Contents

MEGAN’S GARDEN

OWEN JONES

The Psychic Megan Series

DEDICATION

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1 MEGAN IS INSPIRED

2 THE GARDEN CENTRE

3 PLANTING OUT

4 THE FAIRIES

5 WACINHINSHA

GLOSSARY

THE DISALLOWED

Owen Jones

1 MR. LEE’S PREDICAMENT

MEGAN’S GARDEN

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

by

OWEN JONES

Copyright © 14th December 2014 -2020 Owen Jones

Megan’s Garden

by Owen Jones

Published by

Megan Publishing Services

http://meganthemisconception.com

The right of Owen Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously.

All rights reserved.

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Other novelettes in the same series:

The Psychic Megan Series

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

The Misconception

Megan’s Thirteenth

Megan’s School Trip

Megan’s School Exams

Megan’s Followers

Megan and the Lost Cat

Megan and the Mayoress

Megan Faces Derision

Megan’s Grandparents Visit

Megan’s Father Falls Ill

Megan Goes on Holiday

Megan and the Burglar

Megan and the Cyclist

Megan and the Old Lady

Megan’s Garden

Megan Goes To the Zoo

Megan Goes Hiking

Megan and the W. I. Cookery Competition

Megan Goes Riding

Megan Goes Yachting

Megan at Carnival

Megan’s Garden

Megan Goes to the Zoo

Megan Goes Hiking

DEDICATION

This edition is dedicated to my wife, Pranom Jones, for making my life as easy as she can. She does a great job of it.

Karma will repay everyone in just kind.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Believe not in anything simply because you have heard it,

Believe not in anything simply because it was spoken and rumoured by many,

Believe not in anything simply because it was found written in your religious texts,

Believe not in anything merely on the authority of teachers and elders,

Believe not in traditions because they have been handed down for generations,

But after observation and analysis, if anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Gautama Buddha

––

Great Spirit, whose voice is on the wind, hear me.

Let me grow in strength and knowledge.

Make me ever behold the red and purple sunset.

May my hands respect the things you have given me.

Teach me the secrets hidden under every leaf and stone, as you have taught people for ages past.

Let me use my strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.

Let me always come before you with clean hands and an open heart, that as my Earthly span fades like the sunset, my Spirit shall return to you without shame.

(Based on a traditional Sioux prayer)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 Megan is Inspired

2 The Garden Centre

3 Planting Out

4 The Fairies

5 Wacinhinsha

Glossary

The Disallowed: Chapter One

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My thanks to the artist who did the cover for me,

Jacqueline Chavarria.

If you want her contact details, just let me know.

1 MEGAN IS INSPIRED

One afternoon, when Megan was sitting in the back garden of her friend and neighbour, Mrs. Temchenko, drinking black Russian tea and admiring the flowers, Megan asked, “So, you don’t mind if people call you ‘Babushka’?”

“No, not at all child, it gives me a warm feeling in my heart. It means ‘Grandma’ in Russian, so why should I mind?”

“I don’t know, I just thought it better to ask. If I said to an elderly lady in English ‘Excuse me, grandma’, I wouldn’t be sure how she would take it, but if I said to an old man ‘Excuse me, granddad’, I could be pretty sure he would get offended”.

“Yes, I see what you mean… perhaps it would be the same in Russia, it would be safer to call him ‘dyadya’ or uncle”.

“Oh, you couldn’t say that to a stranger here! You would have to say ‘Excuse me, sir’ or ‘Excuse me, mister’. Aren’t customs strange? May I call you Babushka as well? It sounds so much friendlier than Mrs. Temchenko”.

“Yes, Megan, I would like that. You would be the first person in the world ever to have called me that to my face. I have no family in this country… and perhaps I have no family in Russia any longer either… I have no way of knowing”.

Megan watched sadness take a hold of her both in her features and in her Aura.

“You know, when I talk to myself, it is still in Russian even after all these years, so if I accidentally call you dyevotchka or dyevushka, they are only the Russian words for a female child, a girl. You won’t mind will you?”

“No, Babushka, I would like to learn some Russian”. Tears formed in Mrs. Temchenko’s eyes and she dabbed at them with her hanky.

