Just look at the rosebuds. Outside, each wrapped in a leafy calyx: five green sepals, lapped over one another, two outer, two inner, and one half-in half-out. Inside, the coloured ball of petals, unopened, unseen, as yet unexplored: the corolla. Together, the perianth. Some of the rosebuds have furry green calyces: the moss roses. Some have extravagantly ornamental calyces protruding beyond the tip of the bud like the heraldic mantling on a coat of arms: the damasks and the albas. Some are almost plain; smooth and round as a capsid bug: the gallicas. Every one plump and green and full of possibility, and quite new to me.
I’m all eyes. Mesmerised by the words, the new vocabulary; by the intricacy and variety of the buds themselves. An old riddle is running through my head:
We are five brothers at one time born.
Two of us have beards, by two no beards are worn
While one, lest he should give his brothers pain,
Has one side bearded and the other plain.
Carefully I peel a calyx apart. Five sepals: the outer two with leafy edges, the inner two plain, the fifth — its inner edge, tucked inside, as modestly plain as its two inner brethren — with an outer edge as triumphantly crocketed as half a miniature Gothic pinnacle or the velvet buds of a stag’s horn.
The rose bushes are head-high now, and the back of the border is a secret place once more, damp and dim and tunnel-round, smelling of earth. Thick white roots of wood-sage dive beneath the leaf litter, pungent and pinkly brittle. Sunlight sifts through the canopy of rose leaves. Pale tendrils of clematis reach for the light. I stoop to gather the fallen leaves of giant cardoons, outgrown as the hollow stems rocket upwards, grey as aluminium, soft as felt. Out in the sun, iridescent flies, blue and green, bask. My fingers are sticky and aromatic from the calyces of the moss roses, bitter from the cardoons. The polished surfaces of the rose leaves wink in the sun. There’s the sweet-sharp gooseberry smell of elderflower, crinkled bloom of medlars like crushed taffeta. The first wild roses trail in the long grass.
Don’t blink. Beneath the wall the bearded irises are in bloom, the tall uppermost petals so gauzy, so delicate, that each bloom, once opened, lasts hardly longer than a day. Look, you can almost see through them. As fleeting as a rainbow, and with the same rain-washed colours, they were named after Iris, the messenger of the gods, who as a rainbow linked heaven and earth. It’s the same derivation as the iris of the human eye, the coloured membrane which separates the inner from the outer chamber. Both have the same mysterious, shifting, shimmering quality, the colours depending on the viewpoint of the observer, one colour flecked by, veined with, shot through with another. These irises are pale blue, with a tracery of darker veins, their furled navy-blue buds rising out of translucent papery spathes, like new ballet shoes in tissue-paper wrapping. Later there will be rust-red ones and yellow ones, white ones and ones as dark as midnight. But these, the earliest, are the colour of summer skies, a clear pale blue, their shimmering standards like the crumpled wings of newly emerged dragonflies or the iridescent wings of the angel in Van Eyck’s Annunciation.
The irises were given to me by the painter John Napper. They had formerly belonged to Chloe Gunn, the daughter of society portrait painter James Gunn. Now they were mine, a gift to the new garden. I spent a day digging them up at Steadvallets, the house John and his wife Pauline rented near Ludlow. I shared them out: some for me, some for Pru, some for David and Simon. I liked that — the feeling of passing them on, passing them down, from Chloe to John to me; from me to Pru, and David and Simon. Like a story, with different bits added here and there, elaborated or slimmed down, but essentially the same. These are old-fashioned varieties. They wouldn’t be out of place in the border of a Book of Hours, along with the red roses and cornflowers and columbines, the pea flowers with their curling tendrils, the speedwells and carnations, the white flowers of the strawberries with their plump red fruit. Modern varieties of irises are bigger and brighter with stronger colour contrasts — plicatas and amoenas, bicolours and bitones — thick ruffled blooms which stand up to the weather. But now John had tired of his irises: he wanted blocks of brilliant colour — annuals he could change every year. He was always changing his garden. The beds were based on the abstract forms of Miró, sinuous, swirling. He used to plan it looking out from his studio window on the top floor.
It was John who first taught me how to see a flower, to really look. ‘You have to see it from below, against the light. Do you see?’ It was Clematis ‘Huldine’, growing near the house: an off-white, vigorous variety, useful because large and late-flowering. But from above it was nothing. Against the light it was exquisite. Pale grey, with pale violet midribs dividing each tepal, and a frosted sheen like crisp sugar-icing. I planted it at Morville over an archway, where it could wander through a pale pink-and-white climbing rose.
And so I learned: about sepals and petals and tepals, calyces, corollas and perianths. But, more importantly, how to look. It takes time to look. And no one can be a gardener without really looking. And tepals? Petaloid sepals: a ‘petal or sepal of a flower, where the calyx and corolla are not clearly distinguished’. Not everything is susceptible to precise analysis. We need to retain a sense of wonder.
Pass it on.
This is Sext, the hour when the sun is at its highest, the peak of the day, as June is the peak of the year. The message of the liturgy at Sext is one of joy: ‘Then was our mouth filled with gladness and our tongue with joy …’ Everything is perfect. The days are endless, the sky without a cloud. It’s like the beginning of the school holidays and being a child again. Magnificavit Dominus facere nobiscum … ‘The Lord has done great things for us, and we are made joyful.’
Every Trinity Sunday, in late May or early June, people congregate in the little church at Credenhill, near Hereford, to celebrate the life and work of the poet Thomas Traherne, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, who was Rector of Credenhill from 1657 until a year or so before his death in 1674. Traherne is one of the supreme poets of childhood, his work imbued with a sense of wonder and joy in God’s creation. His poems are full of delight in the body with all its senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight, especially sight, a recurring motif throughout his poetry. Here, in ‘The Preparative’, the infant has not yet begun to distinguish between itself and the world around it:
Then was my soul my only all to me,
A living endless eye,
Just bounded by the sky,
Whose power, whose act, whose essence was to see …
It is the infant eye with its freshness of vision that sees true. In ‘Shadows in the Water’ the child Traherne mistakes reflections in a puddle for other worlds beneath his feet, worlds he cannot reach although they are separated from him only by the seemingly insubstantial surface of the water — one of the ‘sweet Mistakes’ of ‘unexperienc’d infancy’, but which provokes in the adult Traherne the hope that perhaps
Some unknown Joys there be
Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin Skin
Is broken, be admitted in.
One of Traherne’s best-loved poems is ‘The Salutation’. Here Traherne the child speaks of the magnificent gift of existence, of the wonder that he should have ‘smiles or tears, / Or lips or hands or eyes or ears’ at all:
Strange all, and new to me.
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.’
