Colour is seeping back into the garden. Leaves sparkle, washed of the dust of August. The grass is greening up again; the red of the dahlias vibrates against the glossy evergreens of the tapestry hedge. The angle of the sun is lower now, making the light redder and less intense, enhancing pure reds and their complementary greens.
I sit in the sun in the west-facing arbour of the Cloister Garden, one of the cats on my knees. The sun moves down the sky. I feel no inclination to read or work; I merely sit. It is paradoxical that, as the days grow shorter, I should feel this sudden expansion of time. Yesterday we finished clipping the yew hedges. There are stray fronds still scattered about the grass. Now, nearly twenty years after the garden began to be made, the hedges are seven feet tall, wrapping the garden round, lapping it with green in this bleached, post-harvest landscape.
The wound-up watch-spring of summer is winding down. The days fill with rounded golden light, like a rich old Sauternes, full and sweet. Sugars caramelise in the leaves — tones of butterscotch, cinder toffee, treacle tart; quince paste, marmalade, toffee apple; Beaujolais, cassis, Lynch-Bages. The hedgerow shines with great plates and bunches of glossy berries like so many jars of jelly and jam ranged on a larder shelf — scarlet hip and crimson haw; red bullace and yellow crab; purple elderberry and blue-black sloe. Trees blaze, as if a reverse photosynthesis were taking place, green chlorophyll turning back into pure energy.
The swallows are gathering in a row on the loop of telephone wire that runs down to the house. All summer they have been restless silhouettes, dark against the sky or outlined against the water as they sweep low over the Canal; now they sit for the first time, companionably burbling like a huddle of pashas smoking hookahs — discussing travel plans? — close enough for me to see the blue sheen of their wings, the red of their throats, their white breasts. The swifts are long gone, heading south over the Sahara and down into central Africa. And the water boatmen and pond skaters too have gone: shipped their oars and flown away, leaving the Canal vacant like an end of season lido. But the swallows, like me, seem to have all the time in the world.
I wander the garden, browsing on milky-white hazelnuts, ripe yellow plums, crisp crimson apples netted with russet. I lay my ear to the beehive and feel the bees’ warmth. Idly I compare the cobnuts one with another, sampling first ‘Butler’ and ‘Ennis’, then ‘Cosford’ and ‘Merveille de Bolwiller’, ‘Fertile de Coutard’ and ‘Gunslebert’, ‘Kentish Cob’, tastiest of all, with slender, thin-shelled, oval nuts rolled in their green calyces like Cleopatra in her carpet. Despite its name, ‘Kentish Cob’ is not a cob but a filbert. Cobnuts belong to Coryllus avellana, our native species, and have short helmet-like calyces (Coryllus from the Greek korys, a helmet; the Anglo-Saxons had the same thought: our modern word ‘hazel’ comes from the Old English haesil, a head-dress). They have broad round nuts or ‘cobs’ (from the OE cop, meaning head — the reverse process giving us ‘nut’ as a slang term for both heads and testicles). Filberts on the other hand are derived from C. maxima, a species native to south-eastern Europe that has longer, slimmer nuts, with calyces that protrude beyond the end of the nut, sometimes enclosing it altogether. The word ‘filbert’ is often said to be a contraction of ‘full-beard’, but more plausibly is an anglicisation of the Norman word philibert (short for noix de philibert), from the time of their ripening on or about St Philibert’s day. St Philibert was the founder and first Abbot of Jumieèges, the greatest of the abbeys of Normandy, and his feast day is 20 August — which would of course, before the reform of the calendar, have fallen eleven days later in the season, at what is now the beginning of September.
I like the wordplay of ‘nuts’ and nuts, the association of calyces with beards and helmets and head-dresses: anthropomorphic, but it works the other way too. We speak of jeunes filles en fleur, green inexperienced youth, hearts of oak; we say someone is blooming or has withered; we too spring up and die down. Ruskin would have called this sort of thing neither true nor useful, an example of what in poetry he called the Pathetic Fallacy, the product of ‘an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational’. But it is a useful way of understanding the world. I feel a little like a herbaceous plant myself.
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
George Herbert, ‘The Flower’
Herbert was born in Montgomery in 1593, a man of the Marches like Traherne — and like Henry Vaughan too, who ‘saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light’. Is there something about the Welsh borders, the Marches, that breeds metaphysical poetry? Something to do with the landscape, the juggling of identities, the feeling of being between, that prompts the philosophical speculation, the precision of language, the yoking together of like and unlike in striking metaphor, the metrical irregularity? Something that grows out of the soil, the weather? A large part of the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan explores the dynamic of a personal relationship with God, the transformation of a heart as stony as flint (Vaughan’s second collection of poems was entitled Silex Scintillans, the ‘flashing flint’, from which God strikes fire) through spiritual awakening, expressed by images frequently drawn from the natural world — Traherne’s puddle, Herbert’s flower, Vaughan’s vision of Eternity, with Time ‘in hours, days, years’ moving beneath it ‘like a vast shadow’. Vaughan was born at Newton-upon-Usk in Breconshire in 1621. John Donne knew the Marches too: ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’ was written as he rode across England into Wales to stay with the philosopher-poet Edward Herbert (later Lord Herbert of Cherbury), the oldest of the seven Herbert brothers. Donne always wrote best on horseback, he said, for then his mind was ‘contracted, and inverted into myself’. He dedicated his Holy Sonnets to the Herberts’ mother, Lady Magdalen Herbert, and it was he who preached the funeral sermon in London after her death in 1627. At his own death George Herbert gave the manuscript of his poem sequence The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the religious community at Little Gidding, requesting that the poems be published only if Ferrar thought they might do good to ‘any poor dejected soul’. They went into thirteen editions in less than fifty years, and continue to be in print today.
I pick the hazelnuts when they are firm and white and milky, with something of the texture of fresh coconuts about them — ripe, but before the shells turn brown. This is when the nuts are at their most delicious. But picked like this they do not keep, so I pack some in bags at the bottom of the refrigerator and leave the rest to ripen on the trees. If I want to get the best crop of nuts I know that my hazels need to be grown on a ‘leg’, and that I must ruthlessly cut out any branches that spring up from the base, aiming at an open goblet-shape of eight or a dozen branches, annually tipped to about six feet for ease of picking. But then I lose that fountain of arching many-stemmed growth which is what I love about hazels — the way they transform that corner of my garden into a little chantry with clustering columns and fan-vaulted roof, dim, cool, set apart from the colour and motion of the rest of the garden. For their sake I have come to accept, even to love, the business of coppicing which at first seemed so brutal — the five-year rhythm of cutting all the stems back to a ‘stool’ no more than six inches high, promoting new growth, clearing out the old trunks, letting in the sun and air. If the hazels remain uncoppiced, the plants of the woodland floor — snowdrops and snowflakes, bluebells and oxlips — gradually dwindle, the bulbs making leaves but no flowers in the deepening shade. Plants like the oxlips and wood spurge vanish altogether, surviving as buried seed, biding their time. They can wait like this for decades, even a century or more. Then, when the hazels are cut and light is let in once more, there is an explosion of flower, the whole woodland floor ‘recovering greennesse’. The products of coppicing are useful too: nothing is thrown away, the hazel branches bent into arbours or arches, cut into bean-poles or tent pegs, the thicker trunks added to the wood pile to keep us warm in winter, the brash shredded into mulch, the twiggy bits used as pea-sticks or bent over the emerging peonies. And the cut stools spring up again into straight new wands which will in time make a new roof, the nuttery growing once again secret and chapel-like, until the bulbs are once more extinguished and the cycle begins all over again.