“That sounds so nice, Megan, you cannot understand how much that makes me feel as if I fit in for the first time since I have been here”. Megan stood up, put her arms around the old lady and gave her a hug from behind. Mrs. Temchenko patted Megan’s clasped hands as another tear escaped. It was the first time anyone had touched her for three years, three very long years. She relished the moment but it was also painful to realise how much she had missed human contact. “Another cup of tea, child?”

“Yes, please,” and she retook her seat as the old lady leaned forward to operate the tap on the samovar, “Your garden always looks so exquisite, Babushka, how do you do it? You don’t seem to spend much time working on it”.

“Oh, I do, my dear. Perhaps not as much time as I used to, or I would like to… my old bones won’t permit that any longer, but I do as much as I can and that helps me keep as fit as ever I am going to be at my age. I used to spend about half my time cleaning the house and the other half cooking and tending the garden, but since your mother helped me, I have a home-help come in to do the dusting and the W.I. will bring a meal any day I book one – ‘Meals on Wheels’ they call it, it’s very good – no Russian food yet though… Sometimes, when you get older, you can’t be bothered to cook just for yourself and then some weeks I used to cook my cakes and pirozhki and didn’t eat them… I’d give them to the birds… but not any longer, eh? Now I can give them to you and my kind neighbours, the home-help, and the ladies from the W.I.

“You and your mother have made my life so much happier. I’m even thinking of joining the over-sixties’ club and going there once or twice a week to play whist! What do you think of that? I used to enjoy a game of whist with my dear departed husband”.

“I think it’s a great idea. I’m sure you will enjoy meeting new people in the club”.

“Do you have a garden, Megan?”

“No, not of my own. My father grows some vegetables and I help him from time to time, but I can’t really get enthusiastic about potatoes and carrots”.

“No, perhaps not, but they are very important. You should not overlook or underestimate the value of growing your own vegetables. I grow my own too”.

Megan was astounded. “Where? Your garden looks nothing like my Dad’s”

“Perhaps not, but come with me”. She led her down the path past a pergola of wisteria and a short avenue of rose bushes and buddleia. “There, look, potatoes, carrots, beetroot – they are so important to Russian people. You haven’t tried my Borsch yet, have you? I will have to make some for you when they’re in season. My vegetable patch is not on display, because their beauty is underground, so I put them at the back. They still get the morning sunlight, and the flowers get it in the afternoon. I love to sit out here in the afternoon when the sun is on them, especially in the Spring and Autumn, when the mornings can be a little chilly for me now.

“So you see, you can plan your garden so that you can have vegetables and flowers. However, when you plant this much on the poor soil that we have around here, you must help it as much as you can, so I have a compost heap here and I recycle everything from the house and put it back on the garden; and this bin here holds my stock of horse manure. I haven’t been able to get any for many years, but that nice Mr. Bryant from across the road has offered to get me a sack once a month”. She lifted the lid, “and there it is rotting down nicely”.

“Your compost doesn’t smell horrible though…”

“No, why ever should it, child?”

“I don’t know, but my Dad’s compost smells like… well, horrible”.

“I suppose it depends what you put in there, how wet it is and how you take care of it. I’ve probably got more time than your father, but compost doesn’t have to smell bad, certainly not… though I wouldn’t wear it as a perfume either,” she chuckled.

“I love your roses, they smell Heavenly and those? They’re Buddleias aren’t they?”

“Yes, butterfly bushes, we used to call them back home. I love butterflies and they love these bushes, so I have many of them in different colours. They can get quite tall though and then they blow about and look straggly, so I like to keep mine clipped back”.

“If you ever need any help, I’d love to learn how to take care of a garden. I’m sure Dad would give me a patch at home if I asked him. I know that Mam would love to have flowers in the garden, she’s always saying so”.

“OK, well, you find out, and if you want to start your own garden, we can take some things from here to get you started. Most of them are easy to grow, because I don’t have the energy to fuss over difficult plants anymore”.

“OK, thank you. I think I’ll go and ask them now. Can I carry the samovar back inside for you, Babushka?”

“Yes, please, it is awkward for me these days, but I’ll have one last glass of tea before you take it away. I think I’ll sit here for a while longer”. Megan kissed her on the cheek, patted her on the shoulder and took the samovar inside to its home on the table before leaving through the front door. She went straight home, let herself in and found her parents both sitting out the back as well. Her father was reading the paper and her mother a magazine. There was a jug of iced tea on the table and two glasses, so Megan popped back into the kitchen for another glass.

