Free Gifted and Talented by Wendy Holden Page B

the dark purple flowers. In Italy it was known as ‘ fiore di morte ’, flowers of death, because heretics had been led to the stake wearing garlands of it. Periwinkle was planted on graves in the belief it protected against evil. Uprooting it was said to cause nightmares and haunting.
    Diana tackled a buttercup root. Buttercups were so deceptive, that delicate yellow enamelled flower belying the tough and vicious root system beneath. You had to get all your fingers underneath, difficult to do properly in gloves. Apart from really freezing weather, or when picking up litter, Diana never wore them. She preferred to handle nature directly; nature returned the compliment by ruining her nails and ageing her hands.
    About to pull up another plant, she paused. A delphinium, it looked like: weedy, yellowish, the plant dying off, but those fringed leaves were unmistakeable. It gave her a wonderful idea. She imagined the stained concrete walls which so abounded at Branston transformed by row upon row of great blue floral rockets ranging from deepest violet blue to palest forget-me-not. What a sight it would be: a jump of blue joy that would hit anyone entering the garden right in the eye and in the heart.
    Her thoughts swung back to Rosie and she felt apprehensive once again. How was her daughter getting on? How was she finding the school? How was she coping with going from one extreme to the other, from the private and exclusive with education individually tailored to the child and delivered by committed professionals, to . . .
    Diana pulled herself back from sliding into wholehearted panic. Well? she demanded of herself, To what ? Who was to say that the education at Campion Primary wasn’t delivered by committed professionals? She hadn’t given them a chance yet.
    She had weeded so fast and frantically her bucket was full. Standing up to get another, Diana spotted a small coil of brown dog poo under a nearby bush. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. One of the few advantages of Branston’s garden was that it seemed relatively free of animal faeces. Certainly there was nothing akin to the horror stories she had heard about London’s prestigious garden squares, whose gardeners could encounter anything from aggressive tramps to Coke bottles filled with taxi drivers’ pee, tossed out of the cabs as they drove by.
    The poo looked new, Diana thought, rummaging for a plastic bag with which to remove it. But she had seen no dogs at Branston. They weren’t, or so she understood, allowed.
    The session with the council, at a table of Arthurian roundness in one of Branston’s peculiar circular concrete meeting rooms, was proving even longer and drearier than Richard had feared. So far he had thought mostly about his ongoing experiment, tuning in only occasionally. The first time he did this the Bursar was being congratulated for employing such a cheap new gardener, at a salary half of that enjoyed by her predecessor.
    ‘A gardener?’ Richard put in, suspiciously. Any effort at improving the grounds was a sinister development, in his view. He had hoped the college would not find one; who in their right mind, after all, would wish to tackle such a wilderness? Who could?
    He felt slightly relieved to hear the person chosen was a recent graduate of horticultural college, and a woman. He pictured someone very young and slight, someone whose impact on the wholesale wreck of the Branston gardens would surely be minimal. With any luck, she’d resign after a week. ‘And a single parent,’ the Bursar had added, shaking his head. ‘A sign of the times, I suppose.’
    At this, all Richard’s liberal neurons sparked at once and, for a second, the temptation flared to demand what exactly the Bursar meant by that. He desisted, however; the college officials were quite curious enough about his personal circumstances as it was and he had no intention of positively inviting their attention. He dismissed the college gardener from his thoughts. But