She’s Frightfully Generous with Cuttings.

Mrs Bantry lived in the big house on the outskirts of the village. The big house was not blessed with much in the way of aesthetic appeal. The best which could be said of it, was that it was a solid sort of building, square and imposing, much like Mrs Bantry herself. If you were to go about describing the big house to a stranger, you might say it was exactly the kind of residence in which you’d find a vicar residing, or a retired colonel of little import. The big house had a garden to the front and a garden to the back and two thin strips of garden, like brackets, running down either side. Mrs Bantry had done her worst with each of these green spaces. Where a simple lawn might have sufficed, Mrs Bantry had gone for raised beds and rockeries, topiary features, ornamental hedges and, to top it all, a ruddy great fountain which, on windy days, was wont to cover anyone unfortunate enough to be caught passing the big house, in a fine mist of chlorinated water.

Mrs Bantry fancied herself a gardener. Mrs Bantry was not a gardener. Mrs Bantry stuck plants in soil and called it gardening. Mr Bantry came along behind her, rectifying all her mistakes at dead of night, whilst Mrs Bantry slept oblivious in the big house beyond. Thankfully Mr Bantry was a rich man. He could afford to pay through the nose for a landscape gardener who was willing to drop everything and dash to the big house in order to garden by torchlight, occasionally in the rain. Everyone in the village was party to this secret. The villagers were good at keeping secrets. Everyone both knew and did not know about the butcher’s crossdressing son and the fact that the milkman would, for a mere ten bob extra per week, deliver weed alongside your daily pint of semi-skimmed.

When Mrs Bantry talked of her garden, which she did often with anyone foolish enough to ask, and occasionally with those who hadn’t, they knew well enough to compliment her on her flowering perennials and the marvellous job she’d done with the laburnum tree out back. Mrs Bantry responded to their kind remarks with cuttings. Mrs Bantry was frightfully generous with her cuttings. You only had to admire the colour of a flower or the peculiar shape of a bush and she’d be round your door the very next day with an enormous bunch of cuttings grasped in her gloved hand like the ghostly remains of a bridal bouquet. Unsurprisingly, these cuttings never took. No amount of fertilizer, prime chicken manure or careful attention could coax the life back into the various branches and sticks Mrs Bantry pressed upon her neighbours.

When she called back a fortnight hence, to enquire how her cuttings were doing, the cuttings would invariably be in an advanced state of decay, languishing at the bottom of the compost heap. Anxious to avoid giving offence, the villagers would already have nipped down to the garden centre to purchase a substitute plant so, when Mrs Bantry asked how they were getting on with the rhododendron or the rose or the green spiky plant whose name eluded her, the villagers could not only say, “marvellously, Mrs Bantry. The plant’s growing like billy-oh,” they could also take her outside to admire the specimen, blooming with good health by the trellis or the patio steps.

Mrs Bantry was always pleased to see her cuttings flourishing in the hands of others. She promised further cuttings, bulbs, seedlings, once an entire pear tree which she kindly presented to the new school teacher. Each time they saw Mrs Bantry approach, wearing her gardening hat, the villagers would die a little inside and pray to the good lord for patience and forbearance and something that wasn’t yet another hibiscus. “Mrs Bantry,” they’d cry through gritted teeth, “how very lovely to see you again,” knowing full well they’d be in the garden centre, spending their holiday money, before the day was over.

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1942 novel The Body in the Library