The physic garden was dying. Thomas Brown and I were in agreement about that. When he asked if I would gather specimens for him, the state of the physic garden lay at the heart of his request. In fact, the state of the physic garden lay at the root of all that occurred over those next few years. There had been a slow but steady decline for a long time past and the miserable end of this once beautiful and productive garden was inevitable.
It all began with Alexander Wilson who was made professor of astronomy in 1760, but he was already the official type founder to the university. This was his main trade; astronomy was but a pastime with him. These academic disciplines were often hobbies for men who made their real living elsewhere. Much, I suppose, as Thomas would have said that his real work was medicine, even while he was lecturing in botany. Professor Wilson soon petitioned Faculty for permission to build a type foundry in the grounds, a convenience for himself, since he was about to become resident in the college. Without reference to the gardener – for who ever would think to consult a common gardener on such a matter? – they allowed the foundry to be built on a small plot of land next to the physic garden.
The type foundry was much more important than the physic garden. The university needed printing of all kinds and it was an expensive business, as I now know only too well. I always feel that there is a certain irony in the nature of my later profession: fate winking at me from behind her hand, so to speak. But life does sometimes seem to throw these strange coincidences our way. The first venture must have been very successful because they quickly allowed it to be expanded, and a second foundry was built beside the first. From that time onwards the garden deteriorated a little more each year.
My father had been working as college gardener while I was toddling about the place and getting up to all kinds of mischief. I spent my childhood running about the gardens, paddling in the burns with the other lads, guddling for the wee silvery fish that swam there, or catching them with nets and letting them go again. I was supposed to be helping my father, although perhaps hindering might be a better way of describing it. But he tolerated me and encouraged me in about equal measure. He was a good, God-fearing man, if a little dour.
I remember one time when I was running like the wind on an imaginary errand of my own. Oh I was well away, my feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground. I think I had some vague idea, without knowing anything save that these countries lay beyond the great river and the sea, that I might run to Africa or the Americas or some such place, that my legs might carry me over the water and beyond. I was brought down to earth from this engaging fantasy when I collided with a professor, who was donnering down one of the pathways, deep in thought, his black gown flapping behind him. He was a small man and I ran right into his belly and for all that he was small of stature, his belly wasn’t that wee, I’m telling you. They were well fed, those professors.
I fairly bounced off him, and the collision released a cloud of snuff from his waistcoat. The impact took the breath from him and from myself too, and I fell over. I remember sitting there with my arse paining me, and my hands digging into the cold grit of the pathway, looking up at him staggering backwards with his mouth in a round ‘o’ of astonishment. I don’t know which of us was the more surprised. My father had seen the whole thing and he came galloping over with his spade in his hand, brandishing it like a weapon. He was all for giving me a beating there and then, and I think he might have been tempted to use the flat of the spade to do it, so great was his wrath, compounded by embarrassment at his own son for being the perpetrator of such a crime. I expected it and thought my arse would be sore all over again. But the old man wouldn’t have it.
‘Na, na, na. Leave the wee man alane, Mr Lang,’ he said. ‘Let him be. He was merely doing what boys do.’
‘Aye,’ said my father drily. ‘Cause naethin but trouble! Will ye let me hammer the deil oot o’ him Master? Will ye?’
He was hovering there, wondering whether to drag me to my feet or brush the professor down or what to do next. The professor surprised us both by letting out a wheezy chuckle, like a laugh that has gone rusty from lack of use. As perhaps it had.
‘Na, na, Mr Lang,’ he said again, shaking his head. ‘Leave the lad alane! It’s whiles a pleasure to see a wee lad runnin’ within the walls of this solemn auld place – and doin’ it for the joy of movement!’ he added. ‘My, my, but it’s the closest thing to perpetual motion we’ll ever see, for all their wild propositions and experiments with wheels and vast quantities of mercury! Look to the lads, that’s what I say! Look to the lads!’ and off he went, still chuckling to himself.
I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying about perpetual motion and mercury, neither of us did, although I found out all about it later, when I had more books in my possession, and how it was a sort of holy grail among scholars. But he seemed to be in high good humour, as though he had enjoyed the whole incident. While my father was gazing after him in some astonishment, I scrambled to my feet and took myself off before he could change his mind and give me a beating anyway for the good of my immortal soul.
* * *
My father’s predecessor, Sandy Adams, had been a fine gardener who had taught my father all that he knew. Adams’s enterprising wife had set up a shop in one of the rooms of their house in Blackfriars Wynd, just outside the college. There, she would make herb ale (said to be a great tonic for the blood) and would sell it, along with all kinds of medicinal herbs, both dried and fresh, and distillations of these herbs, including cinnamon and peppermint as aids to digestion, lime flowers for the apoplexy and vertigo, elder with all kinds of curative properties, as well as common mint and pennyroyal, which, although its oil is very poisonous, will keep the flies away from your larder if you but place a pot by the door in summer. We still do that here in this house. There would, of course, be seasons when the produce of the physic garden was abundant, and I think Adams must have sought and gained the permission of Faculty to use the surplus as he saw fit in the service of his other business.
