Snowflakes at the Little Christmas Tree Farm

I whack the side of the caravan again with the flat of my hand, and there’s a thunk and a scrabbling noise from inside. I peer into the window again to see what my squatter is, and a squirrel suddenly drops down from the ceiling and hits me square in the face.

I scream and stumble backwards as the end of a bushy tail flashes through the window, dashes onto the roof of the caravan, and hurls itself into the grass and scarpers to safety.

Bloody Nora. I expected rats scurrying around the floor, not a squirrel going for the World Gymnastics title.

At the sound of my scream, a dog starts barking, and there’s a shout of ‘Gizmo!’

My heart is pounding from the shock and I put a hand on my chest and try to catch my breath. Of all the things that have been a surprise about Peppermint Branches so far, a squirrel to the face was definitely the most unexpected of them.

There’s still a dog barking, and I look up to see the farmer racing across the rows of pumpkins in the next field as a tiny white and brown dog dashes towards me.

The pumpkin field is fenced in by a short picket fence, but the dog leaps over it easily, and I back out of my garden and crouch down to intercept him before he reaches the road.

The Chihuahua barrels straight into my outstretched arms, barking and spinning in excited circles.

‘Oh, aren’t you adorable?’ I hold my hand out and he licks all over my fingers with his tiny tongue, making me giggle as he puts both paws on my hand and stands up on his back legs, his whole body wagging with excitement. The farmer jumps the fence surrounding his pumpkin field and slows to a walk as he reaches the grassy verge that runs along the edge of the road. He lifts a hand in greeting and I do the same, and while I’m distracted, the dog paws at my trouser leg like he wants to be picked up.

‘You’re so friendly. You don’t even know me and you want me to pick you up?’ I glance behind – there’s no traffic and doesn’t look like there’ll be any anytime soon, but better to be safe than sorry. The dog clearly runs a lot faster than his owner, and it’s a good excuse for a doggy cuddle. It’s been ages since I had a doggy cuddle.

I pick him up and carefully settle him under my right arm, and he licks my chin and his wagging tail tickles my arm, making me giggle again. ‘You are just too cute, aren’t you? Yes, you are, you are. What’s a good boy like you doing out here all by yourself, hmm? Aren’t you a lovely little boy?’

I rub his ears and coo at him, and he turns his head towards every ear rub. I don’t realise I’ve degenerated into baby talk until someone clears their throat and I look up to see the farmer standing in front of me with his arms folded across his wide chest and a dark eyebrow raised.

And he is way hotter than he looked in the distance.

I take in the long dark hair in waves around his shoulders, the red plaid shirt and faded denim jeans that make his thighs look like they’re made of solid steel. Since when are farmers this gorgeous? I thought farmers were all old scruffy types with bits of hay in their grey beards and a faint smell of cow dung. I catch a waft of juniper aftershave. Definitely not cow dung.

I climb to my feet with the dog still under my arm and look up into eyes halfway between blue and green, set off by the darkness of his almost-black hair and unshaven dark stubble. If I was interested in men right now, it would be enough to make me go weak at the knees, but I’m not, and my knees are completely steady. I stamp one foot against the ground because it’s clearly uneven and that’s what’s causing any shakiness there happens to be.

‘Sorry about that,’ he says in a deep Scottish accent, and I can’t take my eyes off the piercing in his lip. It’s just one silver ball nestled in the dip of his upper lip, but it looks so out of place with the outdoorsy clothes that my eyes are drawn to it as he speaks. ‘Usually I trust him to stay with me but he heard your scream and came to rescue you.’

His accent makes ‘to’ sound like ‘tay’. I’m so fixated on the piercing that I forget he’s standing there waiting for a response while I pet his dog’s ears and stare vacantly at his upper lip.

I swallow a few times but my voice still comes out as a squeaky remnant of the baby talk. ‘Yeah, sorry. There was a squirrel.’

‘Utterly terrifying.’ His voice is sarcastic but the expression on his face doesn’t change.

‘It made me jump. I’m not scared of squirrels, I just didn’t expect it to hit me in the face.’

‘If you’re here for a viewing, the place is off the market, it was sold a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Yeah, I know. I bought it.’

