Free Shadows Over Paradise by Isabel Wolff

inside, we were hit by a wall of warm air mingled with the scent of damp earth and the tang of tomatoes.Klara took a pair of secateurs out of her apron and snipped some off a vine and laid them in the bowl. Then she snapped two cucumbers off their stems.
    “We grow peppers too,” she told me as a bee flew past. “We have aubergines, okra, galia melons …”
    “And grapes.” I glanced at the thick vine that trailed along the roof.
    “Yes, though they’re rather small and prone to mildew. I give them to the hens, as a treat.” We walked on past grow bags planted with Lollo Rosso and Little Gem lettuce, coriander, and thyme, then Klara stopped again. “These are my pride and joy.”
    Before us were six lemon trees in big clay pots.
    “I love growing lemons.” Klara twisted off three ripe ones, put them in the bowl, then indicated the two smaller trees to our left. “Those are kumquats. They’re too bitter to eat but make good marmalade.”
    “And you sell all this in the shop?”
    “We do. Everything that we sell we have produced ourselves. Come.”
    I followed her out of the greenhouse and toward the field to our left, where I could now see a huge stone structure, like a little fortress.
    “What’s that?”
    “You’ll see,” Klara answered as we approached it, then entered through a wooden gate.
    Inside, the air was still, the deep silence broken only by the silvery trills of a blackbird perched high on the wall. The air was fragrant with a late-flowering rose.
    We strolled along the gravel path, in the sunshine, past gooseberry and red currant bushes and teepee frames for peasand runner beans. There were rows of cabbages, cauliflowers, and leeks, a strawberry patch, a bed of dahlias, and a small orchard of dwarf apple trees.
    “It’s amazing!” I exclaimed, utterly charmed. “But it must be so much work.”
    “It is,” Klara said as she twisted a few last apples off the nearest tree. “But I have a gardener who does the weeding and the heavy pruning. The watering is automated, and the rest I can manage.”
    “How long is it?” I asked as we walked on. “A hundred feet?”
    “A hundred and twenty, and thirty feet wide. The walls are eighteen feet high and two feet deep.”
    “It’s magnificent.”
    “It was my husband’s wedding present to me. He asked me what I wanted, and I said that what I wanted, more than anything, was a walled garden. So he and his farmhand, Seb, built this, using stones that they carried up from the cove. It took them a year.”
    “And when was that?”
    “They started it in 1952. I’d just arrived here, never having been to England, let alone Cornwall.”
    “You must have been very much in love with your husband.”
    “I was.” I felt a sting of envy, that Klara’s love had clearly been so deeply reciprocated. “When I saw the farm for the first time, I made it my ambition to grow any crop, from A to Z.”
    “Really?” I laughed. “And did you achieve that?”
    “Oh, I did,” she replied as we passed a row of pumpkins. “We have everything from asparagus to … zucchini.”
    “What’s Q?” I wondered aloud.
    “Quince.” Klara pointed to a glossy shrub growing against the wall.
    “And Y?”
    “Yams. Though I don’t grow many, as they tend to go mad and take over the place.”
    We’d stopped by a peach tree that had been trained against the south-facing wall. Its leaves had yellowed and its fruit was all gone, except for one or two shriveled ones that were being probed by wasps.
    Klara pressed her hand against the thick, twisted trunk. “This was the first thing I planted. We’ve grown old together—old and rather gnarled.” She smiled; wrinkles fanned her eyes. “I planted that too.” She nodded at a huge fig tree. “I planted everything—it was an obsession, because when I was a child someone told me that the word
paradise
means ‘walled garden.’ And from that moment, that was my dream, to have my own little paradise, that no one