Strange too that Traherne’s poetry should have survived. For two centuries after his death he was known only as the author of two minor theological prose works. Poets of his milieu wrote poetry not for publication, but for private circulation among a select coterie — in Traherne’s case probably the religious community that centred around Susannah Hopton at nearby Kington, under whose name his rapturous psalm-like ‘Thanksgivings for the Body’ was published in 1699. Then in 1896 a volume containing thirty-seven poems in what proved to be Traherne’s own handwriting, together with another volume containing his acknowledged prose masterpiece, Centuries of Meditations, were bought for a few pence on two London second-hand bookstalls. Thereafter, fragments started turning up with increasing rapidity. Shortly after the publication of the poems and Centuries (in 1903 and 1908 respectively), another manuscript with forty more poems was identified in the Burney Collection in the British Library (published as Poems of Felicity in 1910). Then the manuscript of a vast encyclopaedic work left incomplete at the time of Traherne’s death, entitled Commentaries of Heaven, designed to show ‘ALL THINGS … to be Objects of Happiness’, was rescued from a burning rubbish heap in Lancashire in 1967 and identified as Traherne’s in 1982. Two further volumes were discovered in 1997, one in America, the other by a Cambridge don sheltering from the rain in Lambeth Palace Library: flicking through a catalogue of unattributed works, he was intrigued by the title ‘Seeds of Eternity’; calling up the volume, he found it to contain five additional unknown works by Traherne, including a remarkable extended prose passage in which the poet, leaping the centuries to our own era of space travel, pictures a ‘Celestial Stranger’ to whom the Earth ‘perhaps would be invisible … or seem but a needle’s point, or a Sparkle of Light’, visiting the Earth and being amazed by its beauties, like the first astronauts on seeing our own fragile blue planet spinning in the depths of space for the first time — an image which, beamed back to Earth, changed everything for ever.
‘Verily,’ he says, ‘this star is a nest of Angels!’
As the garden began to take shape, I started to keep a diary of the garden-making. At first just a record of things to do, things done, the rise and fall of the thermometer. But gradually it became something more. Writing for me became a way of seeing; the struggle to describe precisely became my way of paying attention. My husband gave me a camera — a Pentax with a zoom lens — and I used it to record the befores and afters, and to make a record of each of the plants. But the camera was no substitute for words. As a process it was too quick; as an image it was too limited. I like to take my time.
For one hectic summer I was employed at David Austin’s rose nursery at Albrighton, near Wolverhampton, describing roses. Every day there would be a new list of which roses were coming into flower. A photographer and a retired perfumier were employed on the same project. (‘Grapefruit?’ the perfumier would ask, wafting a flower beneath my nose. ‘Brown bread?’) People came and went, the gardeners carried on with their work, the photographer snapped away, and every day I would stand, pencil poised — sometimes peering over dark glasses to deflect the white glare of my notepad, sometimes with the rain dripping from the brim of my hat — trying to capture in words the essence of each rose. What makes ‘Alain Blanchard’ different from ‘Hippolyte’? ‘Belle de Crécy’ from ‘Robert le Diable’? ‘Duchesse de Montebello’ from ‘Duchesse d’Angoulême’? Trying to describe leaf, sepal, stem, thorn, habit, flower — single, semi-double, double; cupped, quartered, rosette, dome or globe; in truss or spray or cluster; in bud, in youth, in full flower, in age; from above and below; in the middle and at the edges; streaks and veins, tones and tints — rooted to the spot.
All the first roses I planted in the garden were white — but how many tints and subtleties are subsumed in that one word! — the paper white of ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’; the ivory of ‘Mme Legras de St Germain’; peachy ‘Mme Alfred Carrière’; the car-mine-streaked globes of Ayrshire ‘Splendens’, smelling of myrrh; the tumbling sprays of rosy-budded ‘Félicité et Perpétue’; the brilliant red shoots and white cups of ‘Adélaïde d’Orléans’, brimful with yellow stamens; the hint of apricot in ‘The Garland’; the apple-green freshness of ‘Mme Hardy’; the heavy cream silk of ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, ‘Sombreuil’ like milky China tea. Then I made the Cloister Garden, and planted the old white albas and damasks: Rosa x alba, simplicity itself, pure as a dog rose; the lovely ‘Alba Semiplena’, taller than the type; ‘Alba Maxima’, the Jacobite Rose. I like white. Colour used to be as rare in my garden as it is on my person, but gradually colour is seeping in. Next came the blush roses — Rosa x damascena var. versicolor, dubbed ‘York and Lancaster’, with separate flowers of palest pink and white on the same bush; ‘Great Maiden’s Blush’ and ‘Blush Noisette’; the coconut ice of ‘Félicité Parmentier’; the pale lilac of ‘Narrow Water’; the soft pink of ‘Céleste’ and ‘Fantin Latour’. Then the striped roses: carmine-and-white ‘Rosa Mundi’, paler ‘Camaïeu’, vivid ‘Ferdinand Pichard’, ‘Variegata di Bologna’ like blackcurrants and cream. It began with white roses, but now I have roses of every tint and shade from palest blush to darkest maroon: ‘Black Jack’, ‘Emperor of Morocco’, ‘Black Prince’; slate-purples like ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ and ‘Nuits de Young’; intense dark red-purples with crimson and blue-purple lights — ‘Russelliana’, R. gallica ‘Violacea’, ‘Robert le Diable’, ‘Belle de Crécy’, ‘Hippolyte’, ‘Indigo’. Now chaste and chilly ‘Comtesse de Murinais’ is wreathed in the prickly wine-stained embrace of ‘William Lobb’; modest ‘Blanchefleur’ shrinks from roguish dark-whiskered ‘Capitaine Basroger’; the shamelessly Schiaparelli-pink ‘Mme Isaac Pereire’ flaunts herself beside muted and matronly ‘Honorine de Brabant’. In my garden there are now purple roses, red roses, even yellow roses (though segregated in a garden of their own). But not orange. I draw the line at orange.
‘You can’t see Venice twice for the first time,’ Mirabel said. After the first excitement of newness, will there always be the same enchantment every year, watching the rose buds open, the irises unfurl? It’s the challenge that faces us all at some point, and which faces me now, twenty years on from the beginning of the garden. And it’s true: you can change the colour of your tulips, you can forswear roses in favour of dahlias, you can even move house and make a new garden, but you can never leave yourself behind. For it is the eye that becomes jaded — the mind, not its object. Even for Traherne it was a struggle to retain that freshness of vision, to protect it from the eroding sea of experience. As he constantly reminded himself, ‘I must become a child again.’ But even if we cannot see all anew each year, we can each time strive to see it deeper, differently: the experience can be enriched, not impoverished. A rose at forty or at eighty means something different from a rose at twenty; we naturally bring to it more associations, whether personal or literary or historical, more ‘back story’. And if we can’t see Venice twice for the first time, neither can we step into the same river twice — the world is perpetually changing, renewing itself. See how different a single rose, a single petal can be, not only every year, but every day, and every hour of every day, as the world turns around it — in all weathers, in every season, bud and bloom, calyx and corolla. All we have to do is look.
I met Mirabel in 1989: Mirabel Osler, the writer and gardener, who had made a famously wild and romanticgarden up in the Clee Hills and written about it in her wonderful first book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos. She had left the Clee after the death of her husband, and had just moved to a much smaller town garden in Ludlow, where there was no room for meadows of long grass or billows of wild roses, no tree house or stream. But as her garden shrank, so paradoxically it got larger, for Mirabel took to examining her flowers with a hand lens — peering deep into the purple-smudged heart of a cistus, the green eye of a rose, discovering there veins magnified to the size of the Zambezi, stamens as big as baobab trees. However small one’s garden becomes, even shrinking at last to a flower on a bedside table, the whole of creation is there.