By the side of the hazels is an old damson tree, its crown shattered by storms now but still fruitful. The most luscious fruit hangs out over the beehives. To pick or not to pick? Damson trees are famously brittle. Shall I wear my bee suit and fumble and sweat as I pick the fruit, or risk death from a thousand stings if I fall? Either way I risk breaking my neck. I opt for a middle course, fetching a stepladder but dispensing with the bee suit, hoping the bees won’t bother me if I don’t bother them.
Gradually the basket fills with blue-black fruit. I can see the bees flying in and out of the hives beneath. The sun is pleasantly warm, the dappled light soft — not too bright — as I peer up into the tree. Clear amber extrusions of resin glow in the sun along the older branches. Once the tears of Phaethon’s sisters, now — how myths change! — the legendary repository of dinosaur DNA. In Ovid’s story Phaethon’s sisters, weeping for their brother, were turned into trees, their tears solidifying as amber. Ancient amber, such as that from the Baltic, is the fossilised resin of prehistoric conifers (gymnosperms, probably pines). But since more recent times — the Eocene, say, rather than the Early Cretaceous — some flowering plants (angiosperms), like the poplar and the damson, have also exuded gums. Amber has been prized for jewellery — for its colour, its warmth, its lightness — since the time of the Romans and long before, though the pieces that command the highest prices now are curiosities, those which contain the trapped bodies of prehistoric insects. As I pick, I disturb a harvestman — slow, short-sighted, mainly nocturnal creatures which emerge at the time of the harvest — his thistledown body carried as if on springs. With his immensely long thin legs he delicately palps the oozy substance. Spider yet not a spider: a future fossil?
Phaethon, like Icarus, aspired too high. He thought he could drive his father Phoebus Apollo’s sun-chariot. But as soon as the horses started to climb into the sky the chariot careered out of control, singeing the earth and the heavens, melting the ice caps and boiling the rivers dry. The chariot was eventually brought to a halt by a well-aimed thunderbolt from Jove:
Phaethon, hair ablaze,
A fiery speck, lengthening a vapour trail,
Plunged towards the earth
Like a star
Falling and burning out on a clear night.
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, 1997
Ovid’s subject in the Metamorphoses is change: transformation, transmutation. But it’s one-way traffic, like sedimentary into metamorphic, caterpillar into butterfly: they don’t come back, Ovid’s cast of characters. Phaethon, consumed with ambition, becomes a comet, burning up as he enters the earth’s atmosphere. His sisters, consumed by grief, unable to move on with their lives, become trees, rooted to the spot. Daphne, fleeing in panic and terror, pursued by Apollo, becomes a laurel (Laurus nobilis, the bay tree), wreathing the brows of victors. Philomela, raped by Tereus, her tongue ripped out so that she cannot tell of the deed, is transformed into a nightingale, filling the forest with her song. Her avenging sister Procne, dabbled with blood, becomes a swallow. Cyparissus, distraught with grief at accidentally having killed a sacred stag, becomes a cypress tree, the emblem of grief. (His story survives in the botanical nomenclature of the genus that bears his name — Chamaecyparis, the dwarf cypresses — though Daphne has found herself reclassifed into a genus of flowering shrubs.)
These are ancient tales which seek to explain how the world came to be as it is — how the swallow got its red throat, why the daffodil nods its head. In Ovid’s hands they become, as Ted Hughes observes in the preface to his own version of the Metamorphoses, explorations of human emotion pushed to its utter limit, the moment when passion ‘combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural’. But they are also about the permeability of the human world by the natural world: how, in the extremes of passion or grief or terror, the boundary between humankind and nature dissolves, becomes transcendable. They are affirmations of our relationship with the natural world. Shooting stars, trees, birds. The wild is in us, and we are in the wild.
I have never left the damsons so late on the tree, and their emerald flesh is succulent and sweet beneath their blue-black coats. When I later turn them out on to the kitchen table, the heap of shining black fruit with their matt powder-blue overlay is flecked with narrow pale gold leaves. What a colour scheme for a room! My little study perhaps? How lovely to paint one’s rooms the colours of the fruit in the garden. What about the apples? ‘Egremont Russet’ for the hall — a smooth sulphur- almost lemon-yellow base, overlaid with cadmium tints of reddish orange and a net of matt brown-russet. The sitting-room in the shining pink and gold of ‘Cornish Aromatic’. The upstairs corridor the dark claret of ‘Norfolk Beefing’. The spare room the pale apricot-tan of ‘Cats-head’ with its undertones of chartreuse. Why stop there? The bedroom in the deep yellow of ripe quinces, with a bedspread plumply quilted like the dumplinged base of the fruit, folded and tucked as if with the imprint of a cook’s thumb, and soft muslin bed-curtains like the white down that coats its ample curves. I go up the garden to look at the apples ripening in the tunnel for inspiration. All of the sixteen trees — each one trained into four perpendicular cordons — are laden with fruit. These are not the flawless spherical fruit of supermarket shelves, but the Quasimodos and Cyranos of the apple world, humped and bossed, flat-round and oblong-conical, with basins ribbed, puckered and russeted, eyes open and closed, skin flushed, striped, spotted and seamed, flesh redolent of acid drops and honey, pear drops and strawberries, pineapples, hazelnuts, aniseed and cloves. Some of them are gaudy as peacocks, gleaming yellow as egg yolks, green as grass, crimson as the eye of Mars. Others, subtle as scholastic philosophers, hide their exquisite flavours beneath dun exteriors, like ‘Ashmead’s Kernel’ and ‘Court Plat Pendu’.
Taste and flavour are not the same thing. Taste in itself is a blunt instrument, our taste buds capable only of distinguishing salt, sweet, sour, bitter. The detection and analysis of flavour is a much more complex matter than taste alone, involving the interplay of all five senses: texture (which the experts call ‘mouth-feel’) — whether crisp or smooth, juicy or granular; smell (how tasteless food seems when we have a bad cold!); sound — masking the crunch of food, removing its appetising snap, crackle and pop, removes much of food’s appeal, as does playing around with the look of it (pale-yellow orange juice, for example, is perceived as being less sweet than ‘orange’ orange juice). Our emotions play a part too. Serotonin and noradrenalin, two brain chemicals which control mood, also affect our perception of salt and bitterness. Someone who is depressed has lowered levels of serotonin or noradrenalin, and may put more salt on their food because their ability to detect saltiness is impaired. Workers who are anxious or stressed may crave salty snacks and be able to drink cup after cup of coffee, oblivious to its bitterness. A similar mechanism — an inability to taste the sweetness in food — may prove to be the reason why some depressed people binge on sweet things.
I’m a Twiglets, pretzel and olive sort of depressive, myself.
Apples are easy to pick: a gentle lift and a twist, and if they come away in your hand you know they are ready. The ripening of the apples in the tunnel is like a long ripple which starts in late August with the raspberry- and strawberry-flavoured apples of summer; then the first russets and the big green ‘Lord Derbys’ which cook to a perfect froth in time for Harvest Supper; then the crisp and scented apples to eat at Christmas and Twelfth Night, the rich and nutty New Year dessert varieties and the long-keeping cookers; then the biffins which will last us through to Easter. The racks in the fruit store gradually fill with tray upon tray of gleaming fruit. It is the perfect environment in which to store them — cold, frostfree, dark. The racks recede into the gloom, their coloured contents glowing in the darkness, smooth, shining, cold to the touch.
