Free The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle

redecoration. From the look of the interior, nothing much had been done to it since the 1950s and, apart from having central heating installed, Nell reckoned she could handle most of the work herself. She much preferred that to hiring and supervising others. She wanted to go to bed tired every night, and she had a high tolerance for repetitive manual tasks like sanding down, stripping, and painting.
    By now, the house should have been finished, a showpiece, and Nell looking for something else to do, but the gardens had changed her plans, as they had changed her.
    In the beginning, when she bought the house, there was nothing that could be called a garden, just a lot of overgrown land at the back of the house where, sometime in the past, there had been vegetable plots, rose beds, a rockery, a greenhouse (long ruined), and a lawn. The apple orchards that gave the house its name had been on land in the valley down below—land sold off for other uses in the 1960s. As the pleasant young man from the estate agent’s had gestured toward the fields and woods that stretched away behind the house, pointing out the boundaries of her property, she’d noticed what she thought was a ruined building, only a few hundred yards away.
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh, yes, that comes with the house; that’s the old walled garden.”
    “May I see it?”
    “It’s not much to look at; I don’t think it’s been touched in thirty years.” But, as obliging as ever to this potential purchaser, he’d let her satisfy her curiosity, leading her on a tortuous journey across a boggy, rutted field, and then scratching himself rather badly on the thorns that barred the door.
    “Brambles,” he muttered, finally wrenching the splintered old wooden door open to reveal the way inside still blocked by a particularly wicked-looking bush. “Devil’s own job to dig them out once they take hold.”
    “I need a prince on a white charger, brandishing a sword,” she said. She was thinking of the castle surrounded by a thorny hedge in “Sleeping Beauty,” and was surprised to see him blush. She turned away, annoyed by his presumption. “Never mind,” she said, staring over the hill at the road far below. “I’m not a gardener, anyway.”
    It was true, she’d never grown anything except a tray of cress at school. It had been Sam’s fantasy to potter around tending vegetables in his retirement, not hers. But
The Secret Garden
had been her favorite book when she was small, and the existence of the walled garden in the grounds of Orchard House tipped the balance. And once she was the owner-occupier, responsible for the upkeep of the property, things began to happen that made the restoration of the orchard almost inevitable.
    A spell of fine weather when she first moved in meant that she began with outdoor jobs, and once she’d cleared away the worst of the weeds and the rubble, she found herself thinking about what to put in their place: patio, flower beds, lawn? After all, the setting of the house was important, and it had been abandoned for so long that she was denied the easy option of leaving things as they were. She ordered books on garden design, drew up plans, searched through gardening catalogues, and took a trip down to Scotland’s central belt in order to scout through the bigger gardening centers and do-it-yourself stores to see what was available.
    In Stirling she got to talking to a knowledgeable nurseryman about what plants would and would not suit the southern west coast, on a hill above the sea, and unexpectedly she found herself confiding, “But there’s a walled garden, too, so the sea winds don’t have to be a problem.”
    “Where is it that you stay?”
    “Appleton.” She wouldn’t have been surprised by a blank look; no one outside of Scotland had ever heard of Appleton, and even Scots outside the immediate area were vague about where it might be, usually confusing it with Applecross, which was much farther to the north.
    But