By the time of Sandy Adams’s death, however, the type foundry was already exerting its malign influence and the garden was in decline. My father was a young married man by that time, steady and reliable, but already with considerable experience in the college gardens, and Faculty had no hesitation in appointing him in Sandy Adams’s place. When I grew old enough to become a real help to him, my father never tired of telling me that he judged the physic garden to be in a dreadful state. After his appointment as head gardener, he had attempted to remedy it and immediately ordered forty cartloads of dung for dressing the soil. I mind the stink of it yet for I played my part in shovelling it into and out of wheelbarrows. You could shovel all day long and the heaps never seemed to get any smaller or smell any sweeter.
Throughout my childhood, the botanical garden, as my father called the physic garden, became a constant cause for complaint. It was the focus for all his woes, a sad accompaniment to a thousand conversations. I would sometimes be sent to fetch him in when his supper was on the table – invariably broth, bannocks, a little crowdie with salt, since he was a man of regular, even monotonous habits – and more often than not, I would find him foraging among the herbs, studying leaves and blossoms for signs of injury. But you didn’t need to look too closely to see that the garden was sickly, leaves yellowing and falling before their time or shrivelled, their growth stunted, so many plants afflicted with some dreadful malaise. It was a vegetable plague and just as deadly as the epidemics that from time to time would ravage the human population of the town.
Professor Hamilton, although I have small recollection of him, must have begun lecturing in botany around that time. He had studied under the celebrated anatomist William Hunter, in London, and so came with a reputation for an interest in dissection, that is, slicing into real, albeit dead human bodies, to find out what goes on beneath the skin. Professor Hamilton was a good friend to my father and when the post of college gardener became vacant, he thought that my father would be a very suitable person to fill it and recommended him to Faculty.
My father and Professor Hamilton used to have frequent discussions about remedies for the problem, much as Thomas Brown and I would later spend many hours wrestling with possible solutions for what was becoming an intractable state of decay. But I doubt if their relationship was anything other than formal. My father was the kind of man who knew his place and would offer due deference to men whom he thought of as his superiors in intellect and station, if not in the eyes of God. All men were equal in the eyes of the Lord. He would say that and I must suppose that he believed it. But although Professor Hamilton was youthful and gracious, he would have expected nothing less than respectful compliance with all his wishes, and my father would have thought this right and proper.
I have seen some of Professor Hamilton’s lecture notes. Like many another before him, he was convinced that plants gave off noxious substances by night, vapours inimical to the human frame, a belief which has persisted to this day. My late wife herself believed it, my daughter-in-law still does, and my grand-daughter is not even allowed her posy of wild flowers in her room at night, although I myself remain unconvinced of it, perhaps because I slept in close proximity to all kinds of vegetable matter for a very large part of my youth, and apart from the occasional twinge of rheumatism and a little deterioration of my eyesight, have remained as active and healthy a man as it is possible to be.
Rather, I feel, it is the noxious effluents and vapours of such as the type foundry and numerous other manufactories, which have been established in our town, which destroy our trees and shrubs and flowers, which poison our rivers, which will, I do believe, ultimately destroy us all, for are we not made of the same organic matter? When the plants begin to die, we should look to ourselves and our own health to follow them into putrefaction.
Now, Glasgow is indeed growing and flourishing, but not in any way of which a gardener would approve. Not to put too fine a point on it, the town which, in my youth, was a place of many gardens and still full of the scent of flowers, now stinks to high heaven. The waters that were clear, in which the fish swam, over which the birds flew, are livid and sluggish as they flow through the town. The green leaves turn yellow and sour, even as they unfurl on the tree. The bark that should be silver or brown is as caked with dirt as the stones of this old house and even the statues on some of the new buildings, the gods and angels, already have a thin overlay of soot.
I have to remind myself that I am no longer a gardener and need not care for such things. But old habits die hard, and I do not like the smoke and the fog and the soot, even though I seem miraculously immune to its ill effects. There is nothing left of the dear, green place that Saint Mungo loved, and he would recognise no part of it. The folk of this town grow as stunted as the trees. They are pale and cough a great deal, and I think it was not so in my youth, no matter how hard the privations that the poor had to endure then. But progress must have its way, as my sons are always telling me and perhaps they are right.
My father and Professor Hamilton made strenuous efforts on behalf of the physic garden but they were sadly thwarted by Faculty itself, for a third type foundry was soon built. Everyone knew what the effects of the smoke and fumes would be but nobody was prepared to make a decision to save the garden. And so we limped on in this fashion until Professor Hamilton himself took ill and died. He was then only thirty-two years old. It was in May of 1790 that Professor James Jeffray was appointed to the Chair of Botany and Anatomy in his stead. But in the type foundry next door they were melting lead, tin and antimony. You could taste them on your tongue. Like Canute, and just as helplessly wise, my poor father stood among his plants, head bowed before the onslaught of the incoming industrial tide.