... the garden path
Days of warm sun last week have made way for a colder snap , with snow on the fells for a Cumbrian visit last weekend and now a punishing hailstorm, the hail falling vertically with such force that it bounces up immediately again before returning to earth and coating beds and table tops with a frosting of snow.  The gardens are spectacular just now, though, magnolias creamy white or a sultry crimson, and Housman's ‘loveliest of trees’ the cherry: don't miss the Yoshino cherry on the lawn in front of the glasshouses, a froth of blossom fizzing with bumble bees.  The deft blue of Pulmonaria is popping up here and there, too.  The scientific name is derived from the Latin pulmo, lung.  The spotted oval leaves of Pulmonaria officinalis were thought to symbolize diseased, ulcerated lungs, and so were used to treat pulmonary infections. The common name in many languages also refers to lungs, as in the  English "lungwort".  Colloquial names include soldiers and sailors, spotted dog, Joseph and Mary, Jerusalem cowslip and Bethlehem sage.

... the dance floor

I spent much of last week preparing a poster to take to the Barker Research Lab/Brain Repair Centre Parkinson’s Open Day on Saturday.  Although we had collected the data years ago, it proved a laborious and time-consuming job, and not without its collateral damage – cross purposes, strained relationships, enthusiasms which generated yet more information to absorb and respond to.  Worth it, I think, though: the rather beautiful finished object generated some interest amongst the scientists and more amongst the audience of people-with-Parkinson’s and their carers, and it seemed a good opportunity to revisit the topic.  It didn’t create the stir I’d fantasised about – no researcher from the Wellcome Trust with time on her hands and a pot of money to spend – but a reminder of what we’d achieved – what, two years ago? – and an opportunity to rally the troops, perhaps, or at least poke at the thing with a stick to see if it (the project, the book) is dead in the water, or not.  I do hope not.  Is it time perhaps to reconsider the self-publishing options?  Meanwhile a ‘first person’ article on tango and Parkinson’s for a magazine in Newcastle (Australia) is ready to send, along with a selection of photos.

...  the train window…

From the Open Day, a bus to the station and a series of trains north for a 60th birthday party in the Dacre Hall at Lanercost – how many years since I first celebrated there?   The Cambridge countryside blurred by; a biting wet wind greeted us in Peterborough.  The next leg passed peacefully and then we were in Newcastle (UK) & its Central Station, the Centurion bar a high-volume crush of post-match celebrants and pre-evening roisterers.  I was mistaken in thinking the slow train towards Carlisle would provide a bit of calm before the hubbub that was bound to be Nicky’s birthday bash: I arrived on Platform 6 to find the train already packed – seats full and the aisles jammed with passengers – and tickets being checked as we boarded.  Turned out this was the ‘curry train’, also known as the ‘Passage to India’, transporting getting on for 100 very smart diners I should think to the Valley Indian Restaurant on Corbridge Station platform.  The waiter (formal dress, broad Geordie accent) squeezed through the crowd taking orders (no aperitifs sadly since the train company recently banned alcohol on Saturday evenings on that route.)

...  'Medburn'

Sunday morning: the snow gone from Milton village where I am staying with my good friend Debbie, thankfully on the mend after a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage just before Christmas, but we can see the snow-topped cliffs of Steel Rigg in the distance along Hadrian's Wall as we head out for a stroll round the block.  For once the skies are blue, the sun is up and there are new lambs: a delight to be in Cumbria on such a morning (especially when we hear it's a grey day in Cambridge).

... the writer's table.
I've also had a few outings recently which remind me that I’m supposed to be writing full time: an enjoyable evening with Meldreth Writers’ Group yesterday and today’s ‘Writing the Wild’ workshop at the Cambridge Art Salon; also a lovely afternoon with Juliet Day from the Botanic Garden and hosted by Words in Walden, where a welcoming audience listened to us talk gardens and stories and I had an opportunity to share some of what I’ve written as writer in residence.  The image I used there to describe the feeling of being overwhelmed by a plethora of inspirations – a mass of wires leading out from my head in a million different directions, each begging to have its story pursued and caught –has stayed with me.  I’m wondering if I’ll ever be done.  I’m currently being pestered by Semele (the subject of Jupiter’s lovely aria ‘Where’er you walk’ in Handel’s opera, remember?) which has become tangled in my mind with the remarkable story of a wedding which came to grief over a pork pie.  In fact, I’m stuck.  But I’m hoping that Alex, the glasshouses main man, will help me by pointing out Semele androgyna, reputedly flourishing in the glasshouse corridor somewhere, and that this might unlock something.