They lost the election, of course. The Labour MP for Taunton, Victor Collins, had been elected in 1945 due to the large numbers of evacuees there during the war. The war over, the evacuees drifted back to the cities and at the election of 1950 the countryside reverted to its old way of voting — leaving Pa, who had been Collins’s election agent, out of a job. Eventually he found work as a clerk at a nearby army camp. Then he retrained as a probation officer, finding lodgings and a job three hundred miles away in the steel town of Scunthorpe, in the north of Lincolnshire. It was 1954. I was seven.
A frontier town, he called it: a weird architecture of slag heaps and cooling towers, a night sky scarred by the orange glow of blast furnaces, a population of everyone from nowhere, brittle, seething, the pubs overflowing with drink. She wept. But for us it was Paradise — our own private Amazon or Gobi Desert, our Himalayas or Hindustan. We were invincible. Traversing the high white slag heaps with their sides etched into deep grooves by run-off water and polished by our backsides and plimsolled feet into glassy slides that launched us yelling out into mid-air. Hurtling down the Z-bends of the Cut on roller skates, riding bicycles so big you couldn’t sit on the seat. Browsing on earthnuts, the sweet knobbly tubers that grew beneath a special sort of yarrow; nibbling ‘bread and cheese’, the young leaves of the hawthorn; sucking the sweet sappy stems of flowering grasses pulled from their sockets.
The house at Bellingham Road was on the edge of the common — not an ancient place, but a scummy, scraggy, scrappy sort of place, a leftover strip of land between the council houses and the steelworks, populated by hedgehogs and rusty-seeded docks and the Polish workers who lived in a hostel marooned in the middle of it. We were a tribe of two: dug dens in sandy soil and roofed them with bits of corrugated iron; made tentative alliances with other tribes; hunted the hedgehogs with our dog.
The steelworks ran twenty-four hours a day. A mushroom cloud of steam hung perpetually over the cooling towers. At night from the bedroom we could see the tipping — the sudden white-hot glare, muting to red, then orange. The windowsills would be black with smuts moments after they had been wiped clean.
She painted their bedroom apple-green, with one wall of apple-blossom wallpaper.
In the tunnel now, the apple trees are covered with thousands of tiny apples, no bigger than crabs. I have come with secateurs to thin them, so that the fruit will grow larger. But instead I am watching a dragonfly basking in the sun. Its transparent wings are fine as gossamer yet strong as steel, ribbed like a web of girders. I only see them on warm days: dragonflies are cold-blooded, grounded by cold weather; they need to absorb heat in order to fly. This places them back with the most primitive creatures on earth, millions of years old — back before the Ice Age, back before dinosaurs browsed, back when Shropshire was a tropical swamp and dragonflies with two-foot wingspans cruised the earth beneath colossal trees. Stealthily I creep closer to get a better look. It’s a hawker dragonfly, with a long slim blue-banded body, storing up energy in the four wings it stretches out horizontal to the sun’s rays. But it is far from asleep. From its perch it keeps watch for prey. Dragonflies are formidable hunters, quick and fierce. Their common names reflect that: hawkers, chasers, darters. Hawkers are the biggest, the most accomplished flyers; they roost in the trees at night and cruise the garden by daylight, in search of prey. Chasers are the ones with short muscular bodies. Darters are light and fast, returning with their prey again and again to the same perch. The damselflies are slimmer and slighter still, with narrower wings which they keep closed when they perch. Like hawks or sight hounds, dragonflies seek their prey almost entirely by sight. They have enormous compound eyes, making up almost a tenth of their body length, each eye with up to 30,000 facets, each facet producing its own image. The eyes meet on top of a dragonfly’s head, giving it almost 360° vision. I have a sudden startling image of myself splintered into thousands of parts, blue shirt, white face, dark hair, multiplied sixty-thousand-fold in the darkness of the dragonfly’s head, as in the control centre of some gigantic power station. Alarmed, half-queasy at the strangeness of it, I step back. And suddenly it’s off in a whirr of wings, shimmering metallic blue-green as it skims over the rose bushes like the helmeted bikers who zoom past the end of the garden every summer weekend.
(It’s a lovely road for biking, they say: long smooth curves, gently switchbacking up and down, the Clee on one side, Wenlock Edge on the other, all the way down Corve Dale. No traffic. I see them leaning into the Z-bends, sleek black and silver with a slick of red or blue, all steel and leather, part-man part-machine. I bought a motorbike too, but not for speed. I cruise the lanes and byways at hardly more than walking pace, sniffing the air, gazing over the hedgerows and into the fields, hardly disturbing the buzzard that flaps lazily away at my approach. My speed is 25–30 mph, max. The top speed, as it happens, of a dragonfly.)
In Scunthorpe my brother and I discovered a new hobby: collecting fossils. The soil was light and sandy. The town was expanding. Trenches appeared almost overnight for new drains, new electricity supplies, new roads. The cut sides of each new trench would be studded with fossils. On Saturday mornings we would scavenge the building sites for ammonites, the fossilised shells of mussels and oysters, caches of belemnites like spent bullets. In the garden where Pa grew shaggy white marguerites and Michaelmas daisies, 150 million years ago squid swam in the shallow coastal waters of the Tethys Ocean.
It was a new garden in a big L-shape in front of the house, and Pa set about filling it. But first he had to dig it. It was infested with horse-tail: Equisetum, a fearsome weed of agricultural land, with a ramifying root system that can penetrate thirty feet below the surface, throwing up plantlets from every node. We called it ‘frogs’ umbrellas’, its leafless green jointed stems looking to us like the spokes of an umbrella blown inside out. Pa called it something else, less printable. Had we but known it, the frogs’ umbrellas that Pa struggled to eradicate were even older than the fossils on which we lavished such care. In the Carboniferous era, when the coal seams that eventually brought the steelworks to Scunthorpe were being laid down, tree-sized horse-tails known as calamitids grew thirty feet tall. In the Jurassic era smaller species of horse-tails were the staple diet of herbivorous dinosaurs. One genus only survives, containing seven British species — twenty-five worldwide — including our frogs’ umbrellas. They are unrelated to any other living genus. (The very similar aquatic plant known as mare’s tail, Hippuris vulgaris, is in fact no relation.) Ironically, given Pa’s struggles, some Equisetums are now must-have plants for fashionable gardens.
It was in the garden at Scunthorpe that I first remember failing. I was ‘First Year Girl Champion’ at Ashby County Primary School Sports Day, 1954. Fast and fearless and top of the class. I had taken succeeding as a matter of course, so to fail came as quite a surprise. I was convinced that I could make silk out of the long silky seedheads of meadow grass — well, it was obvious you could, when you just looked at them — and had enlisted the help of a small schoolfriend with whom I laboured in vain all one Saturday morning, up to our arms in water, until she exclaimed in disgust, ‘I thought you said you could do it!’ I seem to have had an innate belief in the seventeenth-century Doctrine of Signatures: the idea that the appearances of plants gave a clue to their use. The spotted leaves of Pulmonaria, for example, were thought to resemble human lungs, and were therefore given as a remedy for pulmonary troubles (reflected also in its English name, lungwort).
I wonder if the grass I thought so silky was Holcus lanatus (meadow soft-grass) with its purple-pink plumes of flower heads. The word holcus is said to be from the Greek word for ‘extraction’, i.e. good for extracting thorns from the flesh. Useful for something then, even if I was wide of the mark in the detail. Its uses nowadays are more likely to lie in subtle landscaping effects than in first aid. I once saw it lit from underneath by lasers in a smart London pocket-handkerchief of a garden. Its other name is ‘Yorkshire fog’. Less poetic than it sounds: ‘fog’ comes from the Old Norse meaning ‘long, lank grass’ — which is what happens to it at the other end of the season. I have enough of that in the Wild Garden here.
