Trees, of course, are another matter. In this country, we have the oak and the yew, both of which can live to a most respectable age. Yews in churchyards get to survive longest – sited there in the first place, it is claimed, because their longevity, and their evergreen status, are symbolic of Christ’s transcendence of death. Top bidder for the record is the yew in the churchyard of St Cynog’s at Defynnog near Sennybridge in Wales, claiming 5,000 years, with the Fortingall Yew in the churchyard of that village as runner-up at 3,000. Impressive indeed, but the St Cynog’s claim would have it with a toe in the Neolithic and doing nicely in the Bronze Age, and thus long before implications of a Christian symbolism. Though many early churches are sited at a place which has previously had sacred significance. So maybe the yew had a more ancient connotation.
When it comes to the oak, chief contender seems to be the Bowthorpe Oak at Bourne in Lincolnshire, claiming 1,000 years and with a girth of forty feet. It looks stumpy in its internet image – vast squat trunk sporting a crown of branches, not so much a majestic oak as one that has settled down and hung on grimly, surviving today in the orchard of a farm and yours to view for a £2.50 contribution to the Lincolnshire Air Ambulance. It is said to be in the Domesday Book. Really? It would have been an infant oak at the time, and I don’t think Domesday listed trees anyway – indeed a cursory Domesday search finds no such mention. Far more suggestive is the thought that John Clare knew it. Clare, whose poems so celebrate the English countryside, was the son of a farm labourer, and lived at Helpston, not far from the oak. The poem in which he addresses it dates apparently from around the 1830s, and his words suggest that it looked much the same then as now:
Solitude
Paints not a lonelier picture to the view,
Burthorp! than thy one melancholy tree,
Age-rent, and shattered to a stump. Yet new
Leaves come upon each rift and broken limb
With every spring; and Poesy’s visions swim
Around it, of old days, and chivalry;
And desolate fancies bid the eyes grow dim
With feelings, that Earth’s grandeur should decay,
And all its olden memories pass away.
Elsewhere, it is the bristlecone pine, in California and Nevada, that lives longest, with the oldest tree in the world, aptly named Methuselah, in California’s White Mountains, its exact location kept secret, and its age allegedly around 5,000 years. There are also clonal colonies which are very much older, where there are no individual trees of conspicuous age but the organism below ground that throws up new stems can be very old indeed – a colony of Huon pine trees in Tasmania around 10,000, and a colony of quaking aspens in Utah estimated at 80,000.
For me, that doesn’t have the same impact; I want the visible surviving tree with an accredited age. And I wonder why it is that an ancient tree is somehow more emotive than an ancient building? John Clare evidently responded in that way to the Bowthorpe Oak, with Poesy’s visions and so forth; I think it is to do with the feeling that a tree is in some way sentient, which a building is not. Anthropomorphism, but it certainly has that effect on me. The thought that that oak presided over the labours of medieval peasants, sat out the Civil War and the enclosure movement and the Industrial Revolution … That that Welsh yew was seen by someone in the Bronze Age … Buildings do not have the same charge, for me. I have lived the last forty years of my life in old houses, moving from 1530 to 1620 to relatively modern 1833, and while I respected (and respect) their longevity and the fact that I am just one of many passing through them, my predecessors are never conjured up in the same way, or the thought that the house has seen and experienced like a tree. Which the tree did not; pure animism, and absurd, but there it is.
I have never gone in for tree-hugging, but I can feel a certain empathy with the activity. My own animistic tendency where trees are concerned certainly began in childhood, back in that Egyptian garden where I communed regularly with a particular eucalyptus tree. But in our neighbours’ garden there was a banyan tree, of which I was deeply envious, certain that they valued it less than I did; it should have been in our garden. The banyan is a kind of fig – not that you would ever suspect that – and is sometimes called the ‘strangler fig’ on account of its growth habit. Banyan seeds are dispersed by birds, and when one lands on the trunk or branch of a tree (or a building), it will send roots downwards, and may ‘strangle’ the host structure. This effect can be seen on abandoned ancient sites in India or Cambodia. Our neighbours’ banyan was an old tree, and as such it had aerial prop roots hanging down from its branches – long tough rope-like roots strong enough for a child to swing on, many of these, so that the tree covered a large area, with a main trunk of clustered roots, and others swaying free. The grown-ups used it as a shady sitting place, we children swung from the roots, or tied two together to make a seat. A most satisfactory tree. The banyan is the national tree of India, and is considered sacred; in many villages a banyan will be the centrepiece, a shady place for gossip or commerce, and, I hope, for children to enjoy.