‘You?’ That eyebrow rises again. ‘You bought Peppermint Branches?’

I nod, wondering if he needs to sound quite so incredulous.

‘Oh, right.’ He sounds a bit taken aback. ‘Are you in the Christmas tree industry?’

‘No, I’m a data entry clerk. I worked for a company that analyses retail sales figures in London until a couple of weeks ago.’

He looks completely confused. ‘So what are you doing here? Some sort of admin?’

‘No. I’m going to run it.’

‘Run it?’ He scoffs. ‘Run it as what?’

‘As it is. As a Christmas tree farm.’

His eyes flick towards the patch of trees in the distance. ‘But it isn’t a Christmas tree farm. It was, once, but it’s been abandoned for over four years now. As the owner of the adjoining land, I can tell you it’s in a hell of a state. How on earth do you intend to sort it out?’

‘Four years?’ I say in surprise. ‘It didn’t mention that on the auction site either.’ I avoid his question because I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to sort it out, and I try not to think about the little stone of dread that’s settled in my stomach at his words. It confirms the niggling fear I’ve had since I arrived: that this isn’t a viable business and it will need a hell of a lot of work and investment – work I know nothing about and money I don’t have – to make it viable again.

He ignores my ignoring of his question. ‘You’re not what I expected at all.’

He runs his eyes down me from the cable-knit bobble hat weaved with sparkly thread to my black coat which I now realise is no match for the Scottish autumn air, and my muddy winter boots that were clean before I got out of the car.

‘What did you expect?’ I feel myself bristling, certain this conversation is going down some sort of sexist route.

‘Well, I had this daft idea that someone buying a Christmas tree farm might know the first thing about Christmas trees.’

‘How do you know I don’t? I could be the world’s leading expert on Christmas trees for all you know.’

‘You could.’ He gives a nod of agreement. ‘But your pristinely sparkly car has clearly never seen a dirt track before, your shiny boots have clearly never stepped in a puddle before now, your nails are clean, and from the look of horror and confusion on your face, I’d guess that this place is not what you thought it was going to be.’

I try to arrange my face into a non-horrified, non-confused look, but it probably makes me look like I need an ambulance.

All right, I don’t know the first thing about Christmas tree farming, but is it really that obvious? Between getting paperwork exchanged with the solicitors, getting hold of my landlord, and the small matter of packing everything I own, I figured I could learn when I got here.

‘I’m Noel.’ He holds out a hand and I stop rubbing his dog’s ear long enough to shake it. His earth-blackened hand is warm despite the chill in the air, and his rough skin rubs against mine as I slip my hand into his huge one. ‘That’s Gizmo.’

I grin at the name. ‘As in the Gremlin?’ I pull my head back and look at the dog, who’s got gorgeous markings – a white chest and brown sides, and around one eye is a big patch of white that extends over his head, making one side brown and one side white. ‘That’s such a perfect name, he looks just like Gizmo from the film.’

‘Ah, Gremlins. One of the most underrated Christmas films.’ He whistles the song Gizmo hums in the film, and the Gizmo in my arms turns his head to the side and his tail wags like he’s heard the tune many times before. I suppose if you have a dog named after Gizmo, why wouldn’t you whistle Gizmo’s song to him at every opportunity?

‘I’m Leah.’ I realise I haven’t let go of his hand yet and quickly extract my fingers and go back to rubbing Gizmo’s ears. ‘I asked Santa for a mogwai every year when I was little. Never got one though. Can’t imagine why.’

‘Probably because they’re not real?’

‘Oh, really? I had no idea that a race of animatronic fictional creatures from an Eighties’ Christmas film didn’t actually exist. You’re not going to tell me that Santa doesn’t exist next and that reindeer can’t really fly, are you? What about the tooth fairy? It’s not the parents all along, is it? And what of Jurassic Park? Are you trying to say that it wasn’t a documentary?’

‘Hah.’ He laughs but his face shows he has no idea if I’m being sarcastic or not. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve totally thrown me. I expected the person who’d won the auction to be a property developer intending to flatten the place and build something new, not someone turning up and intending to run it as a tree farm again. And you’re seriously telling me that you’re not in the industry and you haven’t got any experience? Do you have any idea how much of a state this place is in? What on earth were you thinking?’