The principal image for June in the Books of Hours is Mowing — that is, haymaking (which is cutting grass) as distinct from reaping (which is harvesting grain): scythes (with long open blades) instead of sickles (with short, hooked ones). A line of men would work their way steadily across a field, beginning as soon as the dew had dried and working until noon. Then food and drink would be brought out to the field and the men would sleep for an hour through the hottest part of the day. Then they would begin work again and continue until dewfall. In the Hours of the Fastolf Master a villager mows a meadow with a short straight-handled scythe. From his belt hangs a wooden strickle, which when dipped in grease and then sand would be used as a whetstone to sharpen the blade. A fresh supply of sand is probably contained in the bag which hangs from a nearby tree. The scythe has two handholds, the lower in the form of a projecting peg, the upper positioned across the top of the shaft in the form of a cross-piece, like the handle of a spade. The shape of scythes varied from locality to locality. The Fastolf Master, though he worked on occasion for English patrons, was French. The same pattern of scythe appears in the Très riches heures, and in the woodcuts of the Shepherds’ Calendar, which also had their origins in France. English scythes of this period were longer and had two projecting pegs as handholds. Some Welsh scythes were straight, with a strap and only one handhold, designed to be used one-handed, with a crook in the other. Some Scottish scythes had a shaft or stale in the shape of a Y, one to be grasped by each hand. My neighbour Arthur gave me his father’s old scythe, a typical English scythe of the Midlands, long and sinuous, with a sweeping S-curve and movable handholds which could be adjusted according to the worker’s height. To ‘set’ it you stretched out your arm and held the tip of the blade in your left hand; the first peg should then touch the nape of your neck. I tried it, and it fitted: Arthur’s father must have been no bigger than me.
Most people nowadays use a strimmer to cut long grass, and a petrol or electric mower for short grass. I bought a big petrol strimmer for the long grass of the Wild Garden and the Lammas Meadow. I learned how to balance its weight on the strap so that I could work all day with it, swinging it evenly from the hips, laying the grass in neat swathes. It was satisfying but noisy, and it smelled awful. Secretly I dreamed of the swish of the blade, the sun-warmed wood of the stale in my hands, the soft fall of the grass. But be practical, I said to myself. Besides, it’s harder than it looks.
Mowing the lawn is purest summer drudgery to some, but I have always had a special fondness for my grass. At the beginning, I had too much of it: an acre and a half of grass with nothing in it except new hedges. Cutting the grass to different lengths was a way of reducing the amount I had to mow and making the task more interesting. I left some of it to grow long and mowed paths through it. I cut some of it once a month and made patterns in it. This was how the Turf Maze began. I tried other new garden layouts too by mowing them in grass first: the grid of beds in the Cloister Garden, the long rectangular shape of the Canal with its Dutch-gable ends, the sinuous lines of the New Flower Garden. After the black-and-white of pen and ink, my garden existed next in a green incarnation, sculpted in grass.
I like mowing. Up and down, backwards and forwards, each time a different slice of the garden, each time a slightly different view. Time to look. Time to consider. Would that penstemon look better over there? Would it be fun to cut a window in the hedge over here? And all the time that wonderful smell rising. And when it’s finally finished and the shadows are lengthening, and you stand back to admire your handiwork, the swallows come skimming the smooth green surface of the newly-cut lawn like skaters on a vast green ice-rink.
I don’t go in for ‘lawn maintenance’, though — all that weeding and feeding. I prefer my ‘weeds’: the clover, which keeps the grass naturally green with its nitrogen-fixing nodules; the daisy, opening and closing each day (its name comes from the Old English daeges ēage, meaning ‘the day’s eye’); the little blue-purple Prunella, known as ‘self-heal’, used to treat sore throats, mouth ulcers and open wounds — and still used in modern herbal medicine as an astringent for external or internal wounds. As Vita Sackville-West said, ‘A weed is only a plant in the wrong place.’ To which we should add: ‘or one for which we haven’t yet discovered the use’.
Grass is what we grow best in this country: foxtail, cat’s tail, bent and brome; cock’s foot, dog’s tail, melick and fescue; quaking grass, oat grass, rye grass and barley; nearly 150 indigenous species, all told. The family of grasses is perhaps of all the plant races the most important to mankind, for it is from wildlings like these that our staple cereals are derived. Our mild climate and heavy rainfall favours grass. And British cows and sheep feed on the fat of the land. Miss Bythell’s Guernsey herd won prizes in the 1960s and ’70s. But in the days of skimmed milk and low-fat diets, when supermarkets started to sell milk for less than the cost of production, the rich creamy milk of Miss Bythell’s cows was no longer wanted. In 2001 the herd was sold and the farm changed hands, the farmhouse sold off, the barns converted into dwellings and John, the farm manager, put out to grass.
In the long hot summer of 2006 John’s successor, Mr Meredith, made hay in the Church Meadow, one man and a machine doing the work of a dozen men with scythes. First he cut the grass, dropping it neatly behind the tractor in long flat lines, then he returned a few days later to turn it. The sweet fragrance of mown hay wafted over the garden for days. That smell! — the smell of the sweet-scented vernal grass (Anthoxanthum odoratum), the first to bloom of all the meadow grasses — evocative of a thousand summer days, but now largely a thing of the past. Nowadays hay is much more likely to be cut for silage: cut, chopped and bagged in a single day. It doesn’t lie in the fields at all, except in big black plastic bags. But this year Mr Meredith decided to make hay. A day or two afterwards, as the cut hay was lying in the field, a column of whirling grass and air suddenly rose up, hundreds of feet tall, moving at what seemed like walking pace down the windrow like some harvest demon stalking the field, come to exact his tythe. For a few terrifying moments it towered over the gardens. Then as suddenly as it had arrived it was gone — withdrawing up into the high blue sky, the stems of grass still whirling, but black now against the light, smaller and smaller, higher and higher, at first like a circling flock of crows — then swifts — then larks — then dots merely. I looked it up in a meteorology book: a phenomenon caused by intense heating of the soil, given a twist by the differential exposure to the sun of the rows of heaped grass and the stubble between. ‘Whirlygigs, we called them,’ said Ivor. He and his brothers used to chase them as children. ‘We never caught one though.’ Perhaps just as well.
Under the glare of the sun, I long for shade. Any new garden always lacks shade. Light and shade — what is the one without the other? I look longingly across the sun-bleached expanse of the Church Meadow at the church now bowered in trees within its picket fence. I think enviously of my friend David Bromley’s garden high on the Ercall with the wind soughing in the tops of the tall trees around the house. When I began the garden I planted standard pears which will grow into fine large trees, standard plums and apples, sweet chestnuts and walnuts — but it isn’t the same. So I took out the overgrown shrubbery of viburnum, variegated dogwood, Japanese maple, laburnum and forsythia that divided my garden from the house next door, and I planted a little spinney — too small for a wood, too wild for a grove, really hardly more than a thicket — of native British trees, with a top storey of pry (Tilia cordata, small-leaved lime), then field maple and wild service (Sorbus torminalis), then whitebeam and rowan beneath, and finally an under-storey of guelder rose, dog rose, spindle and eglantine (Rosa rubiginosa).
