The Little Garden

 

Inspired by J.R.R Tolkien

 

Arnie Humbold paused to mop his brow. His red spotted handkerchief dripped with the sweat of an autumn day’s toil, but the labour was worth it. Arnie’s little garden was the talk of the village; his rhododendrons had placed first at the flower show last summer and his cauliflowers were snapped up by the bushel every market-day. The village doctor came to Arnie each week for various medicinal herbs and plants. His little garden could be called a ‘riot of colour’ from the first day of spring through to the first chill of winter.

 

Arnie had never been a boastful man, but there were those who suspected more than green fingers were involved; those who envied his success and wanted to know his secret. Spiteful people who couldn’t put the effort into their own ventures and resented him for it. Arnie knew there was no secret, no magic ingredient to his little garden. Just a well-planned year of maintenance and pruning, and a healthy respect for Mother Nature, he called it whenever people asked. He tended his little garden with the same love he had tended upon his late wife, nurturing the saplings and sprouts as if they were his own children.

 

Not that Agnes could have any, bless her heart. Not that she didn’t want kids, just her body wasn’t strong enough. So Arnie made his little garden the nursery she always dreamed of; the soil was so fertile and the buds grew so strong. Agnes had loved sitting in the rose arbour of a summer’s eve, wrapped in the fragrance of their botanical offspring, until Death had come for her. Now Death would come for his little ones, his nursery, and his garden. A year of careful planning and hard labour gone in the chill of the frost. The blink of an eye.