‘I was a little bit drunk, okay?’ I snap, annoyance creeping in again. ‘What’s it got to do with you whether I have any experience or not? I’d just caught my boyfriend cheating with half the office and I wanted to change my life. All right, it needs a bit of work, but I wanted a challenge. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You were drunk?’ His voice goes high with indignation. ‘Didn’t you even come for a viewing?’

‘Look, with hindsight, I realise that not viewing it first was a bad decision, but it was on the spur of the moment; the auction was ending and I had to decide then and there whether to go for it or not. There was another bidder and I didn’t even realise how much I wanted it until I put the very last bid in with four seconds to go.’

‘Four seconds.’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘How do you even do that?’

‘I buy a lot of shoes on eBay?’ I offer, hoping it might make him laugh but no such luck.

‘You bought a Christmas tree farm like it was a pair of shoes?’

‘No, I used my experience of buying shoes to win an auction. Not that it has anything to do with you, obviously.’

His eyebrows rise and he has the decency to look a bit guilty. ‘No, of course it doesn’t. I was only trying to figure out how insane my new neighbour might be.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t accost a complete stranger on the road and start telling them what they’re allowed to do with their money and make judgements about how they intend to run their property.’

‘People around here are going to comment, you may as well get used to it.’ He lets out an annoyed huff. ‘You bought a Christmas tree farm, with no experience of the industry, because you were drunk? What did you expect? Did you think you could stand back and watch the trees fell themselves, net themselves, and toddle off to market on their own?’

‘Maybe. Well, apart from the toddling bit. If Christmas trees were going to move independently, it would be more of a leaping sprint, don’t you think?’

I can tell he’s trying not to smile. His piercing shifts as his lip twitches. And then he shakes himself and frowns again. ‘This could be someone’s life, someone’s livelihood. Peppermint Branches was important once, it really mattered to the community of Elffield, and you think you can snap it up on a drunken whim and lark about here until, what, the heels of your designer boots sink into the first cowpat, and then you can sell it on to the next idiot who comes along?’

‘These are Primark, not designer.’

He looks down at my feet. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

I go to start explaining but stop myself. I don’t think a Scottish pumpkin farmer is interested in the pros and cons of high-street brands. ‘I don’t want to sell it on,’ I say instead. All right, it’s not what I expected, but I wanted to do something that made me stop feeling like I was standing still waiting for the grief of my parents death to dissipate. ‘Why can’t I learn how to run a Christmas tree farm? When I started data inputting, I had no idea what I was doing, but I learnt. No one starts a job knowing exactly what’s what. This is a job like any other.’

‘This isn’t just a job. This is a life. Living and working on a place like this is all-consuming. This isn’t an office that you leave behind at 5 p.m. every night. You live it, day in, day out, 365 days a year, and no, you don’t get Christmas off. You don’t get holidays and pensions and medical insurance. You spend every day trying to keep these trees alive. You don’t look like the kind of person who’d be very good at keeping things alive.’

‘I think a séance might be the only way to help these. They’re already dead, look at them.’

He glances towards the area of dead branches on the opposite side of the road. ‘I wouldn’t worry about those, they’re the windbreaker fields. The northern fields are healthier. Marginally.’

‘Northern fields?’

‘Oh, for god’s sake.’ He gives me a withering look. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve bought, do you? You have a northern and southern patch of land. South.’ He throws a hand out towards the patch of dead-to-dying trees in front of us like I’m an imbecile. ‘Road.’ He stamps his foot on the tarmac like I don’t know what a road is. ‘House. Beyond house, trees. Yours.’

‘You Tarzan, me Jane?’ I say in an attempt at humour.

It goes down like a lead brick with an elephant tied to it. Probably just as well. The image of him in nothing but a loincloth is a bit too much for me.

‘You don’t know the first thing about trees, do you?’

‘Well, I …’

He points to a large green thing behind me, one of the only green trees in sight. ‘What type of tree is that?’

I squint at it. Is this a trick question? I pluck a species name out of thin air and hope for the best. ‘Fir?’

‘Cedar.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Cedrus Libani, actually. But I’m sure you knew that.’

