“Morning. Got a visitor?” said Tony. Tony lived next door. It was Tuesday – bin day – and we’d both met up as we often did, each trundling his dustbin down to the pick-up point on the verge.
“Visitor? What visitor?” I said.
He looked confused. He chuckled and frowned. “The man I keep seeing in your garden,” he said. “The other day, he was mowing the lawn.”
I pulled a puzzled face.
“A bloke about your age? He’s got a beard and always wears a red baseball cap. At first I thought you’d paid for a gardener but he hadn’t got a van with him or anything like that. And then, next time I looked, he was sitting on the patio putting his feet up.” He laughed. “I wish we had friends like that. Tell him he can come and stay here whenever he likes.” Tony and Pat have a far bigger lawn than I do.
“That’s really weird,” I said. It was all I could think of saying. I had no-one staying with me and, moreover, I knew no-one fitting the description. I looked back up the drive and scratched my chin, scanning the front garden as if I expected to see the man in the red baseball cap stooping over the roses. Of course, there was no-one there.
“I definitely saw him,” said Tony. “Look at it this way. When did you last cut the lawn?”
I thought for a moment. “A while ago,” I said. The mower had been in the shed all winter. It’s an old hand-mower. It came with the house. I could’ve replaced it with an electric or even a two-stroke machine but I’m sentimentally attached to it. Not only that, but having to push it around is good exercise. This now being spring, I’d been meaning for a few weeks to get it out of the shed and oil it, but I hadn’t got round to it.
“Well, look at the grass,” said Tony.
He was right. It had the neat, green sheen of a freshly cut lawn. Either someone had mown it or it had started mowing itself. And, looking at the border, it was obvious that someone had dead-headed the shrubs the previous autumn. I know you’re supposed to do this but it had never occurred to me to actually do it.
“So there we are,” said Tony. “The Mystery of the Phantom Gardener.” He looked pleased with himself, the way you do when you’ve just come up with a good title. Which he had.
Over the next few days I found myself forever looking out of the window in the hope of catching whoever it was in the act. On one occasion I saw a woman I know by sight walking her Jack Russell down the lane but otherwise I saw no-one. Since the weather was beginning to warm up I thought of actually sitting out on the patio to get a better view but then realised that this might scare him off. Since I’d never seen him it was quite possible he was taking great care to avoid me. In my efforts to spot him I’d become more aware of the garden and it did not escape my notice that, although I never saw anyone doing them, jobs were getting done. One day I noticed that the drive needed weeding. The next day, the weeds were gone.
Hardly a week goes by when I don’t speak to my friend Dave on the phone. I told him about the phantom gardener.
“It’s simple,” he said. “Just get a webcam with a motion sensor. They’re as cheap as chips these days. Anything moves, it’ll take a picture and send it to your laptop. People get them to take photos of wildlife in their gardens. All they usually end up with is hundreds of shots of the postman and next door’s cat but it keeps them happy.”
He’d convinced me. I bought one online and when it came, a couple of days later, I fixed it up in a discreet location, pointing directly at the front lawn. It would soon be ready for mowing again. If I left it running and did my best to forget about it, I thought, I was sure to get a shot of the mystery man. If nothing else, I told myself, it would help me relax. I did indeed lose the obsessive urge to keep looking out of the window. I’d been getting so preoccupied with it all that, one morning, I’d even woken up thinking I could hear the gentle rasp of a hand-mower. I jumped out of bed and ran over to the window. Needless to say, there was no-one there. Not only that, but it immediately occurred to me that since it was very early in the morning, the grass would be so wet with dew as to be unmowable. I must’ve been dreaming.
Next day I checked the laptop to see if there were any pictures. There weren’t many. There were a few shots of birds hopping about looking for worms. There was a cat I’d never seen before, striding across the lawn as if it owned the place and one of an anxious-looking dog, squatting, doing its business – right in the middle of a freshly cut lawn. I ran out to take a look. Yes, the grass had been cut. Not only that but there was no trace of the mess the dog must’ve left behind.
I began to suspect that, somehow, Tony was playing a trick on me. Perhaps this should have occurred to me earlier but I’m a trusting sort of a guy. People in the past were forever pulling my leg and having a laugh at my expense. But if Tony were up to something, how did he manage to evade the camera? And, for that matter, how did he find the time? You’d have to be a pretty dedicated practical joker to maintain someone else’s garden undetected for weeks on end. But if it wasn’t Tony, we were back to the same old problem: how come he could see the mystery man and I couldn’t? The following Tuesday we met up over the dustbins again. I got straight to the point.
