Soon, very soon, bulldozers will bully-doze your ancient orchard of cherries, apples and pears; diggy-dig your lawn, ravage your roses, desecrate-destroy the paradise trees sprung from sprigs your mother smuggled from home.
This is your garden’s last summer. Bastards have stolen your Eden to build a fucking road for another fucking block of flats where there used to be a cow field.
An expropriation "for public utility", decreed that pompous official-sashed bastard who handed you a copy of La Marseillaise to sing after receiving your citizenship papers. They couldn’t do this in England, you think. Bastards!
You’re still fighting for proper compensation for your garden, but who cares? You’d rather keep your birdsong, your roses: pink, yellow, white, crimson, vermilion, bordeaux, and — oh bugger, you’ll have to google the other shades of red.
You’d rather keep your darling roses with their intoxicating hues and swooning scents.
* * *
Nine months later
This Spring is silent. Like Rachel Carson’s.
Your garden is gone. Your lawn, your trees, your roses, your dawn chorus: all are gone. Your birds have flown.
You’re growing crocus and daffodils and tulips in windowsill pots to hide the view of diggers and cranes. But you miss the twitter of birds. You miss your roses, their colours, their bloom, their smell.
When you visit Ikea for the free coffee, brandishing the fidelity card for your non-existent family, they funnel your exit through cacti, orchids and artificial flowers.
You splash out on fake gerbera, peonies, lavender, tulips, ivy, cherry blossom, even a poinsettia on special-offer for next and every Christmas.
And roses. Lavishly-petalled roses on long green plastic stalks that will never prick your fingers.
The Fejka roses come in white and just one red. And they have no scent.
They’ll last for ever, but life will never be the same.
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