‘Oh, right. Of course. I knew that, I was just making sure that you weren’t bluffing.’

‘And what’s that tree dying of?’ He points in the opposite direction towards a sad looking spindly thing that probably had leaves on both sides once.

It’s another trick question. It doesn’t look like there’s any dying about it, it’s almost certainly already completed the process. ‘Creeping brown deadness?’

‘Aye.’ He gives me a scathing smile. ‘Otherwise known as windburn. It happens when the wind pulls water out of the needles faster than the roots can replace it. I can see this is going to go really well.’

‘But I can learn this stuff. You weren’t born knowing this, you learnt it.’

‘Over years of living here. I grew up on a farm. From the age of ten, I came over here every weekend to help Mr Evergreene. You’re not going to pick it up after five minutes with a How to Identify Trees book. It takes more than Trees For Dummies.’

I make a mental note to check whether he’s being sarcastic or if this book actually exists. Trees For Dummies sounds like just the ticket.

Also, Mr Evergreene – seriously? ‘There’s no way that was the previous owner’s name. You’re making that up. Who runs the local garage – Mr Petrol? How about the manager of the nearest supermarket – Mr Tesco, is it? If there’s a bakery owned by Mr Croissant, I want to go there.’

‘Peppermint Branches is an amazing place,’ he continues, ignoring me. ‘A special place, a beautiful tree farm that was once famous and could be again if it had someone to take care of it and restore it to its former glory.’

His green-blue eyes are fiery with passion. He must really love this place. ‘I could do that. Why couldn’t I do that?’

‘You know what, rather than answering that question, I’m starting to think I should go home and let you figure it out for yourself. I predict it’s going to be fun to watch.’

‘You could give me some advice rather than trying to make me feel stupid,’ I snap. ‘I want to restore it to its former glory. I want to make it a functioning Christmas tree farm again. You seem to know so much about it, tell me where I need to go to learn how. Tell me what books I need to read, what websites I should visit. Tell me what its former glory was like and how I can restore it.’

‘Why? So you can do two weeks here, realise it’s too difficult, and swan off back to London?’

‘I’m not going to do that. I’m committed to this. I want to make a go of it.’

‘I’ve heard that before. It lasts until you spoilt city women get bored of not having the luxuries of designer shops and posh restaurants at your fingertips.’

I want to ask him where he’s heard that before and why he sounds so bitter, but I get the feeling he doesn’t like me very much and would tell me to mind my own business. ‘Have you seen some of the things those posh restaurants serve up? The contents of a vacuum cleaner bag look more appetising. And given the amount of money I’ve spent on this place, even Primark will be out of my designer shopping budget for the next thirty years.’

His mouth twitches and I can tell that he’s trying not to smile. I’m entranced by the little silver ball again as we stand there staring at each other.

‘So, what do you grow?’ I ask when I suddenly realise it’s a bit weird to stand on the roadside with a stranger’s dog under your arm while you stare at said stranger’s upper lip. I tear my eyes away from his piercing and nod towards the field he came from. ‘Pumpkins?’

‘No, Brussels sprouts.’

I look over at the field and lift my hand to shade my eyes from a sun that isn’t there in case it’s distorting my vision. ‘Those round orange things trailing along the ground? They’re pumpkins … aren’t they?’

He throws his hands up in despair. ‘The fact you even had to question that …’

‘Obviously I know they’re pumpkins. I was being polite. It could’ve been a new variety or something.’

‘When have there ever been round, orange, giant sprouts that grow along the ground on vines?’ He sounds exasperated.

‘That’s not fair. That’s like me showing you a designer handbag and expecting you to guess the designer and then laughing at you for not knowing.’

‘But I haven’t bought a business selling designer handbags. Forgive me for my mistaken assumption that someone who’s just entered the Christmas tree farming business might know something about growing things.’

‘I know plenty of things about Christmas trees.’

‘What, that they’re green and look pretty with lights and a fairy on top?’

‘No,’ I huff, racking my brains for something I might actually know about trees. Any tree would do at this point, not even a festive tree. Come on, Leah, there are trees in London. ‘Antarctica is the only continent where trees don’t grow.’ Hah. That’ll show him. And prove to my Year 7 geography teacher that I was paying attention in class all those years ago.