“I’ve just been sitting in Mrs. Temchenko’s garden. It’s a real picture… of a beautiful garden”.

Her father lowered his paper, made a show of surveying his vegetable plot and said, “What are you trying to say?”

“Oh, er, nothing, but our garden is not very… er, pretty, is it?”

“I don’t have time to make a pretty garden. I only have time to grow healthy organic vegetables to help you grow a strong and healthy body”.

“Yes, I know. It wasn’t a criticism, just a statement of fact”.

“Well that’s all right then, but I do agree with you that it could be more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, if any of us cared enough to do anything about it. Are you offering?”

“I might be… are you offering?”

“I might be… er, offering what?”

“Well, what can I do? What would I be allowed to alter?”

“You can alter almost anything you like as long as you promise to take care of it for at least a year. I don’t want you changing everything and then getting bored with it a month down the road. A garden, whether it be a vegetable or a flower garden, requires a certain amount of planning. If you notice, I don’t always put the spuds or the carrots in the same place. That’s called crop rotation. It’s a method of reducing plant sickness, blight and pests and allowing the soil to recover. You don’t need to worry about that so much with flowers, but I would want you to keep a veg patch too”.

“Sure, Dad, that was part of the plan anyway. I have seen how Mrs. Temchenko, she wants me to call her babushka now, has hidden the ugly veg patch behind the flowers so she has the best of both gardens. I thought I might like to try the same thing here”.

“Yes, by all means, but if you’re going to be taking that much out of the soil, you will have to feed the garden regularly. You will need to compost more than we do at the moment”.

“Yes, I understand, Mrs. Temchenko uses horse manure too”.

“Yes, a very good idea. Perhaps she can get a bag for you too”.

“I’m sure she could. I could do my garden and help you with yours when you’re busy”.

“That’d be nice, darling. Why don’t you get a pencil and paper and design your garden now? Have you got any graph paper? That would be best”.

“Yes, I’ve got a whole exercise book of it for maths”. She nipped upstairs to get what she needed, then her father reeled off the dimensions of their small garden.

“The whole backyard is twenty metres by six metres. Draw that in to scale using as much of the page as you can. Right. Now the raised flower bed running down the left-hand side is five-hundred millimetres – draw that in. Then the garden path is one metre wide. This concrete area we’re sitting on is three by three, the kitchen is also three by three and the shed at the bottom right is five by three.

“I always thought we should be growing ivy or wisteria over that… what do you say, Suz?”

“Oh, you have noticed that I’m here too then? I was wondering whether anyone was going to ask my opinion”.

Robert looked at his daughter sheepishly. “Sorry about that, but you could have joined in at any time… this isn’t a private conversation. Anyway, what do you have to say now?”

“Well, I’ve always liked the idea of a series of arches running over the path with climbers like roses, sweet peas and wisteria growing up them. You could easily have five or even ten of them with different or alternating flowers on each. I think that would look really nice and romantic… and sure, cover that horrible old shed with something as well. We could also have some tubs along the walls of the house and plant climbers in them too. That would save painting the walls every couple of years…and hanging baskets! I’ve always wanted hanging baskets along this kitchen wall”.

“We could do all that, couldn’t we, Megan? We could turn this place into a real Fairy Grotto”.

Megan nodded enthusiastically. The only idea she had had until that time was to copy Mrs. Temchenko’s garden, but she did prefer that they had their own unique garden, so that she could invite her friend over for tea one afternoon to show it off.

“I’ll tell you what, you do your planning tonight and whatever research you want to do on the Internet and we’ll have a family trip out to the garden centre tomorrow. When would suit you, Suz, before or after lunch?”

“Oh after, definitely. I’ve got Sunday lunch to prepare in the morning… I can’t go swanning off to the garden centre then. Let’s say two thirty”.

“There you are then, we have a plan. You have twenty-two hours to plan and research and then we’ll go to the garden centre together”.

2 THE GARDEN CENTRE

Megan spent Sunday morning looking through web sites on flowers and garden design in preparation for the proposed trip to the garden centre. She had never been to one before, but she was a little concerned, because there had been no discussion about who would be paying for whatever they bought, so Megan put a few weeks’ wages in her purse and resigned herself to spending that and perhaps 20% of the money she got from her Saturday job every week from then on. She assumed that her mother would be paying for her own hanging baskets and arches.

