on the ground until she returned or Peggy started to worry about me as darkness came down. She would be sitting there at home, by the window writing her stories, watching neighbours walking by. Pegs would first ring my mobile perhaps and there would be no answer. She is miles away from me here in the country, there are no bus routes nearby and she does not drive. It occurs to me that I don''t even know if she has the address, could she say exactly where on the face of this planet I''ve been going every day for years? Probably not. The three-legged ladder is stable on the ground and does not rock as tripods don''t. If I pay attention and step on it properly, gripping it well and not taking risks or hurrying, treat it as a meditation. This is a long but simple job.

On the way up I cut off all the old flower heads, prune it hard just above a strong pair of buds. There are dried and faded winter-bitten flowers, all the way from the ground to the bedroom windows. Decay is so often the colour of rust. Like a careless child''s paintbox, all the colours mix to become the chaotic brown of the earth that gives birth to life and cosmos and colour. The shiny new buds are rust coloured too. With my old red-handled secateurs I cut off the crispy flowers that fall slowly to the ground and earwigs and spiders scuttle away from my hands and snails who love their privacy just stay where they are glued to the wall with their own slime while they wait for the warmth. The weather has been getting warmer and wetter in recent years so the hydrangea grows faster and thinner than it used to, tough white aerial roots of new pale green stems grasp firmly to the stone, tiny white hairs snaking deep into the texture of the wall for its moisture and security. I have to pull hard to peel them away and cut them off, I''m nervous, tugging with both cold hands, gripping the trembling aluminium steps with my knees so hard my legs get bruised.

Then down and back on stable land I rattle the ladder along a metre or so and clatter my way back up. The pile of fluffy heads grows and as the light is starting to fade I finish by raking and forking them all into a corner ready for barrowing down to the compost. Tired, I haul the ladder onto my shoulder to go back to my van and pack up. Her car crunches slowly along the gravel drive as Miss Cashmere returns home and daylight fades. She is dressed all in black, a short jacket, a knee-length skirt, tights, patent shoes with a small heel and a square satin bow. She carries a black hat with a brim. Her hair in her usual neat white bun. She has clearly been to a funeral and so I wonder about the appropriateness of passing pleasantries with her.

I ignore the outfit and carry on as normal. My big smile, her small one. She is tightly drawn with a neat line while I am fuzzy. ''Dorothy how are you?'' I ask all upbeat. ''It''s lovely to see you, did you have a good Christmas?'' ''Hello Marc'' she answers smiling, happy, ''it is good to see you too, and getting on with it already. Marvellous.'' She doesn''t answer my question and heads for the house. ''It''s nice to have you back.

My daughter is coming over later, I have just been to my great-granddaughters christening.'' She says fiddling with her door key, ''We must chat sometime'', she goes inside, ''Congratulations'' I say as she closes the door behind her. Her ginger cat wanders to the house, brushing itself against my legs as it goes and sits looking through the glass of the door, staring into the house as she glides away. A Story I''m clearing away the pile of dried flowers from yesterday. Miss Cashmere is not about although her car is there. The bedroom curtains are drawn closed and I''m happy to have been up there yesterday pruning because it could have been embarrassing if she were to open her curtains and see my face, or see my shadow passing on them while she was in bed. I started working for Miss Cashmere when she worked in London and she and her husband came down at weekends and Christmases, summer holidays and birthdays and parties. Then later she stayed at home and had her three children, two boys and a girl, and I watched them grow up and leave and she stayed.

Her husband carried on going to London and coming back and then one day in February about ten years ago he didn''t return. I remember I was here doing this same job but not the year. He came back about a week later, for a few hours. The tide gone out of him. Cars arrived. Friends and the grown children and their new children, and his colleagues and acquaintances, some of whom I recognised, who had visited the house before, who I had seen turning up for parties or lunches, smart people stepped down from large cars in subdued colours, and others curled themselves from smaller cars in brighter colours. The people stood around him in his box, and then they wheeled him off to the cemetery and they made him and his box into ashes as dry and brittle as life and mixed them with the earth and sent him back to where he came from and that was him done. He is just a story now.