To London (suddenly I feel like Pepys) last weekend to see Derek Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden.  In my New Year anxiety to be part of the commemorative festival ‘Jarman 2014’, I booked tickets for the showing I could get to most easily and at the time was disappointed by the choice: I was really hankering after his version of Edward II, or The Tempest, perhaps.  This is particularly strange even from my forgetful head: after all, it was his extraordinary interpretation of the term ‘garden’ at his Dungeness home which provided the emotional charge to send me on my own garden path: last May’s post tells this story.  Anyway, there was plenty of time on this heavenly spring day to take in ‘Pandemonium’, the wonderful exhibition of Jarman’s life and work at Somerset House and then a walk, with him in spirit, across Waterloo Bridge, a favourite from my student days, the skyline to the west reduced to a planetarium silhouette in the afternoon sun.  Even when we’re seated at the BFI I’m still not quite with it until Keith Collins, Derek’s long-term collaborator and partner, is there (for this occasion only) to introduce the film and its accompanying clip from Gardener’s World featuring the Dungeness garden.  There.  In person.  Looking exactly like himself, 'HB', as if he’s stepped straight out of the familiar photographs, and different too of course, twenty years on – a fabulous mane of dark hair half way down his back for a start.  Pow!

Meanwhile spring is in the air – I can hear it in the voices on the street outside my window, smell it in the mown grass – and March is packing its own technicolour punch, the willows on the Cam turned lemon-green overnight, street-corner magnolias blushing as they bud and the blackthorn at the back of my house a froth of creamy white.  At the Botanics, catkins a-plenty, cherry blossom, and golden carpets of primrose and wild daffodil punctuated with the electric blue stars of Scilla siberica (not Siberian, in fact, nor any relation to Scylla, that half of the monstrous pair who lured unsuspecting sailors to their doom).   I like the sound of squill, though – a Dickensian ring to it, somehow.  The prize for the gaudiest gold of the moment has to go to the Sophora microphylla ‘kowhai’, currently in full bloom on the south wall of Cory Lodge and loud with honey bees.  

The kowhai is native to Chile and New Zealand so, like many of the wonders in the Garden, has at some point in its history made the journey across the world to be here.  I’m fascinated still by the plant hunters who made these journeys possible and curious to know how the passion is realised now.  I’m two steps nearer to finding out: a roundabout route takes me in search of Bergenia emeiensis, all the way from Mount Emei in China and currently flowering prettily in the Alpine House.  It was introduced into the UK by plantsman and ex-Cambridge student Roy Lancaster.  I’m wondering where he is now and how easy it might be to get hold of him when I’m surprised to hear his voice on one of the recordings on Voicing the Garden.  A fellow Lancastrian, he was lured to Cambridge not by the Botanic Garden’s reputation but by a girl.  In another quirk of synchronicity, the Garden Museum’s Spring Journal is a publication of Michael Wickenden’s lecture ‘The Nurseryman as Plant Hunter’.  Michael Wickenden, I learn, has a nursery Cally Gardens on the Scottish border, and many of his plants come from seeds from botanic gardens worldwide and from plant hunting expeditions, presumably some in which he took part.  He has undertaken expeditions all over the world and argues passionately for the right to propagate plants without legal limits.

A different approach to gardening, I suppose, is to look at what grows well in a particular environment and work from there.   Jarman’s Dungeness garden is a good example, the broom and gorse rubbing shoulders with viper’s bugloss and the perennial pea, the sea pea.  Jarman filled his garden not just with living things but fragments of the land itself, shingle and flints and stones, and with driftwood and debris abandoned to wind and weather or washed up by the tide.  ‘The garden is full of metal: rusty metal corkscrew clumps, anchors from the beach, twisted metal, an old table-top with a hole for the umbrella, an old window, chains which form circles round the plants.  All this disappears in the burgeoning spring…’ when ‘...the inky purple Crambe maritima uncurl like medieval capitals’.   Sea kale, the most prolific plant of the Ness, is edible, related to cabbage, and the blanched shoots can be served like asparagus but they absorb more radioactivity from the adjacent nuclear power station, apparently, than any other plant.  Jarman loved his garden, termed it ‘paradise’, both a ‘therapy’ and a ‘pharmacopoeia’ .     

'Pandemonium', presented by the Cultural Institute at King's,  was in the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing: sadly Sunday 9 March was the last day.
The film 'The Garden' with the item from Gardener's World is showing again at the BFI on Tuesday 18 March at 20.40
All quotations from derek jarman's garden (Thames & Hudson 1995)