Viola tricolor 'Black Magic': Dr H.F. Oakeley …according to Janice Galloway, to keep breathing. The easiest thing in the world, you would think, although anyone prone to asthma or panic attacks will tell you otherwise. So Viola tricolour – the wild pansy commonly known as heartsease – would have been a welcome sight for the seventeenth century sufferer from bronchitis or respiratory problems. Culpeper, in his herbal of 1653, wasn’t impressed, dismissing it as ‘cold, viscous and slimy’, although he did concede it was an ‘excellent cure for the French pox’. He preferred its cousin the violet, a ‘fine pleasing plant of Venus, of a mild nature, no way hurtful’ and saw its cooling properties as invaluable in the treatment of ‘pains in the head, choleric humours, quinsy, pleurisy, hot rheums, hoarseness in the throat, the heat and sharpness of urine… and for the piles also, being fried with yolks of eggs and applied thereto’. Well.
Royal College of Physicians Medicinal Garden I’m fascinated by the relationship between gardens, health and healing. Cambridge’s botanic garden, in common with similar institutions the world over, began life as a small physic garden, growing herbaceous plants for use in the training of medical students, so I was excited to visit the Royal College of Physicians garden on the edge of Regent’s Park yesterday as part of London’s Open Garden Squares Weekend for a taste of this early history. I joined a brisk tour which pointed out the usual suspects – Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, and Scrophularia nodosa, figwort, for example. According to the Royal College’s plant database, Culpeper believed figwort was good for haemmorhoids too – not surprising perhaps since ‘fig’ (from Latin ‘fica’) also (from Middle English ‘fike’ or ‘fyke’, Old English ‘fic’) had a secondary meaning of ‘venereal ulcers’ or piles. A further benefit offered by figwort, according to Culpeper: it ‘being hung about the neck preserves the body in health’. The garden was redeveloped in 2005 and now contains over 1300 plants from the history of medicine.
Photo: courtesy of Pedestrian Publishing The Royal College of Physicians headquarters, an iconic modernist building designed by Denys Lasdun and opened in 1964, houses offices, a museum and conference centre. Inside, I discovered a further treat in the shape of ‘Pharmapoetica: a dispensary of poetry’, the result of a collaborative project between poet Chris McCabe and artist and herbalist Maria Vlotides. The ‘dispensary’, a metal-framed, glazed cabinet, about 20 inches in height, contains several identical stoppered glass jars on two shelves. Inside each, a particular plant, herb or seed – I remember sage, wormwood, a bundle of daisies – used pharmacologically. Pasted to the outside of each jar, a printed copy of a poem in response to its contents, in the context of the poet’s relationship with his young son. Maria explained how the installation has developed into an exhibition of photographs and showed me the accompanying book which contains images of the installation and working notes on which the poems are based. The book unfolds into a kind of double spread so that you can see text and image side by side. I was captivated by the whole thing, combining as it does my interest in plants, healing and writing and immediately stretched my itinerary to include the Poetry Café on Betterton Street for the final day of the exhibition. I was very sorry to find it closed, though fortunately the book is available from Pedestrian Publishing’s website (details below) where I found this perfect summary of the project: ‘the alchemical and transformative processes of language and its meaning through poetry mirrored by the alchemical and transformative process of plants into medicinal drugs’.
The rest of the day saw me sampling the delights and idiosyncrasies of some half a dozen London squares. I began in the formal grandeur of Park Square, designed by John Nash at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a ‘sort of vestibule’ to the new Regent’s Park. This allowed me to take the ‘Nursemaids’ Tunnel’ under the Marylebone Road into Park Crescent gardens. Then a zigzag across my old student stamping grounds (is that really the same café-cum-corner-shop on Howland Street where we used to buy samosas?) onto Gower Street and a glass of wine by the fishpond behind the Academy Hotel, before a look at Bedford Square. Named after the Dukes of Bedford who owned most of the land in Bloomsbury the square, including its oval garden, was designed as a whole, is still surrounded by the original Georgian terraces and retains its Victorian ‘Chinese’ pavilion. It was also uniquely lucky to keep its elliptical wrought iron railings during World War Two, due apparently to the ‘defiant pacifism’ of the twelfth Duke. A decade of English Heritage funded improvements, including a broad gravel apron around the garden itself, sees it lovingly restored
From here, past the British Museum, across Russell Square and through Queen Square to the lovely little courtyard garden tucked away behind the October Gallery on Old Gloucester Street and then, in complete contrast, the Phoenix Garden, the ‘best-kept secret of London’s West End’ according to the Open Garden Squares Weekend guidebook. Created by volunteers in 1984 in an old car park, this community garden hosts a range of wildlife (including the West End’s only frogs) in a profusion of flowering plants: an absolute delight. Now in its seventeenth year, the Open Garden Squares Weekend was originally intended to draw attention to the contribution that the green spaces made to the capital and the importance of their conservation. Last year saw a record 17,000 visitors, testament to the public recognition of the importance of these urban breathing spaces.
A trip to London earlier in the week took me out on the Piccadilly line to Barons Court and through the Margravine Cemetery to Charing Cross Hospital, for a long overdue visit to the Maggie garden, designed by Dan Pearson. I first heard of the Maggie centres, and in particular of the London garden, just over a year ago, predating my own brush with cancer. Maggie Keswick Jencks gave her name to these centres, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer herself and recognising the need for a new approach to care that would provide emotional and psychological support, reassurance and control for those facing the disease and aiming above all, in her own words, ‘not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying’. In the meantime I’d grown to admire the landscape design and writing of Dan Pearson, so I was keen to see how his vision of the healing potential of gardens worked here.
The Centre is orange, the least soothing colour you might think, but it’s unmissable, almost magnetic in its pull. In contrast to the sharp corners and cuboid shape of the centre itself, a track winds through shrubs to the entrance (‘the embrace of an arm that gradually envelops visitors’ is how Pearson described it in an early interview). Already the overwhelming impression is green. Inside is – well, like being outside, in that wherever you turn there is greenery, except that the unremitting roar of the capital’s traffic is muffled. And if for greenery you’re thinking potted plants, forget it: Pearson’s design has literally brought the outside in, over two floors and on an outdoor scale: towering bamboos, soaring magnolias. Each corner of the building has a distinct flavour in its plantings, and a table and a chair or two should you wish to linger. There are huge square containers of lavenders and creeping rosemaries; a fig valiantly struggling for fruit; a stunning feathery Albizia julibrissin, the Chinese tree of happiness I learn later. Ferns and Tetrapanax interrupt the decking. The interior is further softened with louvred wood, stones, books and sculptures by Hannah Bennett. Were there candles? If not, you’ll understand perhaps that there was an impression of candles. I’d made the journey to see the garden itself, but the impact of this sanctuary was also due to the people I met there and the welcome I received from the moment I put my head round the door. ‘It’s for you, the centre,’ Sue said as I tried to explain a ‘professional’ interest – which of course, as I discovered, it was. If, like the first ‘Maggie’, you are hoping for more than just keeping breathing, this centre or those like it might be a good place to start.
[Thanks to all at the Maggie Centre in Charing Cross Hospital, Maria Vlotides, Open Garden Squares Weekend & The Royal College of Physicians’ Garden of Medicinal Plants http://garden.rcplondon.ac.uk/]
Pharmapoetica: a dispensary of poetry available from www.pedestrianpublishing.com
Janice Galloway: The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
Pharmapoetica: a dispensary of poetry available from www.pedestrianpublishing.com
Janice Galloway: The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
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