The trouble with pears is that they have to be picked unripe to complete their ripening in store. And try as I may, I never quite get the timing right. All too often, brought to the table, a perfect exterior will hide a rotten or ‘sleepy’ core. My pears are a mystery to me. We just don’t speak the same language. Whereas my apples are all English and masculine — ‘Edward VII’, ‘Lord Derby’, ‘Lane’s Prince Albert’ — their names recalling great country houses or English counties — ‘Devonshire Quarrenden’, ‘Cornish Aromatic’, ‘Norfolk Beefing’ — their highest accolade ‘crisp’, my pears are feminine and French and difficult: ‘Duchesse d’Angoulême’, ‘Marie-Louise’ (Napoleon’s second wife), ‘Josephine de Malines’. Even my one and only English pear, ‘Hacon’s Incomparable’ (Hacon apparently to rhyme with ‘bacon’, raised by Mr J. G. Hacon of Downham Market in Norfolk around 1815), sounds better said with a French accent. Beurré and fondante, bergamotte and superfin, I need a dictionary to decipher them: beurré is a pear that is buttery in texture, rich and smooth; a bergamotte is one which is short and broad in shape, like a bergamot orange; fondante is a pear that is melting in texture, one which, according to the doyen of dessert Edward Bunyard, should dissolve upon the palate ‘with the facility of an ice’.
In April the pears’ foaming curds of white blossom are one of the delights of the garden, but by midsummer they have gone all sultry and sulky on me, impenetrably aloof. With their creamy flesh, their curves, their ripe juicy plumpness, they are like voluptuous heavy-eyed French Empire beauties who demand absolute obedience from their acolytes. It is said that there is only one day — a single moment — when a classic dessert pear like ‘Doyenneé du Comice’ is at its best: real pear afficionados sit up all night in case they miss it.
Pears apart, the language of fruit is one of ripeness, perfection, wholeness, good humour. We speak of a peach of a girl, a plum of a job, of life being just a bowl of cherries; of plans coming to fruition, of being the apple of someone’s eye. It’s the language of hilarity and cheerful ribaldry: you lose your cherry, blow a raspberry, skid on a banana skin, don’t give a fig. A well-tuned car runs as sweet as a nut. The best ever is a vintage year, the future a juicy prospect.
In 1989, the year I started my garden, my neighbour Ian planted a vineyard on the south-facing slope of the old kitchen garden here — rows and rows of ‘Madeleine Angevin’ and ‘MuüllerThurgau’, neat as a pin. Despite the comments of Tacitus about the unsuitability of the British climate for wine production, there have been vineyards in these islands for nearly two thousand years. There was one near Bridgnorth in the eighteenth century producing a hogshead (sixty-three old wine-gallons, equivalent to fifty-two and a half imperial gallons) of wine a year. According to Ian you don’t need sunshine to grow grapes; you just need the right varieties. Aspect helps: Ian’s south-facing slope at Morville is ideal. And soil: the glacier that scooped out the steep-sided valley in which the Mor Brook runs deposited the perfect combination of soils — a good loam over a clay subsoil with a deep layer of pebbles beneath. The clay gives richness and body to the wine; the pebbles ensure good drainage and give finesse and elegance. And now we have a second vineyard in the village, further round the same south-facing slope: Richard Rallings’s Morville St Gregory to Ian’s Mor Valley. Richard thinks his soil may be even better than Ian’s — lighter and sandier, quicker to warm up in spring, but still with the same clay subsoil and the same layer of pebbles beneath. He won’t know for sure until he tastes his first vintage.
Harvesting and Treading Grapes are the activities portrayed in the Books of Hours for September. In the calendar of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s prayer book, a man stands up to his thighs in a vat of red must. His sleeves are rolled up as he reaches out to scoop the last remaining grapes from a basket brought on the shoulders of a second man; a third man with a full basket waits his turn. Three more men strain to lower a hogshead of wine into a cellar. Round the corner, the new wine is already being broached by a tapster, and a group of men stand drinking. Ian makes his wine in a little slate-roofed winery in a corner of the garden next door. He presses the grapes by hand, using a small wooden screw-press filled from plastic buckets of grapes. I stand in line with Ian’s parents Pat and Arthur, each with our bucket, taking the chance to chat and to ease our backs. The juice runs out, sharp and green and fruity, into a plastic tub. From time to time Ian decants it into large glass jars to await fermentation. Gradually the shelves fill with jars, while the pale wedges of pressed skins, turned out like sandcastles behind the winery, mount into tottering piles. They make the most wonderful compost.
The buildings here have cavernous cellars, dark and deep as badgers’ sets. Here Ian stores his wine in a vaulted chamber beneath the Hall. Slab-tables of slate or quarry tiles range around the walls. Here beer and cheese would have been stored, hams salted, vegetables steeped in vinegar or brine. We get a glimpse of the domestic economy of the Hall in past times, of the products of the ‘buttery, Larder House, mylke howse, Kytchin … Brewehowse [and] kyllhowse’ enumerated in the will of George Smyth in 1600. The cellars beneath my house were once a kitchen, two semi-basement rooms equipped with a bread oven, a vast open fireplace for boiling and roasting, windows to see by, a well in the corner and a doorway through into the big house beyond; a third room is deeper, older, with arched recesses for vats and beer barrels. I put buckets of flowers down here to keep cool before the Wakefield Tulip Show in May; bowls of blue hyacinths in autumn to bloom in time for Christmas; pots of endive in winter to force for chicons, the tender new shoots blanched pale pink and gold under an upturned pot.
The cellars must date from the earliest phase of the buildings’ construction, between 1546 and 1562. Although the first description of the house comes from George Smyth’s will of 1600 (at which time it included a hall, a best chamber, a parlour, ‘the chamber where I lye’, a ‘brusshing chamber’ and at least three other bedchambers), there are features extant today — the great hall (into which a first floor was subsequently inserted), the E-shaped plan of the central block with projecting wings, the twin staircases in the angles, the use of exterior buttresses — which when taken together, appear to indicate a mid-sixteenth-century date, suggesting that it was his father Roger, not George himself, who built the house (though the ornate emblematic plaster ceiling installed in what is now used as a kitchen may well date from George’s time, as moulds used in the design appear to be identical to moulds used at Upton Cressett Hall, his mother’s family home, in the 1580s).
The house that Arthur Weaver III inherited in 1747 was essentially that built by the Smyths two hundred years before. Evidently a fashionable young man, he lost no time in commissioning substantial alterations and improvements. In 1748 he retained the services of the architect William Baker of Audlem, who was responsible for the addition of two identical pavilions, each with cupola and ornate weathervane, either side of the original E-shaped block, to which they were linked by curving walls of rusticated stone. The south pavilion housed the stables, with the horses entering and exiting through the front door; the north pavilion housed the staff, with a sham front door to match the stables, and the staff entering and exiting discreetly out of sight, at the rear. And enclosed between them — pavilions, walls and central block — was a spacious semicircle of perfect lawn.
