Matters are made more pressing by the fact that I now have not only all the empty pots in the courtyard to fill but also the series of old stone troughs recently acquired to go outside the gate as well. The one fly in the ointment is the timing. Normally my visits to Faruk are a matey affair made with a car-owning companion. This year, however, she did her plant shopping early while I was drifting around the countryside, which means that I now have no access to transport to get my flowers home.Actually, this turns out to be an illusory problem since every Göreme hotelier worth his salt is also about the plant-buying business. “No problem! We’re delivering to the Cappadocia Cave Suites. Your plants can go in with theirs,” Faruk tells me. There ensues a bit of hanging about while CCS’s purchases are gathered together, but the time passes quickly in conversation with the owner of the SOS Restaurant, who knows me even if I don’t know him, and who fills me in on the progress of his son’s education while we wait.
Then, glimpsing action, I wander over to the pickup truck, which is being piled high with an unfeasibly large quantity of rose bushes, and tray upon tray of bedding plants. “You’re going to have to drive awfully slowly,” I say to the driver, who quips back, “I race here at the speed of a plane and crawl back at the speed of a horse cart!”
“A snail, more like it,” I murmur, as ropes are fetched and the whole overloaded rear is lashed together like a giant game of cat’s cradle. There is not now a lot of space for my own cargo, some of which has to be loaded onto my lap. Thus encumbered the truck can no longer take the shorter hilly route up to the hotel, so we divert round Göreme’s new one-way system and roar up to the back, braking in a parking lot beneath a fairy chimney whose side has fallen away to reveal the red consecration crosses of a medieval chapel. Then, freed of the excess weight, we race up to my house and offload enough marigolds to start a subsidiary nursery in the courtyard.
That evening I plant out my pots and then fill the troughs with marigolds. In the morning I open the gate to water them only to find that several have gone walkabout overnight. Ten years ago the last mayor but one planted tulips all around town. Shortly afterwards the loudspeaker crackled into action. It was ayıp (shameful), it told us, to remove bulbs intended for everyone’s enjoyment for private gardens. Spotting one such pilfered tulip in the backyard of a belediye (municipality) worker, I chalked its acquisition up to the equivalent of filching a pen from the office. But my marigolds? I suppose it’s back to the drawing board again.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
