Last week (in Pepys mode again) to Kew, on the trail of orchids and their hunters. An unforgivingly dour and damp Thursday, the trek to the gardens (bus/train/tube/bus) knocking the edges off the romance of a plant hunt to foreign shores. We two, renewing an acquaintance from not far off half a century ago, were overawed by the size of the enterprise, both the Palm House itself and its contents at least three times taller/broader/and simply more than its Cambridge cousin. Our behind-the-scenes tour of the orchid nurseries (a similarly grand scale, though a welcome close focus) courtesy of volunteer Jenny provided ample advice on planting and growing though less on recent research-based expeditions. As for the orchid displays themselves: well, some exquisite specimens, a breath-taking extravaganza of colour and form and a really impressive show, although I left with a feeling akin to having eaten too much chocolate.
A new species? Photo: Andre Schuiteman I’ve loved reading about the journeys of the great eighteenth and nineteenth century travellers who between them collected tens of thousands of new species: Francis Masson, Kew’s first official plant hunter who in 1775 collected and brought to Britain the Eastern Cape giant cycad Encephalartos altensteinii which is still thriving in the Palm House, or Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, one of the nineteenth century’s most important scientists and botanists who, undeterred by altitude sickness in his two-year stay in Sikkim, maintained a taxing routine of walking and collecting by day then, under canvas and by lantern light, writing his journal, cataloguing his findings, plotting maps, with the small luxury of an evening cigar. So I was keen to discover how a modern expedition differed. In 2013 two orchid specialists from Kew travelled to Cambodia, where they spent six days in jungle minefields, accompanied by local rangers and military police. An agreement with the Cambodia Forestry Administration enabled them to collect 200 plants which were brought back to Kew (wrapped in damp newspaper rather than the elaborate mini-greenhouses used by the Victorians) for growing on, identification and documentation. Almost a year later, when one of the orchids flowered, the team found they had an orchid never before recorded by science.
Marianne North: Nepenthes northiana Whilst science is behind Kew’s recent forays into Cambodian orchid country, self-confessed orchid obsessive Tom Hart Dyke risked life and limb, and very nearly lost the former, in pursuit of his personal passion. In a talk which ranged from the acres of his ancestral home in Kent to his nine-month captivity in the jungles of Columbia and Panama in 2000, his enthusiasm was palpable if puzzling – and still didn’t really quench my thirst to learn about the business of plant-collecting. Infinitely more satisfying was my long-awaited meeting with botanical artist and intrepid traveller Marianne North. Breaking the mould of Victorian water-colourists quietly producing copies of plants at home, in 1871 at the age of 40 Marianne embarked on a series of journeys which took her to 17 countries across five continents. Travelling alone, she painted – in oils – what she saw: flowers, yes, but also birds, butterflies, frogs and monkeys, as well as landscapes. Some plants she painted were new to science and four species, including the pitcher plant Nepenthes northiana from the mountains of Borneo, were named after her. Newly restored, the paintings – 833 in all – are displayed edge to edge, above samples of wood she brought back from her travels, in the gallery which she had built within Kew Gardens with the help of her architect friend James Ferguson when she arrived home. The effect is intense, almost overwhelming, like stepping inside a living world of vibrant oranges and greens which slips from tropics to mountaintops to tundra as your eyes move from one picture to the next. Fabulous!
Back at home – although the Garden residency is officially over and the journal of the extended year almost complete, the Cambridge Botanic Garden still feels like home – leaf buds are starting to open, the Cornus mas near the café is a sunburst and there are buttery primulas newly planted in the beds near the Winter Garden. There’s an irresistible lift in the spirits that comes with the dance of the hazel catkins in the stiff wind or in the contrast of sugar pink viburnum flowers on bare branches against a cornflower sky. Heads are up as the days stretch into the new month, and there’s a sense that this is what we’ve been waiting for. ‘At last!’ is how Mark Cocker’s Claxton entry for March begins. In his case it’s sound that heralds the spring, in particular the ‘wild, heart-piercing song’ of the lapwing. Whilst he doesn’t subscribe to the belief that the birds must be joyful because hearing their song fills us with joy, he suggests that there is a healing quality for us in the encounter with an ‘absoluteness’ in the natural world: in song and in flight, the lapwing is ‘only and perfectly itself’.
How we best express this encounter is an exploration which has long preoccupied the hearts and minds of writers. Here is Lawrence on almond blossom: ‘In the garden, raying out/With a body like spray, dawn-tender’ or Alice Oswald giving voice to the river: ‘the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence/among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in motion/sing-calling’. Yesterday saw the publication of Robert Macfarlane’s latest book Landmarks. Lamenting the shrinking of our lexicon of nature-words – the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed, for example, ash, beech, bluebell, catkin, kingfisher, otter and newt but included blog, broadband, bullet-point, chatroom and voice-mail – Macfarlane has set about compiling a Terra Britannica, what he defines as ‘a gathering of terms for the land and its weathers’, particularly the rich resource of local variants. His book is more than a collection of vocabularies, though: for Macfarlane, language is our way to know and experience the natural world, to understand the otherness of landscape or plant. And, rather than simply preserving the past, Macfarlane joins Richard Mabey in calling for a new language to accommodate the ‘selfhood’ of plants. ‘We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes,’ Macfarlane writes, ‘but we will make 10,000 more…’
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane published by Hamish Hamilton 5 March 2015
The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey due to be published in October 2015
Etta James sings 'At Last' (1961)
The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey due to be published in October 2015
Etta James sings 'At Last' (1961)
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