I had asked Miss Cashmere if she would rather that I didn''t come to work that day but she said ''Just carry on as normal, I''ll be pleased to see you''. Maybe she wanted the normality of me pottering around. So for me and the plants and the insects life went on, as the people grouped in black on the other side of the steamed-up conservatory windows stood around in their glass box among the imported hothouse lilies drinking briefly from small stemmed, dark-filled glasses, sherry perhaps. Outside I kept my distance and worked near the stables and the compost heaps for the warmth. I have spent more time in his garden than he did. He was a nice man, we spoke occasionally, he was friendly. We were different. We enjoyed the same whisky.

He was clean and neat and polished, I am none of those things. We came from different worlds. We believed different things. Now he has been dispersed into nature. He believed that flesh was sinful and because of this we struggled to communicate about purpose and meaning, but simple subjects like love is good and beauty is good and work is tiring and whisky is good were easy. There were a million rules and beliefs and systems and rituals built between him and me and the truth of mud. He lived for a higher ideal, a great idea which for him gave life a meaning. He was raised to be special.

I was raised to be nothing but I''ve tried very hard to make being nothing into a good thing. She had loved him and was sad for a long time and as far as I knew, never took to another man. Miss Cashmere is alone. Sometimes the children come, mostly they don''t. I am here every day. I let myself in, do my work then drive home to Peggy who I love. Love is simple, just pay attention, put the effort in, kill your ego. Peggy does the same so it works.

Cyclops There are primroses flowering, pink and yellow. Some of the Hellebores, Christmas Roses, are showing their white flowers. In Latin the Christmas Rose is Helleborus niger, the Black Hellebore, although the flower is white. Hanging face down in a cool shady place, in the drying leaves under the shrubs where they like to be. When they fade, their seed pods will swell and turn brown and their relatives the Lenten Roses (Heleborus orientalis) will open their red-wine flowers. Hellebores are common garden plants that are deeply poisonous, like many other plants in the garden; the foxgloves and aconites and rhododendrons and more. An unrelated plant known as the False Hellebore contains a poison called cyclopamine. The child of the pregnant woman, the cat, the goat, the chicken that consumes the plant is born with one eye in the middle of its forehead and a primitive smooth brain like a snake or a mole.

The creature dies soon afterwards. There is no recorded instance of a cyclops living into adulthood. Helleborus leaves tend to turn black when the flower blooms so I kneel and take the secateurs from the cracking leather holster that hangs on my belt and cut them off so they can display their flowers the better. It is a traditional thing to do, the plant doesn''t need them anymore, it is about to go to sleep. The sap too is poisonous but it has never had an effect on me, though who can tell which is cause and which is effect of all the daily thoughts and feelings, aches and pains? Miss Cashmere probably won''t even notice the blooms, and I complete these small tasks for my own pleasure now as much as for hers. In ''Warming her Pearls'' the poet Carol Ann Duffy writes about a traditional practice of a servant warming her mistresses'' pearls before she goes out for the evening, a sensual poem about a relationship that has personal value to the servant but only a functional one to her mistress. I wonder if I''m warming Miss Cashmere''s pearls, I love her as I love the poisonous hellebores and the faded wintersweet, she is a flower in my garden and I had wondered what she felt about me. We have been together for so long, perhaps it gives her pleasure just to have me around or, more likely my work here only gives her one less thing to worry about.

I think that in years gone by I was an entertainment, seeing her and her female friends drinking and laughing with each other in the conservatory or on the patio in the sun as I worked in shorts, mowing the grass, or pruning the roses. I was young and fantasised about being invited inside, and what might happen. But of course I never was. Eventually it occurred to me that she was just watc.