Arthur Weaver III was born into an era of stability, prosperity and confidence. England was enjoying the fruits of peace after seventy years of civil strife and foreign war. It was an age in which people could afford to take the long view in their approach to gardens: time for trees to grow and mature, time for the scars of earth-moving to heal. Whereas the gardens of Arthur’s father’s and grandfather’s generations had been small in scale, relying on the immediate effect of bulbs and flowers against an unchanging background of clipped hedges and evergreen topiary — controlled, contained — the new style displayed a confident assumption of continuity within which change and development could be accommodated. It was the moment when, in the words of Horace Walpole, William Kent ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. It was the age of what came to be known as landscape gardening.
The vital underpinning for the new style was the ha-ha. The earliest ha-ha in England was constructed at Levens Hall in Cumbria in 1695. Within fifty years landowners everywhere were adopting it as a means of achieving the seamless transition from garden to park that was an essential prerequisite of the landscape style. Prior to this, most large houses would have been fronted by an enclosed court, paved or of rolled sand, with a central gateway. Did Arthur Weaver III build the ha-ha at Morville? Given that it forms the long straight side of his great semicircle of lawn, and seems consistent with the building of the pavilions, it is likely that he did. He probably also oversaw the rearrangement of the approach to the house, with its grand gate piers and new drive from the north. Perhaps this too was when the old village was swept away, to improve the view from the house. In 1761 the 1st Earl Harcourt became notorious for having removed the village at Nuneham Courtenay near Oxford to make way for his landscape improvements. Unfortunately for him, the poet Oliver Goldsmith happened to be travelling along the turnpike on the day the villagers were turned out of their old homes; appalled, he wrote the incident up in ‘The Deserted Village’:
The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds.
The Earl had built new houses for the villagers beside the Oxford road, but for Goldsmith that was hardly the point: they had been turned out of their homes to gratify a rich man’s caprice. By an irony of fate, the 1st Earl died after falling down one of the wells left on the site of the old village. His heir was a republican who refused his title. A follower of Rousseau, he had already in his father’s lifetime created a Rousseau-esque flower garden in the newly landscaped grounds; one of his first acts upon succeeding to the estate was to obliterate the 1st Earl’s vistas with new planting and institute a custom of taking tea each week with one of the villagers.
The ha-ha at Morville is still here, fulfilling its old purpose and some new ones: as a conduit for storm water between the drains and the stream; keeping the cattle from straying on to the front lawn; as a hunting ground for the cats who now patrol its stone edge on the lookout for prey; occasionally as a car park for the unwary drinker. One morning we woke to find a red sports car upended in it, its bonnet pointing to the sky.
And when he was done Arthur commissioned a painting of his splendid new house and garden: the house still with its Elizabethan turret stairs and dormer windows, but altogether grander now in scale with the two pavilions splayed out on either side of the new lawn, upon which various figures are shown sociably grouped. The figures are probably no more than a conventional device, inserted to enhance the scale of the building and give a sense of movement to the painting, though it is tempting to see in the lively central group — which includes an elegantly dressed woman, her back turned to display the drapery of a sumptuous golden sack-back dress, and a man in bright red frock coat and breeches luxuriantly trimmed with gold, sitting on the grass playing the newly fashionable oboe, his music spread out beside him — a representation of Arthur and his new wife, Susannah Papillon.
Their idyll lasted less than five years. They married at St Margaret’s, Lee, in Kent in August 1754. Susannah’s family, of Acrise Place, near Folkestone, were of prosperous Huguenot descent — military engineers, international traders and MPs. But her father, David Papillon, seems to have had a sinister reputation which still lingers among villagers in the vicinity of Papillon Hall, the strange octagonal house near Lubenham in Leicestershire where he lived prior to 1717. By 1754 Arthur had resigned his seat as Member of Parliament for Bridgnorth and by April 1759 he was dead, his body brought home to Morville from his house in Hammersmith to be buried in the churchyard alongside his father and grandfather. It was his cousin Arthur Blayney who found the will sealed up at Morville — an old out-of-date will, much altered, dating from before Arthur and Susannah’s marriage, which left everything to Arthur’s father’s oldest surviving brother Edward. There was no mention of Susannah. Either she had pre-deceased him, or the marriage had broken down. I looked the Papillons up on the Internet. The motif on their coat of arms was a papillon, a butterfly. I wondered whether Susannah was a butterfly, broken on the wheel of Georgian society, or whether like Frances Cressett she was a survivor. But there the trail goes cold.
There is a curious coda to the story of Arthur Weaver III and his garden. Thomas Percy’s letter to William Shenstone continues:
In view of one of his windows grew a noble large, Spreading Ash, which tho’ the spontaeous gift of Nature, was really a fine object: and by its stately figure and chearful Verdure afforded a most pleasing relief to the Eye; you will stare when I tell you that Mr W. had this Tree painted white, — leaves and all: it is true the leaves soon fell off, and the tree died, but the Skeleton still remains, as a Monument of its owner’s Wisdom and Ingenuity.*
* This painted Tree I saw with my own eyes a few years ago.
I stand on the lead roof of the church tower, looking down on Arthur Weaver’s pavilions, the ha-ha and the semicircle of lawn. The clock strikes the quarter hour on the bells beneath my feet.
The bells date from 1759, the date of Arthur Weaver III’s death. Perhaps one of the bellringers’ first tasks was the melancholy ‘ringing home’ of his body. The bells were cast by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester, and were probably brought upriver on the Severn like the tufa for Earl Roger’s church at Quatford, each bell inscribed with its maker’s initials and date, and a message that reflects that prosperous confidence with which Arthur Weaver began his tenure at Morville: ‘Peace & Good Neighbourhood’, ‘Prosperity to this Parish’, ‘Fear God & Honour the King’. And yet the England of the three Georges was not a golden age for everyone. There was widespread unrest in both town and country. In the absence of a police force or proper custodial system capital offences multiplied six-fold, almost all of them offences against property: the penalty for poaching a rabbit or stealing a sheep, picking a pocket or slitting a throat, was all one — hanging or (after 1787) transportation. The rate of enclosures accelerated, this time sanctioned by Acts of Parliament. At Morville the last of the commons and wastes were enclosed in 1773. The suffering of the squatters, the very poorest people who had built cottages on the fringes of the commons, pastured a few animals there and reclaimed a bit of ground, was far worse than the position of the cottagers and smallholders affected by earlier enclosures. There had in the past been occasional prosecutions of squatters for encroachment, but their activities had, by and large, been tolerated. Now they found what few rights they had entirely extinguished and themselves rendered homeless into the bargain.
I spread the tithe map out on the stone balustrade of the tower and look to the north and east of the village. I can tell the later enclosures from the earlier ones by their larger size and straight boundaries, by the broad roads of regulation width, the regimented single-species hawthorn hedges. The earlier enclosures down by the brook are smaller in size and more irregular in shape, still following some of the old boundaries. The later fields, high above the village, scalp the land, close to the sky.
