Free The Orchid House by Lucinda Riley Page B

more. In their place was a tangle of weeds and nettles, interspersed with the odd, mournful face of an overblown cabbage. Julia walked towards the small orchard that stood at the bottom of the kitchen garden, shielding the hothouses from view. The many apple, pear, and plum trees, some of them extremely old, were still there, their crooked branches stark and naked, windfalls from the previous autumn lying uncollected and turning to mulch beneath them.
    Julia walked through the trees and saw the roofs of the hothouses peeping above the bushes that had spurted up unchecked around their sides. She stepped along the now barely distinguishable path towards the first door.
    It was no longer there. Instead, it lay at her feet, a heap of rotting wood and broken glass. She picked her way through it and entered the hothouse. It was empty, bar the old trestle tables that used to line it, and the row of iron hooks hanging from the trusses above her head. The concrete floor was covered in moss, and weeds were encroaching underneath the frame and inside it.
    Julia walked slowly to the end of the hothouse. And there, in the corner where it always had been, was the stool she used to sit on. And underneath it, its metal components heavily rusted, was Grandfather Bill’s old Bakelite radio.
    She knelt down and picked it up. It was beyond repair, but she had to take it with her anyway. She cradled it to her breast like a baby and twiddled the knobs in a fruitless attempt to resuscitate it …
    ‘Orchids love music, Julia. Perhaps it replaces the noises of nature they hear in their native homelands,’ Grandfather Bill tells me as he shows me how to mist the delicate petals with a spray gun. ‘And warmth and moisture, to imitate the humidity they’re used to.’
    Everyone else finds the hothouses unbearably stuffy, with the strong sunlight pouring through the glass windows, which, added to the lack of natural breezes, raises the temperature far above that of a humid English day.
    I love it, for I hate wearing lots of clothes to keep me warm. It feels like my natural habitat and Grandfather Bill doesn’t seem to notice the heat either.
    Besides, it allows the beautiful smells of the flowers to permeate the air.
    ‘This is a Dendrobium victoria regina , sometimes listed as the Blue Dendrobium but, as you can see, it’s lilac,’ chuckles my grandfather. ‘A true blue orchid is yet to be discovered. This one grows on trees in South-East Asia. Can you imagine? Whole gardens in the air …’
    And Grandfather Bill would get that ‘look’, as I call it, and even though I ask him to tell me more, he never does.
    ‘Dendrobia like to rest in the winter – I think of it as hibernating, I do – and not be fed and just misted with enough water to prevent them shrivelling.’
    ‘How did you learn what they like in the first place, Grandfather?’ I asked him once. ‘Did you go to Orchid School?’
    He shook his head and chuckled. ‘No, Julia. I learnt a lot from a friend of mine who lived in the Far East and had grown up surrounded by them. And the rest by trial and error, watching them closely to see how they responded to what I tried. Nowadays, I know what I’m getting, because it says what the flowers are on the packaging, but when I was a lad I used to get crates sent from far away and we never knew till it flowered what sort we was growing.’ He sighed. ‘It was exciting in them days, it was, even though I lost more than I grew.’
    I know that Grandfather Bill is famous in the orchid world for managing to grow something called hybrids. His are unusual and often well-known horticulturalists will come to see his latest bloom. He’s very modest, doesn’t like to talk about it; says his job is about growing flowers, not boasting about the flowers he grows. Grandmother Elsie doesn’t feel the same – I hear her saying sometimes how much money Bill has brought into Wharton Park, what with all the day-trippers coming to see the hothouses