Megan was hoping that she would be able to incorporate some sort of water feature into her garden, as she had always found the sound of running water pleasing. She liked the sound of the sea crashing into rocks and retreating over pebbles, as in the Park and the sound of a fast brook gurgling over stones too.

She had had to promise to leave her father’s vegetable plot where it was until the following year, but as crops died back, she was planning to move it closer to the shed and the wall they shared with their neighbour on the right, so that her flowers would mask it, although it would still receive enough sunlight to thrive, just like Mrs. Temchenko’s. As lunch was cooking in its final stage, she led her father out into the garden to explain her ideas and pick his brains.

“I saw in one garden on the Net, how they tacked two by one inch batten to the wall to grow plants up. Could you help me do that up the pine end of the shed, Dad? I thought we could grow tayberries up that. The book says that they’re bigger and sweeter than raspberries and the three of us like them”.

“It sounds like a good idea, although I don’t know anything about them. Still, it’s a fruit, so I guess they crop in the late summer and autumn… we can certainly ask. We can get batten from the builders’ merchant’s, and it’s not difficult to create a trellis for the plants to climb up”.

“Great! Then I want the same on the long wall of the shed, so we can grow honeysuckle and winter jasmine up that. Mam said she wanted to hide the shed and if we put three or four kinds of honeysuckle and the jasmine, we should be able to do that all year round”.

“You have gone into this, haven’t you?”

“Yes, and honeysuckle grows quickly and profusely, so four different plants of four different kinds will cover that wall and the roof within a year. Two at the most”.

“I see, you would turn the shed into a living thing. It’s a pity honeysuckle doesn’t produce fruit, isn’t it? Did you look at passion flowers. They sometimes fruit, but I’m not sure if it’s edible. It grows like honeysuckle though. You could replace one honeysuckle with a passion flower”.

Megan took out a pen and wrote the name down on the back of her sketch. “I like the sound of that, I’ll look it up before we leave”.

“How about daffs and tulips?”

“Yes, I thought we could have them in the border in front of where we sit and along the path, like a frame to the garden itself, and also in that narrow strip running down the left-hand wall. We could have carnations and gladioli in it too. You would have to build Mam’s arches, and then she could have her rambling roses and sweet peas growing up and over them. We would need some decent grass to stand on when we’re gardening too, I don’t want to have to wear boots all the time – that’s all very well for a veg plot or an allotment, but not a backyard flower garden”.

“No, of course not! We can’t have her ladyship stomping about on mud! That would never do, but it’s not a large area, we could turf it over easily enough”.

“Good, I was hoping you’d say that, because seeding is a bit hit and miss, isn’t it? It can take years, that’s what I read. Then, we can cut a few holes in the turf and have islands of flowers in a sea of green. Oh, and wild daisies, buttercups and clover pink and white… and dahlias at the back – all different colours and varieties. We’ll also need ground cover bedding plants between the daffs and tulips to keep the weeds down and… what do you think of Tiger Lilies? They are sooo beautiful, aren’t they? Just divine!

“We’ll also need some different types of buddleia, of course, for the butterflies, don’t you know? Mrs. T has buddleias and she has absolutely hundreds of butterflies and, lastly for now, a water feature. I shouldn’t think we’ll have room for a pond, will we? A standard fountain would provide pleasing sound effects and a refreshing mist for the plants on a hot day”.

“Very good, I’m impressed, but you say we won’t have room for a pond, but I don’t think we’ll have room for half of all that either. Plants grow and spread… it is best not to go out and buy everything you have ideas for in one hit, love. If you start with less than half that lot, other ideas will come to you as you see them growing in situ and friends will give or swap you plants. That can save you a fortune, because plants are not cheap anymore.

“I’m sure you’ll be swapping cuttings with your friends like Mrs. Temchenko pretty soon”.

“Yes, I’d forgotten about that. She did say she’d give me some plants and cuttings to get me started, if you agreed to having a garden”.

“There you are then, and there are other neighbours as well. When they find out about your new hobby, they’ll be offering to swap and give you things too. You’ll see. Come on, let’s go in now and wash our hands, lunch must be nearly ready. I can smell it even from here, can’t you?”

“Yes, and it’s making me hungry”. They washed