‘Storey’, our word for the different floors of a house, shares the same root as ‘story’, our word for a narrative. Historia, a sequence — of events, of details, of layers. History. Every piece of designed planting has its storeys, its layers of colour and texture and incident, just as every plant within it has a story. William Lobb was a Cornish plant hunter. The Duchesse d’Angoulême was the eldest child of the ill-fated Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The red and white roses entwined in medieval gardens symbolised Mary, mother of Christ, in her dual roles of virgin and mother — just as, centuries before, they had symbolised the qualities of innocence and experience in the goddess Venus.
The eglantine’s name means ‘prickly’ or ‘thorny’, from the Latin aculeus, ‘a little needle’, by way of the Provençal aiglentina. Its other name, sweet-briar, comes from the sweet apple-like fragrance that rises from the leaves, especially after rain. In the sixteenth century the eglantine became a symbol of Queen Elizabeth I. Its leaves are small, crisp, bright green and glossy, and the whole plant thrives in the poorest of soils, flowering early in the year and producing a prodigious display of bright orange hips that lasts throughout the winter. So just as her grandfather Henry VII had adopted the device of the white rose superimposed upon the red (the Tudor rose) to symbolise the union through marriage of the two warring houses of York and Lancaster, Elizabeth used the eglantine to convey her toughness and Englishness in the struggle against Spain — ‘so green that the sun of Spain at the hottest cannot parch it’. Its distinctive single pink flowers with their white eye appear in many of her portraits; in the British Museum’s sumptuous Phoenix Jewel, eglantines and Tudor roses twine together round Elizabeth’s profile, enamelled on gold, with a phoenix rising from the flames on the reverse.
At the Reformation the cult of the Blessed Virgin had been suppressed, and the English people deprived of their special devotion to Mary. Elizabeth’s association with the rose and her projection of herself as the Virgin Queen were both part of a deliberate appropriation by Elizabeth of the external symbols of the cult of the Blessed Virgin, an attempt to replace Mary, mother of Christ, in her people’s affections and to bind them to her with an equal devotion. Gradually the whole garden came to symbolise Elizabeth just as the Hortus conclusus had Mary, every flower signifying one of her virtues and accomplishments: the garden was England in microcosm, where poetry, music, the new classical learning and the twin arts of horticulture and architecture could flourish under the patronage of a new queen — no longer Mary, the Queen of Heaven, but Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
Once Prior Richard had been ejected in 1540, the contents of the Priory at Morville would have been confiscated or sold off, the buildings stripped of everything saleable (timber, paving stones, the tiles or lead of the roofs, even the stone of the walls, which the King’s men had a standing instruction to pull down to render buildings uninhabitable), and what little remained would have been pillaged by the local populace. By 1545, when the King’s commissioners came to value it, the property — ‘houses, kitchen, pasture, barns, stables, buildings’ — was all in a state of ‘utter ruin’.
Such had been the volume of monastic property flooding on to the market in the 1540s that it had taken five years for a valuation to be given for Morville. But once the valuation had been given, the way was clear for the Priory to be sold. Events now proceeded with almost indecent haste. By the end of 1545 the Priory had been granted to Viscount Lisle, a man who had had his fingers in the monastic pie since as early as 1536. Weeks later, he sold it to Roger Smyth of Bridgnorth. Smyth was a self-made man, a burgess profoundly distrusted by his fellows, an energetic merchant with his eye on the main chance; that year he was one of the Bailiffs of Bridgnorth, the following year Member of Parliament for the town (an office he held again in 1552). In 1549 Smyth snapped up more church property, this time at Underton (the prebend of the Chapel of St Mary Magdalene in Bridgnorth, dissolved in 1548), granted to John Peryent and Thomas Reeve in December 1549 and sold to Smyth the following month. In 1557 he got his hands on a real plum: the Hospital of St James (a leper hospital on the eastern outskirts of Bridgnorth with an estate of 130 acres along the Severn as well as houses in Bridgnorth itself), granted initially to John Perrott and again immediately sold to Smyth. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the town council was concerned: his fellow burgesses, having tried and failed in 1560 to wrest St James from him by legal means, in 1561 voted to ban him from the council as being ‘not worthy to be burgess or Freeman of the Towne’, citing the fact that he had ‘prevented the Town of the Chaunterye of sainct Leonardes … that he hathe gotten into his hands the hospytall of sainct James … [and that] the said Smyth dothe occupy the Townes Land and holdeth the same with force’.
A man with enemies, then; a man on the make who took what he wanted and held on to it. A man without family: in terms of pedigree he could hardly muster a single generation. He remedied that by acquiring a coat of arms — ‘Sable, a bend argent between six martlets argent’ — and by marrying the daughter of an old landed family whose property adjoined his newly acquired acres at Morville: Frances Cressett, whose family had owned Upton Cressett Hall since the 1300s.
Then on 25 June 1562 Smyth mysteriously died, leaving under-age children and a hasty will dated the same day, shorn of all pieties and preamble, which left everything to Frances, appointing her one of the executors and her brother Henry one of the ‘overseers’ of the will, with a litany of witnesses which included her father, her uncle and her brother-in-law.
The Cressetts stood to gain massively by the will. They now effectively controlled through Frances all the property Smyth had amassed in the previous two decades. Within six months Frances had been married off again: a much better match this time, to John Hopton of Rockill, a member of a powerful old Shropshire family; both he and William, the eldest of the six children Frances was to bear him, went on to hold the office of Sheriff of Shropshire (in 1575 and 1591 respectively).
But Frances’s story does not end there. By 1584 Hopton too was dead, and Frances had been married off again, this time into another even grander landed family, the Hordes, who had held the controlling interest in Bridgnorth politics for two hundred and fifty years, an unparelleled span of influence which was to last well into the nineteenth century.
Then the past caught up with her.
In 1584 a legal action was brought against her as executor of the will of Roger Smyth. The plaintiff was George Smyth, who had been named in the will as Roger’s son and appointed co-executor with Frances. He seems to have been absent at the time of his father’s death, for when probate was granted on 5 February 1563 it had been to Frances alone (now the wife of John Hopton), with Thomas Whitton (the other ‘overseer’ of the will, Henry Cressett having died in 1562) swearing on oath that George had resigned as executor. By the terms of the will Roger’s daughters were to get two hundred marks apiece when they married, and the boys ‘fowre scoore poundes’ each when the time came for them to be apprenticed; ‘my howse at Morefyeld … beinge the third parte or there aboutes of all my hoole landes’ went to Frances for her lifetime ‘towardes the preferment and bringinge up of my children’, except for half of Roger’s plate, which was bequeathed to ‘my heyre’; all the rest — the other two-thirds, Underton and St James, which the syntax indicates and the law might be expected to dictate to go to George, his heir (together with the reversion of the Morville property at France’s death) — was left to Frances, apparently this time absolutely. According to George, the will was a travesty of his father’s intentions. Had the Cressetts tampered with the will in George’s absence?
