Turns out it's a line from a hymn, one of those fragments of a Methodist childhood lodged stubbornly in my head. All change at any rate and, in keeping with the time of year, I’ve moved, digitally at least. Instinct, along with other readers, has suggested the benefits of tidying my on-line presence – I think that’s the term – into one place. It feels rather like shedding another layer of skin, and I’m unsure how sensible this is. But like Fred Astaire (check out that cigarette!) I’m putting all my eggs in one basket and crossing my fingers that you won’t love me any less for doing so. And of course I hope you find your way here without any trouble.
I’m surprised again today that, months into ‘living’ in Cambridge's Botanic Garden, I can still get lost. Cutting through the pines, here’s yet another corner that I’m sure wasn’t here last time I looked. And this is without the changes that the time of year brings: that shift in light after the clocks go back, the gradual removal of the marquees and so on left over from the weekend’s splendid Apple Day, and then the clearing of debris from yesterday’s storms. Meanwhile the wingnut colony near the Brookside gate is trimmed and tidied, apparently, all sign of active surgery gone, leaving a thinner and rather graceful gathering of stems and tops, and more sky.
In the woodland garden, I’m stayed by an aesculus parviflora, for once the common name – bottlebrush buckeye – more of a mouthful than its Linnaean equivalent. Its beautifully shaped leaves, slender ovals stretching to a point at either end, are in the process of goldening. Some are huge – seven or eight inches from tip to tip? I snip a junior for the record, a couple of inches at most, a lime skeleton fading to near-invisibility at the leaf edges, the body a rich orange-yellow nearest the stem. Its web information page comes with a warning of poisonous leaves and foliage – at once I’m a child again, disturbed by those stern notices: Now Wash Your Hands Please. Apparently the bottlebrush (note to self: watch out in spring for the rather spectacular blooms which give it its name) is unique amongst the buckeyes for ‘retaining its foliage, in good condition, well into fall’. And indeed its near neighbour, aesculus neglecta ‘erythroblastos’, the sunrise horse chestnut, is only a tracery of branches with a twiggy bundle of nest against a white sky. Less poisonous? Perhaps: ‘ingestion may cause severe discomfort’, I read.
I’ve been trying to arrive early, to experience the garden before it’s open to the public. I don’t know quite what I imagined. There is certainly more wildlife – a string of pigeons clatters from the branches, heavy bodies arrowing to another roost; a posse of mallards bustles past; and squirrels everywhere, flowing up a trunk, looping over the grass, darting, stalling. No surprises, though – no badger or muntjack, not even one of the cats that I suspect share my lodgings. Occasionally I spot gardeners crossing a path ahead of me, always in twos like coppers on the beat. They don’t notice me, though, or don’t seem to. I think of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, and the heady if dubious privilege of observing unobserved. I walk through the scented garden then alongside the bulky, squared-off hedges of leylandii (this a surprise: always the enemy, I’d thought, although the scent of their clippings hangs sweet on the air) and yew, and past the perennial beds near the eastern edge, its blooms still got up gaudily. Their promise of a good time seems a bit half-hearted now, though, their brazen confidence wilting.
I’m expecting quiet, but of course this is the time to get awkward jobs out of the way. Once the irritable whine of machinery is silenced, I try to peel back and separate out the layers of sound. Here’s the plink plink of a bird, a moorhen I think, down by the lake somewhere; now a chip chink in the bushes followed by an anonymous tickticktick atickatickaticka ticktick; the sudden indignant prrupp of a pigeon, then a magpie’s hoarse cackle. Beneath the individual sounds, occasionally another – the chuckle and two-note hoot of a distant train, the jangling of a handbell, a burst of laughter; somewhere there’s a radio playing, so that now and again a phrase or two of a song drifts into hearing and is gone; and, always there, the breath of traffic and the breath of the wind, a constant sussuration, knitting together the fragments of sound like cobwebs on a hedge, into a fabric that wraps around the morning. In a way I wish I could hear more, or more clearly – compared to birds of prey, for example, our receptors are feeble – but already it’s close to overwhelming. Any more, according to George Eliot, and it would be ‘like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. Astonishing that writers have felt the need of drugs to open the doors of perception: was it Proust who began the day with an opium breakfast? Still, the first caffeine hit of the day is both energiser and steadier, so I head for that first cup of coffee.
Inside, the sing-song of parents to their children vies with the internal voices chattering at me. Most people I know tell me how lucky I am to be the Botanic Garden’s writer in residence, so I was rather taken aback yesterday by the comment of a friend I haven’t seen for a while: ‘I don’t like plants’. The unnamed writer of The Garden that Paid the Rent (1860) would have been surprised, too:
'Most ladies have a natural taste for gardening, and with a gardener once a week, there is nothing which they could not do… Indeed, I know one lady who alone keeps in order a garden of a quarter of an acre, and two greenhouses. She also attends entirely to her poultry. A gardener is her horror… Did young ladies of the present day devote themselves more to the pursuit of gardening, they would gain in every way, health, beauty, and temper…'
Not that my friend needs improving, of course. How different from pioneer settler and botanist Georgiana Molloy, who developed in south-western Australia a slow-burning passion for the landscape and its flora. I think of her discovering a plant she had been ‘almost panting for’, or longing to ‘kindle a fire and stay [out] all night’. I don’t know if her love affair with the natural world supplanted the religious faith of her youth or simply intensified it, and she won’t have known the hymn I remembered: ‘Abide with me’ was written four years after she died. But I’ve no doubt she had a headful of hymns and would have been more ready to be ‘grateful that the wealth of colour, store of fruit, and long-lived flowers one receives from Autumn’s bountiful hand are now added to the rich store left us by vanishing Summer, than to dwell upon the obtrusive signs of decay to be seen in falling leaves’ (E.A. Bowles 1915).
'Most ladies have a natural taste for gardening, and with a gardener once a week, there is nothing which they could not do… Indeed, I know one lady who alone keeps in order a garden of a quarter of an acre, and two greenhouses. She also attends entirely to her poultry. A gardener is her horror… Did young ladies of the present day devote themselves more to the pursuit of gardening, they would gain in every way, health, beauty, and temper…'
Not that my friend needs improving, of course. How different from pioneer settler and botanist Georgiana Molloy, who developed in south-western Australia a slow-burning passion for the landscape and its flora. I think of her discovering a plant she had been ‘almost panting for’, or longing to ‘kindle a fire and stay [out] all night’. I don’t know if her love affair with the natural world supplanted the religious faith of her youth or simply intensified it, and she won’t have known the hymn I remembered: ‘Abide with me’ was written four years after she died. But I’ve no doubt she had a headful of hymns and would have been more ready to be ‘grateful that the wealth of colour, store of fruit, and long-lived flowers one receives from Autumn’s bountiful hand are now added to the rich store left us by vanishing Summer, than to dwell upon the obtrusive signs of decay to be seen in falling leaves’ (E.A. Bowles 1915).
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