In old age, you think of yourself as time made manifest: this body, with which time has had its way, undergoing metamorphosis from decade to decade, fetching up, it seems, as someone else. Trees do it rather more expressively, recording their own age with neat precision. Tree rings are wonderfully eloquent; here is time stated, time recorded, time made manifest. Dendrochronology – the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of tree rings – can determine past climates, or the age of a building, it can be used to calibrate radiocarbon dating, or by art historians to determine the date of a panel painting. And all because a tree grows slowly, systematically, but laying down each year a memory of what that year was like – unusually wet, dry, cold, hot – whether the tree flourished and grew, or held back, and how many years have passed. And, the more I think about it, the more I have to come to the conclusion that this is why trees invite anthropomorphism. They are sentient, in a way that a building cannot be.
Any garden is a defined area, within which the gardener attempts to impose order. The garden resists, and defies the imposition by throwing up docks, couch grass, bindweed and anything else that occurs to it at any spot the gardener has not been watching intently. I have been infected by Karel Čapek here, I see – but it does, it does, as any gardener knows. More than that, it does not observe its own boundaries. Walking the lane beside Josephine’s Somerset garden this spring, I saw that her euphorbia had nipped through the hedge and joined the red campion, the stitchwort, the primroses on the hedge bank. The primrose, incidentally, is the West Somerset weed; the lanes in spring have cliffs of primrose, walls of primrose, carpets of primrose. In the garden they have to be sternly treated – culled, moved elsewhere.
Escaping euphorbia. Garden escapes – I rather love them. Red valerian, in Somerset, springing from every wall; it especially favours walls. Clumps of blue anchusa. Valerian is a native of the Mediterranean area, but its escaping tendency means that it has naturalized all over the globe: the United States, Australia, and is a most firmly settled immigrant in this country. Anchusa is native to Europe, and parts of Africa and Asia, and evidently considers itself so here, though there are of course many different garden species. Buddleia … Buddleia davidii came here from China in the 1890s, got dug in as a garden plant, and soon made its way out of the garden and into any waste ground it could find. In its natural habitat it prefers stony soil, and therefore pounced on the rough ballast along the edge of railway lines, thus fanning out all over the country. Ragwort, incidentally, did just the same thing – Oxford ragwort, jumping out of Oxford’s Botanic Garden, achieving the railway station in the early nineteenth century and setting off from there along the Great Western Railway and eventually all over the country. Buddleia is the butterfly bush, and so is valuable in that sense. We had a huge white buddleia in the Oxfordshire garden and in a good butterfly year there would be clouds of them around it – Painted Ladies, Peacocks, Red Admirals, Ca
bbage Whites, Brimstones, Clouded Yellows, Commas, everything. In London, it is the urban opportunist, particularly enjoying a good roof site; where I am, many roofs sprout a whiskery fringe of buddleia in a gutter. The escapist is invariably the pale lilac one; plenty of more interesting varieties to be had for the garden – the deep purple one is my choice, or the white.
