Two Witches and a Weed

"Everything has its place," said Kat Grimm.

"Everything has its time," said Andromeda Lovegood.

The difference meant war was inevitable.

It was a long battle. Hostilities began with accusations of snails, moved on to weed seeds, weedkiller, then angry calls to the local Council Complaints Office Hotline, and, possibly, witchcraft.

The two competing territories were side by side in a row of tiny terrace houses. Originally the houses had been identically decorated with the latest fashions of 1880. Iron lace hung like cobwebs from the corners of the porches and painted metal railings topped with fleur-de-lys blades were designed to prevent interlopers from stepping into the gardens.

Interlopers who presumably couldn’t figure out how to open the gate.

Every other house in the street had been adapted for modern living, with the small gardens converted to parking spaces, brick extensions or a collection of bins and dumpsters.

Kat’s garden was a masterpiece of order. In late summer, the neat clumps of flowering pinks were hemmed in by taller cosmos and a clipped box hedge. A Comice pear tree was spreadeagled and pinned to make an espalier on the side wall, bordering a garden-less neighbour.

No weed grew past a centimetre in length before being snatched away by Kat’s hands. Bedding flowers were replaced on a rigid timetable, or as soon as they began to look frayed and tatty.

Next door was a different matter. Andromeda’s garden was a riot of colour and texture at any time of the year, even winter, when the rose-hips and pomegranates dangled from bare branches. In the spring she began to scatter the seeds she had saved from the previous year, allowing calendulas, forget-me-nots and poppies to push up through the spreading thyme and make drifts of gold, or red, or blue.

She encouraged native grasses along her border with Denise, a very sore point, because when they self-seeded they were prolific. Even more offensive was the prickly bursaria bush which caught at the arms of passers-by and resulted in frequent complaints from the postal service. She hung coloured crystals and wind chimes from the rusted iron lace on the porch, adding to her reputation for witchcraft.

Andromeda didn’t deny it. “Naturally I’m a witch. I’m over fifty and a single woman. Back in the day, they’d have burned me at the stake. That skinny shrew Kat Grimm too, of course.” She liked to wear home-made tie-dyed peasant skirts that swished around her full figure, and lumpy hand-knitted shawls that made that figure a mystery.

Kat, on the other hand, liked to look professional at all times, even when wearing her smart leather gardening gloves and kneeling on her expensive padded mat, which relieved the pain in her aging knees as she worked her way methodically from one corner to the other.

The third house in the little row was one that had had the front garden converted into a small parking lot, with a side order of dumpsters.

The first Kat knew that the new neighbours had children was the sound of shrill crying at night. Very irritating.

Andromeda, being closer, saw the ride-on tractor among the wheelie bins, and greeted the harried mother with the toddler in a friendly way. The mother smiled back briefly, nervously, but didn’t make eye contact.

The older, skinny boy in a paper thin Superman t-shirt started leaning on the railing of Esther’s garden and asking her what she was doing.

“I’m saving seeds from these calendulas, now they’re getting ready to die back. Do you want some?”

“Awesome,” said the boy. “Are they like watermelons, that will grow in my stomach if I swallow them? Or in my ears if I don’t clean them?”

“Who told you that?”

“My Dad. He knows lots of things.”

“Hmm.” Esther was not too impressed by the loud-mouthed strutting father, who had run over the toddler’s toy tractor on the third day. “Ask your parents if you can come over and I’ll show you some other things in the garden.”

The boy ran inside and got a careless wave of permission from his mother. From then on, he was in Andromeda’s garden every afternoon instead of riding his bike up and down the footpath in front of the house, occasionally scraping the cars parked with their wheels up on the kerb.

On Saturdays, Andromeda went to visit her sons and then on to her meditation group. She sailed away in her enormous orange kaftan for a day of swamping people in hugs and giving them advice they shook their heads at.

Saturdays, Kat was home from work and had an extended session on patrol in her garden for weeds.

One day she pounced on a narrow, big-eared face staring at her through the railing. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“I’m Rory,” said the boy. “I like your garden. It’s really neat.”

These were magical words for a perfectionist. Kat looked at him a little more kindly.“Well, I’m not sure my chrysanthemums are doing well this year. I’ll have to chop them back harder this winter.”

“Do they like that?”

“Some things won’t grow properly without being chopped back regularly. They actually seem to like it. Also, it makes space for new things to grow up and flourish.”

“Can I help?”

Surprising herself, Kat watched carefully as he pinched out tiny grass seedlings between the pavers. “You’re great at that,” she said. “Most kids aren’t as tidy as you.”

"I have to tidy up at home or Dad wallops me," admitted Rory.

"Hmm." Kat pinched her lips together in case some sort of curse escaped.

“Would you like some calendula seeds?” Rory shyly offered up the little handful he’d been keeping in his pocket.

"Let's think. It’s not really the right season. How about we put some in a jar for later, and put a few in a pot and see if they grow?”

The neatly coiffed grey head bent low next to the tousled one as they carefully planted and watered the seeds into potting mix.

“Do you want to take the pot home?”

Rory hesitated. “Things at home tend to break,” he said.

“Then we’ll keep it here.”

Surprisingly, the out of season calendulas began to grow on Kat's sunny porch despite the cooling season.

One Saturday Andromeda was running late. She was burrowing into her gigantic bag for the herbal treats she'd baked specially for her sons when she saw the seedlings waving their small green heads above the edge of the little pot. She gave Kat a look.

“I see you’ve come around to growing calendulas. They do have a lot of medicinal uses.” she said.

Esther was horrified to realise that Rory's flower seeds had come from the Garden of Evil next door. Perhaps she would have done something foolish with the pot, except that Rory appeared, beaming at both of them.

“Hello Miss Kat. Hello Andromeda."

They greeted him, eyeing one another sideways cautiously.

“Isn’t it a nice day to be in a garden?” said Rory. “Everyone in a garden can be friends, can’t they? It’s all so beautiful.”

Somehow both women found themselves agreeing, for the first time ever.

It must have been witchcraft.