It seems likely that George was Roger’s son by a previous marriage (note the age gap: the other sons were very young, too young to be apprenticed; the daughters were too young to be married; George on the other hand was of sufficient age to be named as executor of the will). Why else would the Cressetts take such steps to disinherit him? But why then did he wait until 1584 to challenge the will? Perhaps because by then the major actors in the plot were all dead — John Hopton, Frances’s brothers Robert and Henry, her father Richard — Frances herself being probably no more than a pawn in their hands, a means of forging dynastic allegiances with other, more powerful, families.
The will was produced in court, and after scrutiny by the judge was pronounced to be ‘falsum, fictum et fabricatum’. George inherited all his father’s property, including not only Morville itself but the Hospital of St James and the Underton property, which he went on to bequeath to his own descendants. As for Frances, she married one last time, this time, perhaps, for love: William Clench of Bridgnorth, formerly of Dublin, was the younger son of a family with scarcely more pedigree than Roger had had. Whatever else she was, she was a survivor.
Under Elizabeth the countryside was at peace, and her people prospered. They began to lavish money on trophy houses, parks and elaborate gardens. What sort of gardens would Frances Cressett have made in her time at Morville? The symbolism of the garden in Elizabeth’s time might have changed, and its scale grown larger, but the ingredients would have been more or less the same as in the medieval Hortus conclusus — arbours, turf seats, trelliswork, roses, flower-studded grass — but with a new consciousness of the relationship between garden and house. For the first time too there might have been little pavilions, permanent garden buildings dotted here and there. Both were the legacy of Rome, part of the rediscovery of classical civilisation which we now call the Renaissance.
Much of Renaissance garden-making was modelled on the descriptions of Pliny the Younger’s gardens contained in two of his letters. One striking feature of Pliny’s garden was box ‘cut into a thousand shapes or even letters, which sometimes spell out the name of the owner or that of the gardener’. Low clipped hedges depicting the coat of arms or badge of a garden’s aristocratic owner first appeared in English gardens in Elizabeth’s grandfather’s reign. By her father’s time these ‘knots’, as they were called, had become geometrical designs of great complexity — Cardinal Wolsey at Hampton Court had ‘Knotts so enknotted, it cannot be exprest’ — and, in accordance with the new idea of linking house and garden, they were now sited close to the house where their patterns could be appreciated from the windows above. The arrangement was usually in multiples of four, and this was a principle mirrored in the design of the garden at large, now based on a succession of squares divided into quarters by walks and allées, reflecting the architecture of the house and continuing its straight lines and proportions.
I went back to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to look at Elizabethan gardening manuals. The first surprise was that mid-sixteenth-century knots were made from sweet-smelling herbs and flowers such as lavender, hyssop, thyme, germander, thrift, ‘gillyflowers’ (in this context, pinks), marjoram, ‘herb of grace’ (rue), rosemary and sage. Grey-leaved Santolina, or lavender cotton, was still a novelty and only to be found in the gardens of the great. The dwarf form of box (Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’) originated in Holland and did not begin to be used in England until the early seventeenth century — and even then it was deprecated as a constituent of knot gardens ‘on account of its naughtie smell’.
So much for the planting. But what about the design? The Bodleian had a dozen copies of The Gardeners Labyrinth and another half dozen or so of The Profitable Art of Gardening, both by Thomas Hill. In essence this was a single text reworked and expanded, which appeared in various guises and many different editions over the period from 1563 to 1652. I called up all the copies and compared them. Inserted in many was a sheet of suggested designs for knots and mazes which altered with each succeeding edition. Sometimes the sheet was missing — as if someone had taken it out into the garden to use as a guide in laying out one of the designs and left it on the potting bench or out in the rain. But those that remained showed the knot evolving from a distinctive ‘under-and-over’ of interwoven hedges — the typical Elizabethan ‘closed’ knot — into what became known at the turn of the century as ‘broken squares’, in which the linear design was carried by paths rather than hedges, dividing the area up into innumerable little flower-beds which were either hedged, or edged with ‘dead’ materials such as tiles, shells or bones — the Jacobean ‘open’ knot — then finally resolving itself into the blocky arrangement of corner- and centrepieces characteristic of the Caroline parterre.
The ‘beautie and comelinesse’ of the closed knot depended upon the pattern of the hedges being visible: ‘You must not plant anything in it,’ said the Maison rustique, another late-sixteenth-century gardening manual translated from the French, ‘or if you do… you must see, that it be of a shorter stalke than that which compasseth it about.’ In contrast, ‘… the open knots are more proper for Out-landish flowers.’ This was Parkinson, writing in 1629. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had seen an influx of ‘Out-landish’ (that is, foreign, mainly spring) flowers which were to transform English gardens: new sorts of daffodil, fritillaries, hyacinths, ‘Saffron-flowers’ (colchicums and crocuses of all sorts), lilies (which would then have been understood to include crown imperials as well as martagons), ‘Flower-de-luces’ (irises), tulips, anemones and ‘French cowslips, or Beares eares’ (auriculas). These were the flowers you planted in your open knot, the point of which was that it was pierced with paths, so that you could wander through it and see these novel flowers at close quarters.
So I made a closed knot for Frances’s garden. It is chaste and green but at the same time billowy and aromatic, soft and generous, not at all like the tidy parterres of clipped box which her descendants the Weavers would have preferred. Its beauty is in its interweaving pattern, which I look down on from my study window. The principal lines of the design are carried by wall germander (Teucrium chamaedrys, with its shining toothed dark green leaves), wild strawberries, thyme, marjoram, and purple and green sage. The spaces between are filled with rust-red crushed terracotta. I experimented with rue and Santolina, but the Santolina tended to perish in winter from the wet, and the fine blue-leaved form of rue turned out to be a nineteenth-century selection. All the way round the outside is a hedge of Pa’s lavender, the grey-leaved ‘Old English’ sort (Lavandula x intermedia), with pots of ‘stickadove’ (the slightly more tender French lavender, Lavandula stoechas) and tubs of sweet-smelling myrtles. All summer the Knot Garden drowses away under the open windows of the house, softly green, wafting aromaticairs through the door which stands open all summer long, the cats sunning themselves against the panels of the raised woodwork, or sleeping in fragrant sheltered corners between the herbs, each curled within their own private compartment of the design. And then as a bonus — almost as an afterthought, when the rest of the garden is fading in late summer — the Knot Garden flowers in swells and washes of dusky pink germander and billows of violet-blue lavender. The lavender flowers almost at eye level so that the whole garden is seen through a swaying fragrant sea where bees swim like shoals of fish and butterflies dance like coloured sails. The tide of scent sweeps up to my study: the sweetness of Pa’s lavender; the sharper, more medicinal smell of French lavender; the pungent lemony smell of germander; the warm aromatic smell of thyme.
In 1954 or 1955 my mother converted to Catholicism. During the time my parents were apart, she in Somerset, he in lodgings in Scunthorpe, she had been attending the local Anglican church. It was a new church, half-built. I remember the melancholy smell of wet plaster and its still-dusty concrete floor. Now in Scunthorpe she took me with her to Mass in the Catholic church, where the liturgy was in Latin and the sermon in Polish. I was sent to the Catholic school to be civilised by the Irish nuns. My best friend was Magda. I remember her mother, Mrs Wyslocki, beating her fist on a newspaper photograph of the faces of Khrushchev and Bulganin when they visited Britain. ‘Butchers!’ she shouted. ‘Butchers!’ It was April 1956. I was nine. I took my First Communion at the feast of Corpus Christi, wearing a borrowed dress made of heavy cream satin, trimmed with lace in a deep V from neck to waist, with more lace at wrist and ankle. We carried tall white lighted candles, wore wreaths of red and white flowers in our hair, with fluttering red ribbons down the back in honour of the day.