Down in the garden, butterflies swim in the viscous golden air, their wingbeats slowed to a sleepwalker’s pulse. Shoals of tortoiseshells sip from the late-blooming lavender, their foxcoloured wings barred with silver and turquoise, like Navajos wearing necklaces. One or two golden-brown commas sun themselves against the yew hedge, their wings burnished and mottled like walnut marquetry, the edges deeply lobed and indented — the colour and shape of oak leaves in winter. Peacocks open and close their wings on steeples of ginger-eyed Michaelmas daisies. No painted ladies — perhaps they have already departed, following the swifts back to North Africa — but an occasional Red admiral floats lazily about in his red, white and black uniform, too lazy to follow the fleet back to the Mediterranean. Will he find a snug berth here for the winter? The small tortoiseshells and the peacocks and the commas will hibernate in the house or the toolshed (waking sometimes to flutter against the windowpane; and always the dilemma whether to let them out or not — will they damage their wings if I don’t? Is it too cold out there if I do? Will they starve in here if I don’t?).
They are beautiful airheads, the butterflies, homeless but unconcerned, who sleep wherever they happen to find themselves, wander the world with nothing more effective for defence than painted owl-eyes to scare away predators; who store up no treasure, build no homes. (The bees know better. The workers are sealing up their city, making it warm and draught-proof against the onset of winter, laying in stores. By day they work the ivy flowers for pollen and nectar. Even at midnight there is a subdued din in the hive as they beat their wings, driving off the water and turning the nectar into honey.)
But, despite their apparent fragility and ephemerality, butterflies are great survivors. They know how to adapt. When food is short in winter they close down and hibernate. (A whole colony of bees, active all winter, may die of starvation in a cold spring.) And, eclectic in their tastes as any gourmand, adult butterflies will feed on whatever nectar-rich flowers our gardens offer, English butterflies developing a taste for Verbena bonariensis from Brazil, Buddleia from China, Michaelmas daisies from North America. They live longer than either bumblebees or wasps, who expire at the end of summer. And, unlike honeybees, they have no intention of working themselves to death for the sake of the next generation (butterflies lay their eggs and depart; a worker bee in summer dies from exhaustion in five weeks).
Many butterflies react to summer heat and drought by aestivation — going to sleep for a month. Their response to a changing climate is simply to migrate. They can fly vast distances. Millions of butterflies annually complete the two-thousand-mile return journey to Britain from North Africa and back again. Monarch butterflies, powerful migrants from Central and North America, have now reached the south-west coast of England via New Zealand, Australia and the Canary Islands.
As I watch, the red admiral alights on some overripe fruit long fallen into the grass — a yellow plum spotted with red — lazily opening and closing his wings as he sips. In our warming world with its chaotic weather systems it is creatures like these, fragile as they are, which will survive. Time should be running out for the red admiral. But he acts as if he has all the time in the world. Perhaps he has decided to change the habit of generations and stay for the winter after all.
Watching him now reminds me of an earlier time, a time when I was no higher than the Michaelmas daisies that grew in Pa’s garden in Scunthorpe. I must have been about seven or eight years old, and I suppose from their height the Michaelmas daisies must have been old Aster novi-belgii varieties like ‘Climax’ or ‘Colwall Beauty’ — at any rate they were lavender-blue with ginger-gold eyes, and they were covered with tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies all through September and October. Pa used to grow them with large clumps of white daisies — my mother called them ‘marguerites’ — probably shasta daisies (Leucanthemum x superbum), with their big white flowers and dark green toothed leaves. Looking at Michaelmas daisies now I see their frailties — the need to stake some of them, their susceptibility to mildew or drought, the way the bottom leaves brown and wither — and I still cannot like the pinks and purples or the washed-out greys, but for me those huge, unfashionable lavender-blue flowers have all the glamour and self-confidence of a world where everything was possible and the summers went on for ever.
In the garden they are a second chance, a re-blooming after the droughts and despairs of August. They derive their name from Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels — 29 September, the third of the four Quarter Days. Michael is the archangel of Revelation, the slayer of demons, the dedicatee of churches built on pagan sites to Christianise them. Glastonbury Tor is one such place, an eerie almost artificial-looking mound projecting from the watery flatness of the Somerset Levels like a sacrificial altar or a landing pad for aliens. We used to climb it as children in the old days before there was an easy path to the summit, scrambling up, grabbing the tussocks, hand over hand in a tearing wind, to the chapel of St Michael at the top, where Pa would tell us how the body of King Arthur was brought here, to the Isle of Avalon, and how he sleeps here still, the once and future King, awaiting England’s call in her hour of need; and how Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury and drove his staff into the soil of Weary-All Hill, where it took root and flowers still on Christmas Day; and how at the time of the Dissolution the last Abbot of Glastonbury was dragged on a hurdle from the Abbey gates all the way through the town and up to the top of the Tor to be executed on the summit. And hovering above it all I would imagine Michael as a Burne-Jones warrior-angel, all scaly armour and shades of blue steel, trampling the Devil underfoot.
Pa had his own demons, which he would exorcise by climbs like these, trampling them under foot with his heavy walking boots, or by long hikes alone in the hills, like the day he drove all the way to Scafell and, having scaled it and come down on the far side, set off to climb Helvellyn on the same day — coming down late into the dark, having finally succeeded in conquering them. After he gave up walking they doubled as gardening boots. I have them still. In 1969 he went back into the Unitarian ministry. An arrogant twenty-three-year-old, I taxed him with preaching rules he himself could not keep. ‘You have to have religion or a code of ethics,’ he said, ‘even if you fall short every day — otherwise we are no better than beasts.’
One last photograph: Pa the same age as I am now, on a high hill somewhere, his tweed jacket blowing open in the wind. He laughs into the camera. He looks like someone I might have fallen in love with.
In the agricultural year, Michaelmas — and all of late September and early October — was the time for ‘wakes’, for time off, time out, celebration after the hard work of the harvest; the time for Harvest Suppers, Michaelmas fairs, the dedication feasts of parish churches; for feasting, drinking and dancing. A goose, plump from feeding on the stubble fields, was the traditional Michaelmas dish. The Nottingham Goose Fair (to which as a teenager I was forbidden to go) still survives, its reputation as rowdy and raucous as ever, though the geese are no longer driven through the lanes in great white honking flocks, walking themselves to market on their own webbed feet.
The Morville saints are an odd lot, mostly distinguished by their absence. St Gregory is the dedicatee of Morville itself, the mother church, but Monkhopton is not sure: they think theirs is St Peter, though there are clues in the stained glass that he may share the honour with St Paul. Aston Eyre’s may be Gregory or Benedict or St Thomas of Hereford (not the doubting one), the Church of Christ or even something to do with Palm Sunday, while the church at Acton Round has lost its saint entirely. But come Michaelmastide each church has its own Harvest Festival and Harvest Supper, a celebration of community life and harvest safely gathered in.
The tradition of a communal meal after harvest stretches back to medieval times at least, whereas Harvest Festival is a nineteenth-century innovation, devised by the vicar of Morwen-stow in Cornwall in 1843 on the model of the Anglo-Saxon festival of Lammas. In Morville parish church the windowsills will be piled high with fruit and flowers: Sara will bring apples from her orchard and black grapes from the greenhouse at the back of the Hall; Barry and Joy, runner beans and brown-skinned onions from their vegetable plot behind the south pavilion; Judy will bake bread; there will be pumpkins and prize marrows, dahlias and chrysanths galore. What should I take? Apples? Plenty of those already. Honey? Quinces? I ponder the choice. But I already know what I would take if I could: I would take the smell of the garden after rain, the spiders’ webs lacing the tapestry hedge in autumn, the reflection of the pear tree in the Canal at blossom time.
