Oh the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree
All flourish and bloom in my own country…
(The North Country Maid: traditional)
All flourish and bloom in my own country…
(The North Country Maid: traditional)
Manna Ash The ash, according to Geoffrey Grigson, is a ‘beautiful and powerful’ tree, producing the ‘toughest and most elastic’ of British timbers. Traditionally used for billiard cues, cricket stumps, hockey sticks and oars, it was also regarded as a protector against witchcraft, the Devil and, perhaps by association, serpents, and also prized for its healing powers. One of Europe’s largest trees, Fraxinus excelsior the common ash now has an uncertain future due to ‘ash dieback’, a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea. I’ve been, rather belatedly, getting to know the trees in the Botanic Garden a little better, and the only ash I've found is Fraxinus ornus or Manna ash, grown as a single specimen 'for maximum impact’.
Part of my latest preoccupation comes from reading Roger Deakin, also a recent discovery. I began with Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, a pleasure to read on the days which coincide with his diary entries. In an early February piece, he talks about the ‘architecture’ of a tree, admiring in particular the ‘horizontality’ and strength of the oak. Trees have the capacity, says Deakin, to ‘rise to the heavens and to connect us to the sky’. I feel as if, for the first twelve months or so of my elongated ‘year’ as writer in residence, I spent much of my time focused on ground level, observing the veins in an iris petal or the buttery blaze in the centre of a crocus. Now, my eyes follow Hopkins’ imperative: ‘Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!.../Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!’ I’m astonished repeatedly by this pull heavenward. The thicket of suckers of the Caucasian wingnut Pterocarya fraxinifolia, its crowded trunks and limbs thinned in last year’s essential tree work, soars with the grace of dancers towards the clouds.
The two original wingnuts, amongst the first trees planted in the mid-1800s, formed part of the essential ‘backbone’ of the Garden. A major tree collection reflects the vision of John Stevens Henslow, Cambridge Professor of Botany from 1825-1861 and mentor to the young Charles Darwin, who so dogged his master’s footsteps that he became known as ‘the man who walks with Henslow’. I think of their patient study of species, the patterns of variation and the sudden changes which Henslow termed ‘monstrosities’, the lasting legacy of their discoveries. I think of the Spanish word huellas – ‘footprints’ – particularly lovely as spoken in Argentina with the ll softened to a breathy jj sound, as in ‘pleasure’. As I slow-foot along Henslow Walk, dawdling under the massive cedars at the junction with the Main Walk – here again is Deakin’s horizontal spread, the lateral stretch as well as the upward reach – I imagine the man who gave his name to the path and his young pupil just ahead of me, my feet in their footsteps like Wenceslas’s page: almost 200 years later here I am, trying to keep up.
Another trail takes me to China and back in the steps of plantsman Roy Lancaster, a fellow northerner who trained in the Botanic Garden in Cambridge. Lancaster's first Chinese venture, to the hills of Beijing in June 1979, prompts a memory of his first sight of Prunus davidiana, a native of north China, in the ‘old Winter Garden’ here in Cambridge. Known as ‘Père David’s peach', it was first collected in the Beijing hills by the missionary Père Armand David. My attempts to locate the site of the original Winter Garden draw a blank, but I uncover instead a planting plan for the present one, which includes P. davidiana and I set off in pursuit. I pass the headily fragrant Daphne bholua and count my way past viburnum and mahonia, cornus and other varieties of Prunus. By this time it’s raining steadily and my planting map is turning to a delicately-coloured mush. Even so, it’s clear enough where this ‘striking pivotal form’ should be, and it’s not. Or rather, there is what at first appears to be only an ivy-covered post. Peering at the post through rain-spattered specs, I spot a handful of slender budded branches reaching for the skies. I return on a grey but thankfully dry day and am sure that I’ve found the elusive ‘peach’.
Acer griseum There are many other delights in the Winter Garden just now – ‘a feast’ a man comments solemnly as he passes – such as the delicious creamy blossoms of Prunus mume ‘Omoi-no-mama’ the Japanese apricot. Also be prepared to marvel at the trunks: the elaborately-patterned pink and green Acer capillides, the snake-bark maple from the Japanese mountains, the pastel shades of the Chinese red birch or the blood-red bands of Prunus serrula from Western China. Most extraordinary perhaps is the bark of Acer griseum – Lancaster was so excited by his encounter with this Chinese Paperbark maple in the mountains north of the Yangtze in May 1983 that he ‘nearly fainted’. Lancaster himself was following in the footsteps of Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson, who discovered A. griseum in west Hubei and introduced it into Britain in 1907.
On the far side of the Botanics, on a golden morning in the Woodland Garden, there is a sense that winter is on its way out: some slight vibration beneath the level of hearing promises what Mark Cocker has called ‘an end to lifelessness’. I loiter, stayed by clusters of Helleborus orientalis greenish-white and dusky pink, waiting for a glimpse of the kingfisher which apparently is often seen here. Moisture jewels the slew of ice chunks across the cloudy surface where the lake is still frozen, and sparkles over clear water. No kingfisher, but the lake has a lambency which seems to emanate from the hanging branches of the willows and the ruby stems of the dogwood directly in front of me. The air is loud with birdsong, mallard and moorhen vying with blackbird and various unknowns for volume and variety. In the distance, a magpie dogs the steps of a squirrel. I stop to stroke the furred buds of the Magnolia cultivar ‘Vulcan’ and, glancing down, find that my boots are surrounded by hundreds of tiny mauve stars, the first crocus showing suddenly through the grass.
Reading: Geoffrey Grigson The Englishman's Flora (J.M. Dent 1955)
Roger Deakin Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (Penguin 2009)
Gerard Manley Hopkins 'The Starlight Night' (Poems 1918)
Roy Lancaster Travels in China: A Plantsman's Paradise' (Antique Collectors' Club 1989)
Mark Cocker Claxton (Jonathan Cape 2014)
Listening: Vesta Tilley sings 'Following in Father's Footsteps' (1906)
Roger Deakin Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (Penguin 2009)
Gerard Manley Hopkins 'The Starlight Night' (Poems 1918)
Roy Lancaster Travels in China: A Plantsman's Paradise' (Antique Collectors' Club 1989)
Mark Cocker Claxton (Jonathan Cape 2014)
Listening: Vesta Tilley sings 'Following in Father's Footsteps' (1906)
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