Soon after I came to England in 1945, aged twelve, I was taken by a family friend to the area around St Paul’s, in London. He wanted to show me how the bombing had revealed the original Roman walls of the city. But what I remember most vividly is the sea of purple in every bomb site, acres of purple on every side, occupying what had been the basements of bombed buildings: rosebay willowherb, fireweed – bombweed, as it came to be called. Chamaenerion angustifolium was actually considered to be a garden plant until the mid eighteenth century, when it set about colonizing the wild. I doubt if any gardener cultivates it now, though Jack and I mistakenly did so, in our first garden in Swansea, planting out a whole lot of neat little green rosettes that we thought must be something to be cherished. Willowherb seems to have escaped from the garden long ago; it flourishes in poor soil and waste places, and, like buddleia, proceeded along the railway lines. And it relished a place where there has been fire – hence its colonization of bombed London.
And there are other ‘historic’ garden escapes that have gone native and are still valued in the garden. Fuchsia magellanica arrived from South America as a garden shrub, and can now be found as naturalized hedging, especially in Ireland, the Isle of Man, and in Devon. The fritillary, that most elegant of all the spring bulbs, with its drooping chequered heads, dusky purple or white, seems to be mysterious in origin, not recorded in the wild until the early eighteenth century, and so seen as possibly an escape from Tudor gardens. It is elusive enough to be considered as something of a rarity in the wild, and has been brought back into the garden by the discriminating gardener. Honesty – Lunaria annua – grown as a garden plant as much for its transparent silvery seed-pods, treasured by the flower arranger, as for its purple flowers, came originally from south-east Europe, but has left the garden and naturalized on waste and on roadsides. The rhododendron can be a pest where it has ousted everything else and made dense thickets. More welcome is little ivy-leafed toadflax, that engaging thing that swarms over walls and banks, finds its way into garden steps – a seventeenth-century introduction used in gardens then but now gone wild entirely. And there are many other escapers that began here in cultivation and have jumped the wall: the laburnum, Russell lupins, stag’s horn sumach, the snapdragon. And, definitely, my beloved Erigeron karvinskianus, its sparkling daisy flowers lighting up railings and basements all around my patch of London, as I write, in late June.
You can’t impose order, where nature is concerned. A garden may be a defined area, but it is also an artificial concept, and plants will evade definition if it suits them – jump the wall and flourish elsewhere. It seems a form of give-and-take: the garden colonizes the wild, the wild probes the garden, sending up natural growth wherever it gets the chance. What is a weed, and what is not? Jack and I used to have the occasional stand-off over vetch, both bush vetch and tufted vetch, which I thought too appealing to be always rooted out, and which he classified as Weed. Equally, toadflax – so pretty, that pale primrose yellow. Not so, in his view. Same issue as a daisy-sprinkled lawn.
Actually, the distinction between garden plant and wild one seems arbitrary. Take cow parsley; if it were a rarity, rather than the stuff that so gloriously foams along the roads and lanes in June, we would be buying it at garden centres and cosseting it. Similarly red campion; if there were not drifts of it every year, so ubiquitous that you cease to notice it, Monty Don would be advocating it on Gardeners’ World. We grow morning glory – an annual – for its cerulean blue, and because it is a reminder of the Mediterranean, swarming there over everyone’s balcony or terrace; we wage war on bindweed, that most tenacious and ineradicable perennial ‘weed’, but actually, to look at, convolvulus is just a small white form of morning glory, and, if annual and more genteel in behaviour, we would probably cherish it.
In fact, a skilful gardener/botanist could create a show garden comprised entirely of so-called ‘weeds’; now there’s an idea for Chelsea.
The imposition of order, in the garden, is the requirement that things grow where you want them to do so, rather than behaving naturally and putting themselves just anywhere. You persuade them too by providing the circumstances that they prefer, just the right amount of sun, shade, damp or dry, by pampering with compost, bone meal, fertilizer, whatever. You fool the plant into thinking this is exactly where it chose to be: anthropomorphism again – I know, I know – but that is what gardening can make you feel you are up against. The weeds, of course, are another matter, a different anthropomorphic thinking: an extermination of the proletariat, a bout of ethnic cleansing. Gardening induces a polarized vision of the plant world, when it comes to this pursuit of an ordered space.