The ladies of the parish have been busy in the village hall, laying the long centre table with two dozen different salads, piles of sausage rolls and slices of quiche, pork pies and hardboiled eggs, mounds of sliced roast beef and boiled ham, baskets of bread, jugs of celery, cheeses, apple pies — the white tablecloth wreathed with ivy leaves. The band plays so loudly that the pints of beer vibrate on the table. Old men and tiny children dance hand in hand, mothers dance with small sons, sisters with each other. The teenagers hobnob outside, swapping gossip; light spills from the windows on to the clustering cars.
By the end of the eighteenth century the grand formal gardens of previous centuries had been almost entirely swept away, obliterated by the vogue for landscape gardening. But the tradition of flower gardening survived, albeit in smaller, less formal, more intimate settings. For Arthur Blayney, Arthur Weaver III’s cousin who inherited Morville in 1762 upon the death of their mutual uncle Edward Weaver, I decided to make just such a garden, a personal retreat from the world.
Arthur Blayney was from the Montgomery side of the family. He never married, but at Gregynog, his house near Newtown, he entertained a large circle of family, friends, tenants and stray travellers from ‘the titled tourist to the poor, benighted, wayworn exciseman who knew not where else to turn in either for refreshment or lodging’. His table was ‘every day plentifully covered with the best things the country and season afforded, for he never indulged in far-sought delicacies, preferring the ducks and chickens of his poor neighbours, which he bought in all numbers, whether he wanted them or not’. It seems to have been he who added the top storey of Morville Hall, the better perhaps to accommodate his many visitors. Perhaps it was also he who enlarged the already spacious drawing room to provide a more commodious setting for the many sociable gatherings over which he presided.
As a model for Arthur Blayney’s garden I took the garden made at Nuneham Courtenay by Lord Nuneham, the 1st Earl Harcourt’s republican son. Lord Nuneham’s garden was based on that made by the heroine of Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloise, published in 1761. In Rousseau’s tale, Julie retires from the court to live a life of rural simplicity. A former lover seeks her out and finds her in her Elysée, a secluded flower garden, enclosed on all sides, where animals and birds live in harmony, wild flowers and garden flowers grow together, and honeysuckles and other climbers trail from the trees and shrubs ‘negligently, as they do in the forest’. Rousseau was drawing on the classical notion of Elysium, the heaven of the Greek poets, and also on ideas of the virtues of the simple life as propounded by Virgil, Horace and others, to mount a savage attack on the life and mores of the court and the ruling class of his own time. Lord Nuneham was captivated. He begged an acre from his father and in his absence laid out a garden with the help of William Mason, Professor of Poetry at the nearby University of Oxford. The garden featured groups of flowing, asymmetrical flower-beds, winding walks and an axial view leading to a Temple of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, all planted with ‘a poet’s feeling and a painter’s eye’. Upon his return from France that autumn, the Earl was said to have been ‘disgusted’ by the garden’s faded state, comparing it unfavourably with the year-round elegance of formal gardens (as live an issue today as it was then, with proponents still on both sides).
Paul Sandby, Lord Nuneham’s drawing master, painted a number of views of the garden in 1777, widely circulated at the time in the form of engravings. One of the views shows several slim dark conifers dotted among the flower-beds to lead the eye towards the temple. Mason must have had in mind the pencil-slim cypresses of the Mediterranean (Cupressus sempervirens, familiar from Italian gardens) but, knowing that they were not hardy in England, found a substitute. Perhaps he used the narrowly fastigiate Swedish juniper (Juniperus communis var. suecica), introduced into cultivation in 1768. (The even narrower Irish juniper, J. vulgaris var. hibernica, was not introduced until 1838.) The Swedish juniper is flame-shaped, silvery-green with softly drooping shoot tips. It took me years to track them down, four of them, knee-high — tall as the Temple now, dark columns thrown into relief against the butter-yellow September foliage of the old mulberry, the bonfire of red and orange that is the cockspur thorn, the vivid scarlet of the maples behind.
Autumn colours come soonest to this part of the garden. I planted the flower-beds with eighteenth-century roses — pimpinellifolias and old damasks, the Portland rose and the first Chinas; with spring- and summer-flowering shrubs such as daphnes, lilacs and mock oranges; with the foxglove spires of Digitalis grandiflora and D. ferruginea (the ‘rusty’ foxglove); thickets of sweet white rocket and tangles of climbing roses; drifts of Phlox and wild Michaelmas daisies. But in autumn it is the trees here which catch the eye: robinias and acers (red maple and sugar maple), Nyssa sylvatica and the cockspur thorn (Crataegus crus galli), all trees introduced into English gardens during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the new colonies of North America. These are woodland trees, with leaves high in anthocyanin — a defence mechanism against harsh light — and it is the anthocyanin which gives them their vivid autumn colours. Masked by the green pigment of chorophyll all summer, it is only in autumn as the production of chlorophyll slows and then ceases, and again in early spring when the young leaves emerge, that the anthocyanin shows its true colours: scarlet and wine, crimson and plum, purple and flame. The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) is another foreigner, introduced from Greece in 1616. By the beginning of September the old tree in the churchyard is already showing its autumn colouring of bright orange and scarlet and gold. Our own native trees are slower to colour, and less vivid. They have a higher proportion of carotenes in their leaves, producing the bright mustard of the native field maple (Acer campestris), the pale gold of the birches on either side of the Plat, the deep yellow of the hazels down in the nuttery — the whole garden awash now with gold, punctuated here and there by the reds and purples of viburnum and wild service, the crimson of rowan, the wine-red of medlar, all wrapped around with the green of the hedges.
*
The Temple at Morville is dedicated not to Flora, as Lord Nuneham’s was, but to the Hours:
ENTHA TEMENOS HORŌN
— three beautiful words of Greek composed by a friend from Oxford as we sat one day with the tea cooling, the plans spread out before us on the kitchen table: ‘This is the Temple of the Hours.’ Temple, she said, in its original sense of sacred space: not the building that encloses, but the holy ground which is enclosed; hence originally a garden or sacred grove. And Hours not just in the sense of weeks, months, years — like Vaughan’s ‘vast shadow’, or even as in the Horae, those goddesses of the seasons whose coming blessed marriages and gave fruitfulness to mortals and fields alike (though all of that is implicit, she said) — but Hours as in history, chronicle: stories.
After my mother died, my brother and I made the Temple together. We keep in touch now. I went to his daughter’s wedding. She is researching the family history, and we sometimes swap information. And when I sit in the Temple now I sometimes think of that other girl, the laughing girl in the photograph, with one heel raised, about to embark upon her life.
Perhaps my Temple is dedicated to Flora after all.
Throughout their long history gardens have always reflected the mores of the times; only rarely have they challenged them in the way that the flower garden at Nuneham did, or Little Sparta, the garden made in the second half of the twentieth century by the poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay. Rousseau and his heroine Julie have an honoured place in Hamilton Finlay’s garden, too. Little Sparta is a garden of inscriptions in the manner of the Leasowes, the celebrated garden made at Halesowen (in what was part of Shropshire at that time) by William Shenstone — the recipient of Thomas Percy’s disobliging comments on the Weavers’ garden at Morville. In all three gardens, inscriptions are placed so as to invite the passer-by to contemplate the scene while reflecting upon the meaning of the text. Lord Nuneham’s texts cited Rousseau. Shenstone’s often memorialised his friends. Hamilton Finlay’s typically comment on, or playfully undercut, their surroundings, as in
THESIS
fence
ANTITHESIS
gate
inscribed upon a stile.
