The Gardens that Mended a Marriage
Karen Moloney, 2014
Muswell Press
223 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780957556836
Summary
The Gardens that Mended a Marriage tells the story of how the author and her husband, an eminent architect, built a contemporary Moorish house on the top of a mountain and created a Persian garden, following the recipe laid down in the Quran for a paradise on earth.
Except it wasn’t as easy as that. The land slipped down the mountain, the neighbours sued, the town hall went into paralysis and wouldn’t allow them to finish the house. The Spanish builder turned out to be incompetent, the lawyer disinterested and the project manager seriously ill. In between times, she visited gardens all over the world for ideas and tended her precious vegetable patch in north London and waited.
Through all this, they argued, made up, disagreed about the garden, argued again, invested a lot of money and almost gave up. But over the years they came to understand that a significant shift happens in a relationship when you let go.
It was the creation of the garden that taught them. Nature will allow you to sculpt her land, nurture her plants and take control only if you agree to her conditions. So it is with a marriage. You can fight human nature only to a certain extent. It’s a trade-off. Accepting that fact is the real recipe for a paradise on earth.