One of the pressures of an April birthday – most would term it a delight – is the prevailing upward thrust of the natural world. Spring is here! the buds on the magnolia announce. Welcome the sun! the blackbird trills. Everywhere you look are signs of new life. In fact, although some are still on the verge, it’s easy to miss much of that coming-into-leaf moment: cycling back from an early swim, I discover that the twin hornbeams on the end of Victoria Park are well past the bud stage. Across the footbridge onto Jesus Green, willows glow lime. Chestnuts that last time I looked were skeletal are not only leaved but showing their candles, and the bird cherry, pale spearmint, looks as if its blossom is imminent. Even Philip Larkin, with a melancholy habit as persistent as mine, is persuaded by the season’s sense of renewal to ‘begin afresh’.
The Botanic Garden positively vibrates with greenness. Undergrowth spreads. The crown imperials, jesters of the woodland garden, cloaked in verdant feathers, flaunt their gaudy orange and yellow hats beneath emerald cockscombs. The boundaries of the colour blur, edging into the acidic lemon-green of the euphorbias or melting into rosy pink where the acers’ leaves emerge. Cowslips and primroses rely for their buttery effect on the green ground beneath their feet. It all happens so fast. Pausing by the manna ash – was it only last week? – we inspect the leaf buds, still tight but clearly on the point of unfurling, and Di insists we find an oak to compare for a weather forecast for the summer: ‘Ash before oak, in for a soak; oak before ash, in for a splash’. It’s a new one on me, but anyway we can’t find much to choose between them, and have to settle for ‘some rain’. A week later, not only have the ash’s buds opened, but the densely-packed panicles of flowers are there too, though they too are for now still green.
Green is not the only shade on show, of course: the turning of the season produces that explosion of colour which, despite its predictability, takes the breath away each year. There’s a purple glow near the Brookside gate as the plucky little columns of Ajuga reptans come into flower and the patch of the parasite Lathraea clandestina purple toothwort at the base of the black walnut smoulders in the sun. Richard Mabey describes the flowers, which apparently cats love to eat and roll in, as ‘livid fangs’ and, because the plant is completely lacking in chlorophyll, it’s an intense block of colour which lacks the green foil setting of its neighbours, It’s peony time, too: beside the Lynch Walk the brilliant yellow flowers of the tree peony Paeonia lutea var. Ludlowii are just opening, and on the Mediterranean Beds the delicate pink of the Majorcan peony fizzes raspberry and lemon at its heart. The blazing oranges and rusts of the wallflowers (are these wallflowers?) in the scented garden cool to mauve in the gracefully open arms of the rosemary, and a sugary pink lilac stretches upwards towards the bluest sky. And here and there the first of the bluebells are appearing.
So it’s perverse, surely, to greet the season with pessimism, to take Larkin’s view that all this greenness is ‘a kind of grief’? Perhaps. Partly I think it’s the way it taps into memories, hoiking us back to that delicious sense of being on the brink, whether it’s the season or the promise of a journey or a new love. The backward glance, though, means that ‘it’, whatever the ‘it’ is, is over; at best, the present can only be an echo of what was then. ‘Et in Arcadia…’ is a phrase I’ve been familiar with for as long as I can remember, but have only recently discovered what lies beyond the ellipsis: that innocent ‘sum’, completing the Latin phrase which translates literally as ‘And in Arcadia I am’. For Arcadia, read Paradise, or at any rate that idealised vision of a pastoral harmony with nature. The root of its darker meaning is unclear but, whether you trace it back to an epitaph on a tomb in Virgil’s Eclogues or Guercino’s addition of a foregrounded skull in his 17th century painting, it has come to signify a memento mori reading something along the lines of ‘Even in Paradise I, Death, am here’. And, now more than ever, this awareness of the ‘worm i’the bud’ has a wider resonance.
One of the challenges of the 21st century is to find a different attitude to our environment. Robert McFarlane questions our comfortable notions of the past as ‘heritage’ and joins Eddie Proctor and a growing number of writers, artists, film-makers and musicians in calling for ‘a busting of the bucolic, a puncturing of the pastoral’. Further, McFarlane quotes Joe Kennedy’s earlier article, critiquing the ‘compensatory cant of Green Toryism’. Ouch. Not Green, at least not in the sense of putting my vote there, and certainly never ever Tory, I am nevertheless often rendered uncomfortable by the gentle and uncritical nature of my responses to the pleasures of the garden. How do I combine an honest personal exploration of place with a sense of urgency about the damage we continue to do to our world, whether that takes the form of indifference to species loss or pollution, or to the multiplying casualties of a remorseless capitalism? I’m hoping that one answer might be found in an ongoing research project called The Alchemical Landscape which, as I understand it, is exploring the relationship between the rural and the occult, combining links to the past with ‘an articulation of pressing contemporary concerns’.
Certainly the past has a way of making itself felt, whether in the realities of cycles of growth, or in the metaphors we make of such things. Larkin’s trees are emblematic of spring for me, but also have come to represent my dad and his last days, since I read the poem at his funeral, thirteen years ago this month. He was also on my mind on Saturday, when I joined a perplexingly tiny audience for a concert given by a touring French choir. We'd chosen for the funeral some of the music from their final item, Fauré’s Requiem, including the ethereally lovely last piece. Of course the starting point of the requiem mass is death, but it’s not just the words of ‘In Paradisum’ which persuade us that life goes on, even though in the ‘real world’ this is an impossibility. Or is it? Thomas Gradgrind wouldn’t have it, but apparently Stephen Hawking surprised audiences at the weekend by his advice to ‘One Direction’ fans mourning the loss from the line-up of Zayn Malik to explore theoretical physics, because it might one day come up with proof of an alternative universe in which Malik was still in the band. Science and art used to be poles apart; increasingly, a marriage between the two seems essential if we are to respond in a productive way to the imperatives of the modern world. Cake and eat it? You can’t have both at once, used to be the received wisdom. Maybe that’s out of date. Ali Smith’s How to be Both reminds us of just this: that past and present, fact and fiction, life and death can and do exist simultaneously. As Larkin said, the trees' 'yearly trick' of looking new is contained within their 'rings of grain'.
Philip Larkin's 'The Trees' was first published in High WIndows (Faber and Faber 1974)
Le Choeur de Paris Sciences et Lettres gave three concerts in Cambridge: watch out for their next visit
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton 2014) is now available in paperback
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