But the most striking inscriptions at Little Sparta invoke the shades of philosophers, poets and thinkers from Horace and Virgil to Rousseau and Saint-Just to call for a neoclassical rearmament — the garden abounds in images of war and conflict — against a society which Hamilton Finlay considered to be morally and aesthetically bankrupt (hence the name Little Sparta, in deliberate contrast to Edinburgh, ‘the Athens of the North’, just over the hills from the garden).
Shenstone set down his ideas on the theory of garden-making in his ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening’, published in his Works in Verse and Prose in 1764. In imitation of Shenstone Hamilton Finlay wrote his own series of garden aphorisms, ‘Detached Sentences on Gardening’. They include: ‘Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.’
Perhaps we gardeners underestimate ourselves: for what else are our twenty-first-century gardens — with their passion for wildlife, their refusal to denude foreign ecosystems by stripping them of rare plants, their rejection of fossil peat as a growing medium, their turning away from chemicals as a means of controlling pests, their emphasis on water-recycling, solar power, composting — if not a critique of modern consumer society, the very society that has brought our planet to the brink of catastrophe?
The mornings are cooler now, with night-time temperatures hovering a degree or two above zero. When I open the door in the morning the smell of quinces wafts across the garden — sweet and musky on the chilled air. The cold breath of condensation lies on the red berries of the honeysuckle. I cross the lawn, my footsteps trailing behind me in the cold dew. Spangled spiders’ webs lace the tapestry hedge. The quinces are furred like cats, weighing down the little trees like great golden pears. One or two lie in the silvered grass. They will hang on the trees until late October or even November, perfuming the air around the house. But once picked they will not keep. Cooked, their plump goldenness is transformed into the dark red of cornelian. Raw, they light up the garden like lanterns.
*
Sacred to Aphrodite, quinces have been emblems of happiness, love and fruitfulness ever since classical times. The Greek lawgiver Solon decreed that quinces should be served to every newly married couple on their wedding night. Chaucer wove them into his tales of courtly love. Slices of quince were even on the menu at the wedding breakfast of the Owl and the Pussycat. But beware. The tree of golden apples given to Hera and so zealously guarded by the Hesperides in their garden at the rim of the world may well have been a quince. It was fruit from this tree that was thrown under Atalanta’s feet (with the connivance of Aphrodite), causing her to lose the race against her suitor Hippomenes and submit to marriage. Not in itself an unhappy ending, you might have thought, had not Aphrodite, piqued by Hippomenes’s failure to thank her properly, inflamed him with lust and then engineered it that the couple were turned into lions on their wedding night. And as everyone knows, lions only mate with leopards …
It may well have been a quince too that caused the Trojan War — the golden apple awarded by Paris to Aphrodite after she had bribed him with the promise of Helen, slighting the other goddesses and setting in train a sequence of events that culminated in the fall of Troy. And were it not for the quince, we might all still be in Paradise, for scholars now believe that the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a quince, and that it was a quince which was offered by Satan to Eve and by Eve to Adam, thus causing the Fall and the expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden.
(If it was, it would have to have been a different variety from mine: rock hard when raw, gritty in texture and with a taste as astringent as lemons, European quinces have to be cooked to release their flavour. Middle Eastern varieties are reputed to be softer and sweeter.) But you get the point. A single quince will perfume an entire room or transform a lowly apple pie into a gastronomic delight. Whole culinary traditions have been built upon quince from Morocco to Iran, Portugal to Serbia: tagines and marmelo, cotignac and membrillo; quince marmalade and quince paste, quince sweetmeats and quince jelly; preserved in honey, spiced with cardamoms, simmered with quails. Quinces are food for the gods.
The mornings may be cold but the days are still hot, full of the shimmer of bees’ wings. The ivy in the yard is being mobbed by clouds of honeybees and hoverflies. I can hear the din over the wall as I walk past. In the knots the bumblebees are feeding on the last of the lavender, their long tongues probing the deep throats of the flowers — too deep for the tongues of the honeybees — their note lower, more resonant, like the buzz of their name: Bombus. A pair of plump young mated queens (red-tailed bumblebees, Bombus lapidarius), move at a stately pace from flower to flower, their fur as black as sables upon their expensive backs; a flotilla of tiny female carder bees (Bombus pascuorum), vivid as fox fur and moving at twice the speed of their bigger cousins, dart among the swaying stems; a scrum of big black-and-gold-striped male Bombus terrestris and Bombus hortorum bomb about with nothing much to do, their wings flashing topaz, amber and crystal in the sun.
As the shadows lengthen and the temperature falls, the lavender is gradually abandoned by all except the male bumblebees, moving ever more slowly, their big bodies clambering awkwardly among the stalks, until the moment when the sun finally disappears behind the house and they stop in mid-motion, one leg half-lifted, like furry solar-powered engines running out of charge. Tomorrow morning as the sun’s rays begin to creep across the knot again, they will start to wake one by one, slowly raising and lowering each sleep-cramped leg, until the warmth returns to their bodies. They will continue to fly until the last of the autumn nectar is gone — ragwort, soapwort, toadflax, hawkbit; aster, golden rod, sedum, ivy — but eventually the day will come when the sun no longer reaches the knot and they will slumber on in a sleep from which they will not wake. Only the plump young mated queens will survive, tucked up in hibernation with the seed of the next generation safe inside them.
The occupations for October in the Books of Hours are Ploughing and Sowing, and Thrashing for Acorns. A busy month. In the Earl of Shrewsbury’s prayer book and the Shepherds’ Calendar, the fields are full of activity — ploughmen with ox teams and teams of horses urge the animals on as they turn the sod and harrow the soil; sacks of grain stand about ready to be sown; crows look on expectantly; everywhere men are broadcasting seed from bulging slings tied slantwise across their bodies. They walk with measured tread, throwing the seed first to this side, then to that, as if walking between a parting crowd, doffing their hats first to this side then to the other, a courtly, stately gesture. In the background, pigs forage, fattening up for Christmas. At Morville the fields around the garden have already been ploughed and drilled with winter wheat and early oilseed, assuming their winter garb. But the oak trees down in Corve Dale are still green; ancient old trees, branches gnarled and zigzag, but still covered with the new Lammas growth put on in July and August, a wash of springtime green above the autumnal fields.
This is oak country, where sessile meets pedunculate — the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) being truly native only in the lowlands of the British Isles (though widely planted everywhere), and the sessile (Quercus petraea) characteristic of uplands in the west and north. There are small differences in their leaves and general outline, but it is the acorns that distinguish them — the acorns of the pedunculate having long stems, those of the sessile having short or no stems. It was the acorns that made the oak so important to country-dwellers. Not for them the oak’s hard wood, destined for the timbers of great ships or the roofs of lofty halls. Nor the bark used in the stinking vats of the leather tanner. Nor yet the oak galls, used for making ink. Pigs were what mattered to the peasants, and acorns were what mattered to pigs. The medieval English peasant was considerably better fed than his northern French counterpart, and in this the pig played an important part: times might occasionally be lean, but with chickens, a cow or a few sheep, a vegetable patch and a pig or two, starvation was rarely the spectre that it often was across the Channel. Chaucer’s ‘poor widow’ in the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ was only a lowly servant, but she owned three large sows, three ‘kine’ (cattle) and a sheep, in addition to the cock Chanticleer and his seven hens who form the characters in the story. Extolling the widow’s temperate diet, Chaucer says:
Hir bord was served moost with whit and blak, —
Milk and broun breed, in which she foond no lak,
Seynd [broiled] bacoun, and somtyme an ey [egg] or tweye
The Canterbury Tales, lines 2843–5
Even today, bacon and eggs is still the great British standby.