“Have you seen any more of this gardener bloke?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Most days. Mowing the lawn again, weeding the drive. He’s been really busy. It’s that time of year, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Why do you think you can see him and I can’t?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said. “But then, There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
Hamlet. We both often quote Shakespeare on dustbin day.
#
Having drawn a blank with the webcam, I decided the only option – despite my previous misgivings – was to do the job myself. We were enjoying a spell of warm, spring weather. Armed with a water bottle, a bar of chocolate, my phone and a good book, I stationed myself on the patio, in the same reclining garden-chair used – according to Tony – by the red-capped mystery man. From there I had an excellent view of the front garden and no-one could come and go without me seeing them. Barring freak storms and calls of nature, I could stay there all day. If anything happened in the garden, I was sure to see it.
The first hour passed uneventfully. I passed the time reading, looking up every few sentences and casting my eyes round the garden. Then I heard a noise coming from next door. I looked up, in time to see Pat walking down the drive to her car. She waved and smiled. I waved back. She drove off. I returned to my book. Then it was the turn of the postie. Seeing me sat on the patio, she made for me, rather than the letter-box, and handed me the mail.
“Oh, thanks,” I said. I felt a little guilty. I could have jumped up and saved her the walk up the drive.
She looked down on me, smiling. Her smile had a slightly wry twist to it that made me think she knew what I was thinking and possibly agreed with me. If she did, I wouldn’t blame her. “Nice day for it,” was all she said.
It wasn’t long after that that I had to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, the house has a downstairs loo. I dashed in and, once there, opened the window as far as I dare, so as to keep one eye on the garden.
Back at my post, I took a good look round. From what I could see, I’d missed nothing. I went back to my book. The sun rose higher, the air got warmer. The same cat I’d caught on the webcam came walking along the garden wall. It jumped down the far side, disappearing from view. It must’ve been soon after that that I fell asleep. I was woken up by the sound of footsteps on the gravel. Footsteps! As I came to my senses, I saw it was Pat, walking up the drive. She’d obviously just got back from wherever she’d been. She stopped, half way, to survey the garden.
“Lovely primulas!” she said. “You’ve been busy. Did you get them from the garden centre?”
I followed her gaze. A colourful line of primulas was indeed now growing along the edge of the border under the wall.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“You’ll be telling me next they’re the work of that phantom gardener Tony keeps going on about,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder about him.”
“Well, yes,” I said.
“I don’t know, you’re as bad as him,” she said. She laughed.
#
I’m not a believer in the supernatural. As far as I’m concerned, ghosts only exist in stories. And although invisible poltergeists are apparently able to chuck things around at will, all the visible ghosts I’ve read about are unable to hold physical objects. They seem unable to interact at all with the real world, hence their penchant for walking through walls. No ghost would be able to push a lawn-mower. Unless it was a phantom lawn-mower. But then, by the same token, surely a phantom lawn-mower wouldn’t be able to actually cut real grass.
So much for ghost stories. I did read somewhere, though, that the Romans believed in the genius loci, a spirit that protects a place. Many depictions of genii locorum survive from Roman times. Could it be possible to actually see one? Poppycock, says my inner sceptic. Genii locorum were depicted with cornucopiae, libation bowls or even snakes, for some reason. They didn’t push lawn-mowers. And anyway, Roman spirits don’t wear baseball caps unless irreverent tourists stick them on their statues.
The only experiences I’ve ever had that were in any way uncanny have involved not ghosts but time. Most of the time, in our day-to-day doings, we feel connected to clock-time, to the things we did earlier in the day and the things we might do later. However, when I go for walks hereabouts through the woods and along the holloway that runs down to the river, as I sometimes do, I feel disconnected from this everyday experience of time. In its place, I feel a connection with all the other times I’ve spent in these places, times going right back to when I first moved to the village. It’s as if, somewhere, I’m always walking that lane or exploring that wood. If I want to find myself, all I need to do is go back to them. I’ve almost convinced myself that clock-time is an illusion.
I realise that all this is no more scientific than the supernatural speculations I dismissed out of hand earlier. It has crossed my mind, though, that Tony might experience time the same way I do, only more so. He told me once that he’d lived in the village all his life and it may be that he’s become so immersed in the past that he actually sees it or, at least, believes that he does. Perhaps, twenty years ago, a man with a beard lived in the cottage. It might be that he used to put on a red baseball cap when he came out to mow the lawn.
None of this explains who’s been doing the garden, though. Perhaps there is no rational explanation. As Tony said, there are more things in heaven and earth and all that. And as Dave said to me, last time we were talking on the phone, I’ve got a house with a garden that does itself, so what’s not to like? He wished he had. It could even be a selling point, he said, if I ever decided to move.
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(Photo: John Lloyd/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Genius Loci by Dominic Rivron - March 9, 2023