And the space itself is an imposition, an artificial creation. Hard landscaping, we call it today, a process that has gone on for thousands of years, worldwide, from Babylon and Pompeii, through the Taj Mahal and the Alhambra and the Villa d’Este and Versailles and the excavations of Capability Brown down to the personal endeavours of today’s back garden: the paved patio, the gravel path, the water feature, the hedge, the fence, the wall. All of them with one purpose: the imposition of order where nature rejects order, the creation of an ordered space that is also an aesthetic endeavour – artistry with earth, wood, stone, and everything that grows.
I remember flying into Los Angeles once and seeing spread out below, as the plane descended, a great acreage of small enclosures each with its rectangle of blue: the swimming pool. The Californian equivalent of a water feature, I suppose; quite a challenge to landscape effectively, and indeed I don’t remember ever hearing of a Chelsea show garden that offered one – rather the rill, the cascade, the environmentally friendly reed-fringed pond. Though, that said, I have seen various Chelsea gardens with – to my mind – constructions as uncomfortable in a garden context as a swimming pool: sheet metal slabs, graceless pieces of sculpture, blocks of concrete. Well, taste is an eclectic matter, and the ordering of space in terms of gardening is a nice demonstration of the vicissitudes of taste, from the Babylon flight of fancy – hanging trees up in the air – to the geometric formalities of André Le Nôtre in the seventeenth century, which seem like order carried to obsession.
But, never mind taste, what is so intriguing for any garden lover is that there is no end to the possibilities offered by this ordering of space. We have just visited the Piet Oudolf garden at Durslade Farm in Somerset, and, for me, every conventional assumption about a garden was overturned. Here is an entirely innovative interpretation of order: a garden that is a group of large areas – you can’t quite call them beds – that are closely planted, with wide paths in which to wander between them. The whole place is a sequence of billowing colour masses, mounds of colour interspersed with moments of height and structure. A palette of purples, blues, soft mauves, splashed here and there with yellow, orange, light green – a symphony of colours. Repeat planting of, apparently, 115 different plants, gives harmony; everywhere there are clumps of waving grasses, foaming grasses, taller and stiffer grass, here a sweep of creamy yellow achillea, there a patch of purple sedum alongside clumps of light green prairie grass, a burst of blue salvia, a stand of orange helenium or steel-blue echinops. There is contrast of height, of texture, of colour above all, but always this sense of the billowing masses of plants, of the colour mounds that are expertly ordered but appear somehow entirely natural. We loved it – enthralled by the concept, and puzzled by unfamiliar growths. With good reason, I later discover, studying the plan with its key to plantings: Filipendula rubra ‘Venusta’? Sanguisorba ‘Red Button’? Eupatorium maculatum ‘Atropurpureum’? Molinia caerulea? This was innovative gardening in a class of its own – the gardening of
the future, perhaps. Though only for some; you need space for this, the generous space in which to create order.
The Jekyll/Robinson concept of contrived disorder still dominates today, the idea of basic structure overlaid by the natural performance of a planting scheme – entirely satisfying when skilfully carried out, with its sense of subtle manipulation, plants persuaded to enhance, establish an artificial design. A Lutyens-style flight of stone steps, lined with Erigeron karvinskianus; a Robinsonian grass walk, bordered with drifts of narcissi.
In the vegetable garden, order is necessity: drifts of carrot won’t do. You regiment your peas and beans: straight lines, no crowding. Also deeply satisfying, in a different way – nicely marshalled rows of well-behaved veg, doing what they are supposed to do and no nonsense about aesthetic effect. Which will arrive anyway: the scarlet flowers of runner beans swarming up their poles, the colour contrasts of lettuce – red ‘Lollo Rossa’ among the greens. You regiment, you discipline, you require good order, you practise crop rotation. Disorder will of course lurk, always: the opportunist weeds, the slug, the snail, the caterpillar. Out with the hoe; in with some ethnic cleansing. The mollusc and arthropod onslaught has to be endured, to some extent. You pick them off, squash. The vegetable garden is hand-managed, like the earliest farming, from which I suppose it is descended.
Life in the Garden Page 11