Pigs by ancient Saxon right of pannage were free to roam the woods in autumn to fatten up on ‘mast’ (OE maest: primarily acorns, but also beech nuts, chestnuts or any other woodland fodder forraged by swine). After the Conquest, rights to pannage were curtailed by emparkment of land by Norman overlords for hunting forests, and further eroded by the enclosures of later centuries, but in the High Middle Ages from which the Books of Hours date the pig was still the winter staple of the peasantry, providing ham and bacon to feed the family through the lean times until spring. The trotters would provide gelatine, the intestines sausage skins, the bladder a means of mending water pipes or a container for lard. Lard was used for baking and would be spread on bread (for there would be no more milk for butter now until the grass started to grow again in spring). Pig meat was in effect virtually free, and everything was used but the squeak.
My neighbour Arthur, Ian’s father, was fifty years a pigman. At the age of fifteen he went to work for Mr Pool, the farmer who owned the land opposite the cottage where Arthur and his family lived. Arthur’s father Mr Rowe was head gardener to Lord Acton, and the family lived in the gate lodge at the bottom of the drive to Aldenham Park, the big house on the outskirts of the village. Although Arthur’s main responsibility was the pigs, in his time he learned to turn his hand to anything on the farm. And so it was Arthur who taught me how to broadcast seed with a fiddle; how to loft the cows’ manure, hot from the byre, on a long-pronged pitchfork; how to burn off the stubble field without setting fire to the house; how to load a wheelbarrow (keep the weight of the load over the wheel at the front; turn the barrow to face the direction you are going before you start to load it); how to look after my tools. Arthur’s tools and toolshed are a model of order, the implements gleaming darkly in the shed’s cedar-smelling interior, the blades sharp and slicked with oil, the handles rubbed smooth by years of use. Some of the tools belonged to Arthur’s father. I found a photograph of him at Arthur and Pat’s wedding in September 1954 — and yes, he was as small as me — dapper in his dark suit and trilby hat, with a flower in his buttonhole. (He died soon after, from falling out of a damson tree.)
In the wedding photographs Arthur is resplendent, twenty-eight to Pat’s twenty, the pair of them ranged before the church door with bridesmaids and matron of honour, best man and bride’s father, Pat with a bouquet of carnations and roses, her dress of Leeds lace and her floor-length veil billowing in the wind. You can almost hear the bells ringing: Arthur Dykes from next door on treble, Bert Richards from Shirlett on the second, Cecil Jones on the third, Percy Ingram from Aston Eyre on the fourth, one of the Elkes on fifth, Arthur’s place on tenor taken by someone from Chetton. Everyone in Morville was there: Joan and Edna, clutching their hats, and Guy from the farm, and Mr Pool, and Miss Bythell (who attended the ceremony but missed the reception to go and milk the cows), Mrs Bishop (who never missed a wedding), and Joyce and Dennis from the toll house, and Michael and his mother (his sister was a bridesmaid) — and afterwards at the Crown in Bridgnorth, the long tables lined with faces and babies and cigars and good-natured laughter. Pat was Miss Bythell’s herdswoman. She had come to live at Morville the year before and met Arthur at a dance in the village hall. Now their son Ian looks after the village-hall bookings and winds the church clock.
Time passes. The sun slides down behind the hill.
The clock strikes again. Six o’clock: Vespers, the most magnificent of all the Hours, originally sung at sunset — the most important of the Day Offices, celebrated with great solemnity. The canticle is the Magnificat: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord: And my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my Saviour.’ Sunset and dawn, midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset, the twin poles of our little lives, whether the makers of the round barrows on the hill or the modern users of the M42, pulling down the sunshades to shield our eyes against the blaze in the western sky. We pray towards the East, but we go West to make a fortune, to discover the New World, to find the New-found-land. We look west to tell tomorrow’s weather. Westward lies Tir Nan Og, the Land of the Young; Hesiod’s Isles of the Blessed; the Garden of the Hesperides, the daughters of Evening; Ynys yr Afallon and King Arthur’s Avalon; Atlantis itself.
The sky is the clear blue-green of a song thrush’s egg, with clouds of pale peach and rose and silver, luminous as a Tiepolo fresco newly laid over wet plaster. The whole garden on its raised platform above the house is laid open before the grandeur of the western sky. Across the valley, the trees on the high horizon acquire a tactile quality — not flat silhouettes but rich and dense and black like clustered iron filings or the thick lamp-black of the calligrapher’s pen. The vault of the sky deepens to violet and indigo, green-blue beneath, a paring of red on the horizon. And then the green flash as the sun finally sinks, when the red light is hidden, the blue scattered in the atmosphere. Paradoxically, with this quenching of the light there seems suddenly more light in the garden, as if before one were blinded by the bonfire in the sky.
Twilight: that time between the setting of the sun and the coming of darkness when one is alone with one’s garden. No one else ever sees it like this — not the garden visitors who come at 2 p.m. on a summer’s day; nor the sensitive garden photographers who rise at dawn to catch the elusive light; not even my sympathetic husband, cooking dinner down in the house. Sounds are magnified: blackbirds calling from tree to tree; a neighbour shovelling coal. Smoke rises into the sky. White roses gleam. I can’t bear to go in. Half an hour? Three-quarters? Lights come on in the houses below. Still loathe to leave, I find last-minute jobs to do, my eyes now accustomed to the dark; make mental lists of what to do tomorrow; think, ‘Can I just …? Have I time to …?’ It is only when — with tools safely stowed and barrow emptied, forgotten washing retrieved from the line and muddy vegetables tipped into the sink, firewood brought in and boots left at the door — I come in at last and turn on the electric light that I realise how dark it has become. The evening star which hung upon the south-western horizon after sunset is already gone. Safely come to harbour once more, I remember the ancient hymn always sung at Vespers — Ave, maris stella, ‘Hail, star of the sea’ — and the old familiar hymn we sang at Benediction: ‘Mother of Christ, star of the sea / Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.’
After dinner I feel restless. I feel the tug of the tides in my blood. If I were a fox, I’d be abroad now. The moon is as huge and round and close as if it intended to come bowling down the valley towards us. For a whole week in September and again in October the full moon rises as the sun sets, sets as the sun rises — Harvest Moon and Hunter’s Moon. There is enough light all night for the farmers to work in the fields. At this time of year the moon is at its perigee: closer now than it will ever be again until the high tides of February. The cats understand.
I put on my coat and go back into the garden. I can smell the frost falling. I bring armfuls of white horticultural fleece from the fruit store and wrap each orange tree, making it snug for the night. I fasten the loose ends with wooden clothes pegs. No need for a torch: the moon is light enough. I drag tubs of myrtle into the porch, close the lids of the cold frames, carry tender lavenders into the shelter of the kitchen, blue Streptocarpus up into the bathroom. All summer they have stood outside. Now the tide of the year washes them back inside again: inside out, outside in, the wash of the years.