The nuns were fierce disciplinarians and fiercely academic. I learned to do drawn threadwork. I passed the eleven-plus. And then, Houdini-like, they did it again. Having fallen out with his colleagues, Pa got a new job in the south of the county. My new school was Church of England, my new school badge blue and yellow, a pattern of trees and dappled sunlight. I started cycling to school, coming home each day for dinner and then cycling back again. On the way, there was a row of balsam poplars. Even now, that smell will instantly recall for me the crunch of bicycle tyres on gravel, the cold circularity of the handlebars with their rubber grips and three-speed, the straightness of the tree trunks slicing the sunlight into slabs of black and gold, the sound of their leaves in summer like pooling water, the heavy green-and-gold leatheriness of the leaf-muffled path in autumn. I started being late for school, my bicycle propped against a hedge, just looking. Looking at the buds of the first dog roses in summer, the way the hoar frost grew in winter, the way the beech trees’ long scrolled pointed red-brown buds unfurled in spring.
Pa always used to plant trees. Wherever we lived, he always managed to leave a tree or two behind him. Ash, elm, oak, hornbeam — gradually the little front gardens would fill with trees. The next tenant almost invariably cut them all down. They were heroic, in their way, those gardens, a refusal to accept the confines of the everyday. They weren’t sensible gardens, gardens grounded in the here and now: they were, I think, a dream of what a garden should be if only one had a little more room, a memory perhaps of the woods of Rivington, of the high moors and their steep-sided valleys overhung with trees, a lost Eden forfeited when he moved with his family into the slums of Bolton. On Saturdays Pa worked in Lincoln, twenty-odd miles away, following the raised causeway of Ermine Street, the Roman road which runs along the high scarp of the Lincoln Edge, the rich black soil of the fens lapping like an inland sea at its foot; and all the way he would sing or whistle — hymns from the Ancient and Modern, scout songs, the lilting love songs of John McCormack, ‘The Star of the County Down’ and ‘She Moved through the Fair’, bits of Handel and Bach. For my brother and me, Pa’s trips to Lincoln were an excuse for an outing — showing visitors around castle or cathedral (‘See the Lincoln Imp up there? There!’), handsomely tipped with silver sixpences quickly spent in the second-hand bookshops of Steep Hill; scrambling up the towers of village churches (which never seemed then to be locked) on the way back; and often Pa would dig a promising-looking sapling out of a hedgerow and take it home.
I remember the tree he planted outside my bedroom window when I was eleven, a tall and shapely young ash, dug from a hedgerow somewhere. Our black cat used to shin up its slender stem at dawn each morning to demand his breakfast from the level of my bedroom windowsill, the whippy top of the tree bending under his weight.
I took Pa back to Ford the summer before he died. We found the cottage where he and my mother had spent their summer idyll sixty years before. The cottage had been smartened up and added to, the corner where the photograph had been taken obscured now by a huge leylandii. But in the field beyond was an ancient blasted oak after which the lane was named — Kittyoak Lane. The cottage was almost unrecognisable, but ‘Oh! I remember that tree!’ Pa cried.
Stand still, and look at your shadow. The sun has yet to reach its zenith, which (as a result of bureaucratic tinkering) it will not do until one o’clock British Summer Time. But already your shadow is nearly six feet shorter than when you first entered the garden. It is 21 June, the longest day of the year, the day when the sun stands still. It is the summer solstice (from the Latin sol, ‘sun’, + sistere, ‘to stand still’), when the sun reaches the most northerly point of the ecliptic, the imaginary line it describes in its apparent orbit around the earth. And just as a ball, thrown high up into the air, appears to hesitate for a moment and hang motionless at the limit of its trajectory before falling back to earth, so the golden ball of the sun appears to stand still over the Tropic of Cancer before ‘turning’ (hence the word ‘tropic’, from the Greek tropos, ‘a turn’) back towards the Equator.
The garden lies flattened by the heat and the light. Purple roses slowly bleach to cerise. The texture of leaf and petal, the articulation of surfaces, the linking of one space to another by the long shadows of early morning thrown across grass paths — all gone, evaporated with the dew. Not a breath of wind: no movement anywhere except the trembling of a white rose disturbed by the visitation of a bee. No sound but the buzzing of flies and the distant tapping of a thrush breaking a snail shell on a stone. Even the scents of the garden seem flattened by the heat, losing their high notes of citrus or spice, melding in a heavy bland sweetness. I am making a sundial. Struck dumb and blind by the heat and the light, only my hearing is alert. I am waiting for the clock to strike. In the centre of the maze is a straight-boled young elm which casts a shadow like a gnomon on the dial-face of the maze. It is a disease-resistant hybrid, Ulmus ‘Regal’, given by a friend when I began the garden in 1989. At noon Greenwich Mean Time the shadow of the tree will indicate true north — which differs from compass or magnetic north by several degrees. From this I can plot all the hours of the day.
But I have a dilemma: not only whether to abide by British Summer Time (BST) or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), but whether to abide by either. Noon at Morville is ten minutes after noon at Greenwich. (The sun is overhead four minutes later for every degree west of the Greenwich meridian.) I like that. I like the idea of local time, a pool of time with the church tower at its centre, separate, remote from the outside world, ours. Church clocks used to be set from sundials, not vice versa. It was the coming of the railways which forced the issue of standardised time.
GMT is not even true for Greenwich. It is true that, in the summer months, the days are on average twenty-four hours long, but in September they last for twenty-three hours and forty seconds, and at Christmas for twenty-four hours and twenty seconds. Cumulatively the discrepancies build up until by mid-February sun-time is more than fourteen minutes slow in relation to clock-time, and in November just over sixteen minutes fast. This is because the apparent orbit of the sun is an ellipse, not a circle, and the plane of the orbit is inclined with respect to the Equator. GMT is based on a fictional sun travelling at a constant speed in an imaginary orbit above the Equator.
Now the railways are in retreat, and we have global time and atomic clocks. But time continues to elude us: even modern atomic clocks are out of step with solar time; without a ‘leap second’, in three thousand years the sun will be overhead at midnight instead of noon.
