Dark earth and bare beds ready for planting, but everywhere signs that spring is coming: drifts of snowdrop are joined by the first daffodils and crocus, even an early primrose among the acid-yellow winter aconites. Helleborus orientalis ‘Lenten rose’ lifts its lovely head in the gusty wind and now the first of the cherry blossom takes me by surprise, the bare branches of the Prunus pseudocerasus var. Cantabrigiensis by Lynch Walk suddenly covered with fragrant creamy pink flowers. Apparently, until it first flowered in 1917, this northern Chinese cherry was thought to be the common, white-flowering form. It became Prunus cantabrigiensis in 1928.
The Greenhead Hotel, Northumbria So February marches on but I’m somehow stuck still in two-faced January, looking forward looking back, pulled both ways, uncertain where I’m headed. I’m reading Simon Armitage’s Walking Home, his account of tackling the Pennine Way as a ‘modern troubadour’, relying on the kindness of strangers and a daily poetry reading for bed and board. He took the unusual option of travelling north to south – so that he was literally walking home, towards the village where he was born and grew up, but into the prevailing wind and weather. It’s an odd experience for me as the route meanders through a sizeable chunk of my northern past: in fact, I was one of the audience of 48 at the Greenhead reading, and recognise familiar faces in the characters he meets. I’ve been an Armitage fan for a while – nothing sweeter than those delicious northern vowels in his recording of ‘You’re beautiful’ More appropriate for the season, perhaps, or at least its romantic associations, is the Handel aria which has been ricocheting round my head recently, his beautiful setting of Jupiter’s promises to Semele:
Where’er you walk
Cool gales shall fan the glade
Trees where you sit
Shall crowd into a shade…
On Valentine’s Day, Jack thanked me for the scarlet Porsche which appeared outside our front door first thing; in the way of these things, it was gone by tea time.
Where’er you walk
Cool gales shall fan the glade
Trees where you sit
Shall crowd into a shade…
On Valentine’s Day, Jack thanked me for the scarlet Porsche which appeared outside our front door first thing; in the way of these things, it was gone by tea time.
No red roses this year then, but the glasshouses more than make up for their absence in this month’s orchid festival, the corridor and individual spaces transformed into a beguiling round-the-world trip. There are stunning examples of some of the 100,000 cultivars which have been developed by horticulturalists from the Orchidaceae family, at more than 26,000 recorded species one of the largest plant families in the world. The journey is guided by intriguing key facts and an accessible longer narrative. Impossible not to be enchanted by the crimson and purple extravagance of the Vanda hybrids in the Tropical Wetlands, their silvery root webs shifting in the air above the empty lily pool. I was also captivated by the account of Bath’s Writhlington School Orchid Project, growing from an after-school gardening club to, over twenty years later, a project which offers opportunities to students for hands-on study and expeditions to orchid hotspots across the globe as well as making a key contribution to the curriculum – quite a story! And I’m imagining those who took part in yesterday evening’s Twilight explorations will have their own travellers’ tales to tell.
I can’t seem to escape the Odyssey theme. I’ve been enlisted to run a two-session workshop on structuring the short story next month and this has sent me in various different directions. First to Morecambe, where my brother was born and whose refurbished Midland Hotel forms the setting for David Constantine’s wonderful ‘Tea at the Midland’. Although the story itself doesn’t move beyond the kite surfers in Morecambe Bay, Constantine evokes the wider world in the fate of the cockle pickers who met their deaths in the incoming tide there, and also in the hotel’s frieze by Eric Gill depicting Odysseus’s arrival on the island of Scheria, en route to home. Which in turn (considering the reputations of both Odysseus and Gill) raises the question of how far we can separate the art from the person of the artist. I don’t know quite where I stand on this. In the garden, though, I’m drawn repeatedly beyond or behind the plants themselves to their – well, if not authors, at least those responsible for their safe passage.
Take the winter-flowering Sycopsis sinensis, for example: according to Dr Tim Upson in the recent Friends’ News, the Cambridge plants almost certainly arrived in the early 1900s courtesy of Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson, a plant hunter for James Veitch & Sons of Chelsea. I investigate. E.H. Wilson, ‘endowed with an indomitable courage and perseverance’, introduced a record 1000+ Asian plants & over 16,000 herbarium specimens to the West, of which around sixty bear his name. On his third expedition, in search of Lilium regale, when his leg was crushed in an avalanche, he set it himself with his camera tripod. He and his wife Ellen had one daughter, Muriel Primrose. He collected 63 named species of cherry in Japan. Rhododendrons in Sheringham Park on the Norfolk coast were grown from his seeds. He wrote several books, including If I Were to Make a Garden (1931) which is in the Cory Library. He is pictured there sitting in a garden – at home, presumably – in cap and gown, with a book on his lap; in the background, according to the caption, his ‘beloved Royal Lilies’.
My mum’s personal journey has her beached, for now at least, in The Hope nursing home here in Cambridge. She doesn’t know quite what to make of it – ‘a very nice hotel’ she said this afternoon. To be honest I’m finding it all unsettling too: after months of being caught fast in an inhospitable turn of the path, suddenly we’re cut loose, and I’m feeling more adrift than free. So a couple of days in the familiar territory of the north Norfolk coast last weekend was a welcome break. We arrived in wild winds that became even wilder overnight and into the following day, shared by pretty much all areas of the UK I think¸ and necessitating an afternoon in front of a log fire with a book – Walking Home, in fact. Sunday took us down a back road between Ringstead and Docking to Home Plantation, where we stopped the car for photographs. Later, on the beach, we watched and heard ring plovers marking out their home turf on the shingle. I’m reminded of another Simon Armitage favourite, ‘Homecoming’ – a lovely poem for all seasons and, in my book, pretty much perfect as love poems go.
The aria 'Where'er you walk' is from Handel's opera Semele (Congreve's words) - try the Bryn Terfel recording
For more on Ernest Wilson, see Eliot Tozer, "On the trail of E.H. Wilson," Horticulture, November 1994:59
Walking Home by Simon Armitage is published by Faber & Faber
For more on Ernest Wilson, see Eliot Tozer, "On the trail of E.H. Wilson," Horticulture, November 1994:59
Walking Home by Simon Armitage is published by Faber & Faber
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