His dark eyebrow quirks at the perfect angle to show exactly how unimpressed he is. ‘Oh, there you go then. My concerns are unfounded. I’m sure you’ll be wowing hordes of early customers before the week is out. So dazzled will they be by your intrinsic knowledge of Christmas trees that they’ll be queuing up to buy them six weeks early.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ I mutter. I know he’s being sarcastic, but I can’t let him get to me, even though if I’m completely honest, he’s kind of got a point. Meeting a real farmer who knows this land and thinks I’m a lunatic for taking it on … I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t got me worried.

‘Let me ask you something,’ he says. ‘I know how long this place has been up for sale and I know how much the price has dropped and I know they were trying of offload it in an auction as a last resort, so I’ve got a good idea of how much you paid – very, very cheap. Did that not start any alarm bells ringing?’

‘I didn’t know how much they cost. I’ve never bought one before. There’s no price comparison site for Christmas tree farms.’

‘No, but there’s this weird, and obviously miniscule in your case, thing called common sense. I see it’s a completely foreign concept to you, but did it not cross your mind that fifty grand was cheap for twenty-five acres? Have you not heard of the phrase “too good to be true”?’

I huff in annoyance. He might be gorgeous, but I’m starting to really dislike this bloke. He speaks sense that I should’ve realised before I ploughed all my money into a failing Christmas tree farm. ‘Just how desperate were they to sell it?’

‘It’s been on the market for over four years. There must’ve been a couple of hundred viewings over those years, but it’s worthless land because you can’t do anything with it. The trees have gone wild. Pruning them back into shape and selling them is an almost impossible job, and cutting them all down and replanting means any potential buyer has got roughly ten years to wait for them to grow to a saleable size. No wonder no one’s bought it, but an idiot had to come along sooner or later. It’s the law of averages.’

I don’t even bother to be offended. I haven’t seen much further than the driveway so far and I’m inclined to believe that he’s not being totally unfair in that description. ‘Am I unreasonable to want something that even vaguely resembled the pictures on the auction site?’

‘No, but you’re unreasonable to buy a property without looking at it, without hiring a surveyor, doing any background research, or using the common sense that would tell most people that if they’re getting something so big for such a ridiculously cheap price, it’s probably not that much of a bargain after all.’

‘I don’t call fifty grand cheap.’

He does another sarcastic laugh. ‘Cheap in relation to size. Thinking you were going to get a working, functional Christmas tree farm that you could simply step into and start raking in money for that kind of price.’

‘I knew there would be work involved,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘Did you see the auction listing?’

He scratches the back of his neck. ‘No.’

‘There were pictures of living trees on it. So far, that seems to be a complete misrepresentation.’

‘This land hasn’t been maintained in four years. It would resemble the pictures. If it had been maintained, which it hasn’t. For four years. That’s more than half a Christmas tree’s lifespan to average selling age. It’s a lot of work to get them back into shape if any of them are salvageable, but they’re not all dead. Yet.’

I look at the brown to browner shades of the trees behind me. ‘No, what are they then? Dressed up in their Halloween costumes? Performing a horticultural re-enactment of Night of the Living Dead?’

His lip twitches again. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about these ones. These are your windbreaker fields.’ He sighs at my blank look. ‘They’re to protect the Christmas trees from the worst of the Scottish weather. Strong winds can distort branches and desiccate needles, and that’s if you get lucky and the wind doesn’t take the trees down altogether. Good farmers plant windbreaker fields to take the full force of it instead of the Christmas trees.’

I look around for some sign of these Christmas trees, and he waves towards the land behind the farmhouse like he knows exactly what I’m looking for. ‘They’re that way.’

‘Oh, brilliant,’ I say, genuinely overjoyed by this news. Gizmo licks my chin in approval and his tail wagging amps up. ‘When I was growing up, my mum and dad had a houseplant in the corner of the room, and once a month, my mum would drown the poor thing, and every time I’d fish it out, drain it off, and nurse it back to health. If anything on this farm is alive, it’s better than I expected when I drove in. I’m going to go and have a look around.’