This is not a garden for the faint-hearted: here it’s every man for himself. As the garden surges towards midsummer, delicate souls can be trampled in the rush — today the Veronica ssp. incana suffocated by the smothering embrace of Galega officinalis, the Thalictrum delavayi ‘Hewitt’s Double’ shouldered aside by the wiry stems of Achillea ptarmica ‘The Pearl’; tomorrow (if I don’t look sharp) my precious old violas, patterning the cool shady bed near the house with pools of blue and purple and amethyst, strangled by the too-rampant Hedera hibernica. And yet I would rather have my mountain of Galega, with its glaucous pea-like foliage and erect heads of pale lilac or white pea flowers like upside-down wisteria (one old name for it is ‘French lilac’; another — less complimentary — is ‘goat’s rue’) than that stingy little Veronica (pretty as it was), which never looked happy. I like plants that live life to the full. I admire their generosity and their exuberance. I also like a certain degree of self-help. If the Veronica was unhappy, it should have moved (it’s no good relying on me). A plant that suits me better is Verbena bonariensis. Reputed to be not totally hardy — though here it has survived −10°C — it energetically self-seeds out of the unsuitable places where I put it and into various more congenial spots. One year it seeded itself into the asparagus bed, where its tall stems of tiny rose-lavender florets flowered at the same height as the asparagus — and with a low sun behind and the cloud of asparagus fern beaded with dew, who could claim that this was not the better place? Another year it moved to the head of the Canal, making a hazy purple screen between one part of the garden and the next. I like my Achillea ptarmica too — though many people would think it too invasive — with its sprays of small shining white double buttons and dark green matt foliage without a hint of yellow. It is a double form of our native sneezewort, but beware the seeds offered in seedsmen’s catalogues, for seed-raised plants are almost invariably not fully double, and have a ‘dirty eye’ in the middle. The true pure-white double (I realise now) can only be raised from cuttings — too late for me, who finds this rude and robust imposter is already well established everywhere. But I forgive him his subterfuge: together with the white rose campion (Lychnis coronaria ‘Alba’) with its mat of grey felted leaves, and the double and single feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium), which came, like the foxgloves, as uninvited guests and stayed to become old friends, they make a foam of midsummer white.
In the Books of Hours the alternative occupation for the month of June is Sheep-Shearing. Alike in both the Duc de Berry’s Très riches heures, portrayed in exquisite colour, and the plain black-and-white woodcuts of the Shepherds’ Calendar, groups of villagers, men and women, sit on the ground, each with a sheep on its back in his or her lap, shearing the fleece with an instantly recognisable tool: the same one-handed shears that the Romans used to clip their box. This time there seem to be no regional differences: the one-handed shears are universal, appearing in all the representations of shearing. They still use the same ones for shearing the wild sheep of North Ronaldsay, the furthest-flung island of Orkney. One summer I helped. The problem there: first catch your sheep.
John Lane in retirement started keeping sheep in place of the Guernseys: cross-breeds and big bone-headed Suffolks with long lugubrious faces and lop ears, all mild as milk — except for the old French tup who sent John sprawling more than once. In June, one of the local farmers arrives to help with the shearing. He hooks up to a portable generator and makes short work of the shearing with his electric shears, the heavy fleeces coming away all in one piece, greasy with lanolin, still hot and pungent from the animals’ bodies, before releasing the sheep again, dazed and relieved, suddenly all hip bones and elbows, like grizzled GIs astounded to learn peace has been declared.
Nowadays the sheep are shorn mainly for their own comfort and for hygiene. Each fleece fetches only 60p or so, hardly enough to pay for the shearing. But the medieval English economy — and the medieval English Church — was founded on sheeps’ fleeces. Wool was our principal export, and the glorious parish churches of medieval England were built on the proceeds. Later, wool was replaced by cotton (and later still by man-made fibres), but sheep still had another contribution to make to the Englishness of the English landscape: the smooth swards of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, which owed their finesse not to scythes but to sheep — nature’s lawnmowers.
The image of sheep grazing has been associated ever since classical times with a golden age of peace and plenty, before wars and civil strife divided the people and urban civilisation corrupted them. It was a theme explored in the pastoral poetry of the ancient Greek writer Theocritus, whose Idylls Virgil imitated in his Eclogues in the first century AD. The same theme persists through medieval literature (the calendar illustrations of the Books of Hours are one form of pastoral) and into the Renaissance, where it culminates in the cult of Elizabeth I. In the late sixteenth century there was a great flowering of poems in the pastoral mode celebrating Elizabeth as ‘the Shepherds’ Queen’. Her accession was seen as the beginning of a new golden age, her England as a new Arcadia; her coming was seen as the end of winter, her reign one of perpetual summer. She was the ‘Summer Queen’, her motto Semper eadem — ‘Always the same’.
Although pastoral was sometimes cast in the form of political panegyric — (Virgil’s Eclogues praised the Emperor Augustus, just as Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender was intended to flatter Elizabeth) — pastoral is essentially nostalgic and melancholic, containing an implicit contrast between the real present state of things and things as one would like them to be or as they once were. The word ‘nostalgia’ was coined at the end of the eighteenth century from the joining together of two Greek words meaning ‘homesickness’. In terms of modern pastoral, this can be not only the longing for a lost time or lost innocence, but also for something which can never be found. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, with its cast of doomed soldiers, hopeless lovers, exiles and convicted criminals, is pastoral in that sense. Housman hardly knew Shropshire at all. For him it glimmered on the horizon, as it had done for me. He was born in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, and those ‘blue remembered hills’ were less the real landscape of Shropshire than the landscape of the heart, the land of lost opportunities.
John Napper’s late paintings are watercolours: large — sometimes very large — pictures with no shading, just flat unmodelled colour, with depth suggested by tone and a careful layering of elements which the eye interprets as perspective. There are still lifes, interiors, landscapes with figures. All are bathed in a calm and even light — a light that he once said had taken him seventy-two years to re-find. All his life, he said, he had struggled with oil paint. Now, towards the end of that life, he turned to watercolour, and to a light which he associated with the confidence and innocence of childhood. It was his resolution of the problem posed by pastoral, the achievement of a harmony between the light inside and the light outside (both literally and metaphorically), a harmony he said we must all find between ourselves and the outside world. Many of the scenes in his watercolours are played out with the distinctive profile of the Titterstone Clee (the view seen from the window of his water-colour studio) as the backdrop. He called one exhibition 37 Views of the Clee Hill — ‘One more than Hokusai!’ he said. He and Pauline had spent most of their married life abroad, in London, Paris, the Far East, New York. In 1971 they settled in deepest Shropshire. Now it was as if the paintings were saying — after a lifetime of travelling — why would one need to go further? Everything I need is here.
John’s final painting was one last view of the Clee. It was on his easel when he died: a wide landscape with sheep, facing east — to where the sun rose, and where the moon rose — not this time looking up towards the Titterstone Clee, but out from the Clee itself, a high viewpoint, high above a house which may or may not be Steadvallets, the valley below bathed in an ethereal light: neither sunrise nor moonrise but the light of eternity.
It is Midsummer Night. The garden holds its breath. 23 June, the eve of St John. Like Christmas Day and Lady Day and Michaelmas Day, St John’s Day is one of the Quarter Days, the four principal Christian festivals appointed to coincide with the four cardinal points of the sun — winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox. But like Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of All Saints’ Day), it is the eve, the vigil before the day, which is the most powerful, the magical time, when the hinge of the year stands open a crack, and the everyday world becomes permeable. It is the night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the lovers enter the forest and everything is changed. The night when maids cast spells to see the face of their future beloved. The night of the midsummer bonfires, protective purifying fires into which magical plants were thrown — St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris, known in Welsh as Ilysiau Ieuan, St John’s plant), corn marigold, yarrow, vervain (Verbena officinalis). The night is never properly dark, the whole long expanse of the big field high now with wheat, suffused with pale starlight. Stand still: can you hear them? The badgers, leaving their sets, those meandering mazes of passages, galleries and chambers inhabited by generation upon generation of badgers, hundreds — even thousands — of years old, the badgers crossing the valley, rustling through the wheat.
Then, as the tanks rolled into Prague, there was a quarrel between my husband-to-be and my father. I hardly saw my father again for the next thirty years.
