To Capture a Garden
It grows out of Somerset soil, grazed and fertilised by generations of dairy cows, tended by hand, then machine and then hand again. Loved and toiled over, sweated and fretted over. A place of comfort and a place of labour. A muse, a task master and confidante. Vibrant and as deeply ingrained with the presence of family as any plot of land can be.
The soil gets under your fingernails and into the fine lines of your skin, scrubbed out with soap and brush at the end of each day but persistent, wanting to stay. It lingers on the carefully sharpened blades of secateurs, clings to the shaft of the spade, hugs each prong of the fork and embeds into the knees of your trousers. In summer it floats as fine dust in the air through open doors and windows, caught in that morpheus void behind you as you kick off your boots and enter the building. Your thoughts remain outside, lying still, with the dew-petals from the roses that dropped onto the morning earth, caught within the spangle of light in the confused scramblings of tangled clematis over the archway. In winter the soil has a heavier presence, its fingers clasp tightly around your legs like a belligerent child unwilling to loosen its grasp. It leaves whispered footprints as it follows you into the house. The garden is always with you and that is as you wish it to be.
My grandparents’ garden. It lingers imperceptibly. Protected by a veil in my memory, then easing into focus, it wills itself back into a sharpened form but reveals only an ache.
I knew the garden as an integral part of you, Granny Joy and Uncle Bill, created by your partnership, your eye for beauty and your pragmatism. The soft touch when needed, the vision, the tweak, the coax. And the flex of muscle and will, to lift and dig, to hammer and force. A place created, a place to come to rest. I have loved it, known it and felt its pervasive presence all my life, a part of me forever sustained by its pulse and therefore nurtured by it, moulded to it. I have known the garden through changing seasons. I have known it since my earliest breaths. I was christened in St. Nicholas’ church that looks down upon the garden from its ancient place below the brow of the hill. My grandparents, my father’s mother and stepfather, are buried in the churchyard and my true paternal grandfather whom I never knew, and an uncle too. Of this place. I want to be buried here, looking eternally out uninterrupted across the dairy meadows to our constant sentinel, King Alfred’s Tower, a dusty silhouette amongst the dark smudge of trees on the skyline, watching in turn, benignly, over the garden.
* * *
As a child in spring, I take the stony steps that climb the wall against granny’s painting studio, with extended strides, slippery in the shade. Ivy leaved toadflax and spleenworts spill and creep from their improbable holds within the crevices, softening the solidity of rock. I push my fingers into the gaps and feel the cool root space. The wall feels sharp and damp against my cheek. My brother has buried his blue tortoiseshell handled penknife under a slab in the paved courtyard garden just here, as a treasure hunt prize. It remains hidden, disappeared, a mystery. I wish I could bury a part of myself here so that I too could remain, still and forever.
The steps lead on to the top of the garden, a paved stone path continues, dappled by the delicate branches of trees aligning the way, dropping soft spring blossom. Lungwort offers its brush strokes in pointillist detail, their pink and blue ‘soldiers and sailors’ catching the light. Lenten roses pepper their dark purples and dusky pinks close to the ground while grape hyacinths and primroses reflect bolder splashes of colour amongst the emerging sheen of bear’s breeches. Fresh foliage of monkshood appears in fountains with its supplicant, the opportunist celandine, a fool’s golden carpet unfolding at its feet. All expectant but peaceful, breathless, new. An agitated child is quietened here, slowed in the playful chase, exposed in the hiding, diverted momentarily by the intimate detail. But from this whispered place you can turn right with a shout into the open light, and emerge into a modest meadow where the grass is allowed to flex under the trunks of young trees and where we run, down the gently sloping ground to the vegetable garden, overlooking the greenhouses and tool sheds.
Purposefully laid paths take one quickly, first to this bed and then to that, room for the wheelbarrow, enough reach to stretch to the middle and sow the broad beans, to construct the rows of canes for runner and French beans. Long, parallel mounds of soil imply late potatoes, fleshy leaves promise new. Throughout the year there are carrots, beetroot, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes. And fruit. The raspberries fill pots of jam and enrich summer puddings with their intense colour and flavour, strawberries decorate Victoria sponge cakes, gooseberries become fools and ice cream. And from the greenhouses, the engine rooms maintaining the progress year on year, facilitating the germination of produce and sheltering the vulnerable, ensuring the garden is resplendent, a damp, verdant heat fills our nostrils.
* * *
In the height of summer the flagstone terrace, lying along the warm, south-facing walls of the house, heats up, the sun-baked mineral smell rising and mingling with the scent of lilies and species pelargoniums placed in terracotta pots on the flags. Lavender in profusion creates a low hedge between the paving and the lawn, and as though it were planted specifically for the purpose, we children jump over it, to and fro. As we animate the space with our games, the adults sit, statuesque, in the heavy teak garden furniture, evening drinks resting on the wide armrests, the dark timber chairs artfully graceless in otherwise elegant surroundings. Adult voices create a bass note, their occasional laughter lifting a key, filling the spaces. There is a small, deeply ornate, white cast iron bench with its back against the house to one side of the French doors, so knobbly with ornamentation that it is uncomfortable to sit on without the ease of cushions. Perhaps the conversation turns to the strange night my brother, deep in sleep, opened the bedroom window directly above and, dreaming he was simply jumping off his bed, he instead climbed off the wide sill and slipped the short fall from the first floor to the ground. His slumberous body dropping like a rag doll and without resistance onto the flagstones, he landed, a few blessed inches clear of the bench. Miraculously he sustained no injury but his mewing in pain and shock woke our mother who found him, surreally and mysteriously, alone outside when he should have been safely under his bedcovers, deep in sleep and unaware of the night.
Thoughts caught momentarily in introspection, loosen themselves into the garden and drift and disperse, hovering with the bees over the clover-pocked lawn, catching amongst the bright phlox, finally eddying over the wall and into the hills, displaced perhaps by a sudden awareness of the close presence and scent of madonna lilies or a sudden lowing from the neighbouring cows at pasture.
The tall lilies and trailing pelargoniums, having over-wintered in the greenhouses, take centre stage on the terrace in the summer. As a child I am totally unaware of the processes required to present this seasonal show of colour and perfume. I am ignorant of the long months of enforced dormancy, the measured lack of water, the periodic denial of light and the ensuing journey, luring the sleeping beauties back into life. All that time ago I lacked the horticultural understanding of the magic involved in working with a garden, achieved here through Granny Joy’s theatrical direction and undertaken by Uncle Bill’s stage management. A partnership of talents unified in a shared performance.
This area of the garden where we sit, with the terrace and the small formal rectangular lawn, is enclosed by a dry stone wall planted underneath with deep beds full of shrub roses and dark flowered buddleia tall at the back, with senecio, cistus, stachys, euphorbias and other lovers of hot, dry conditions, low at the front. Uncle Bill built the wall with Percy, his essential stage-hand in the garden. Sinewy, hard working, loyal, with a gappy smile and weathered skin, crows feet spreading from the corners of his eyes expressing his nature, Percy was as much borne of the Somerset soil as the garden he helped for so many years to build and nurture.
A wooden door sits within one end of the wall which climbs gradually in height as it reaches towards a corner of the house in order to accommodate the door’s size and frame. I can hear the timbre of the latch lifting, wood on wood, as I feel its grainy texture. The surface of the wood is flaky with age but dense and strong, dark against the warm honey stone. The passage from within this hortus conclusus out onto the driveway, which draws a firm, incongruous tar macadam line through the spacious approach to the house, is one short step, one world quickly exchanged for another. From a contained and self-referential space, the eye is drawn out and skyward, pulled all the more powerfully by the imposing line of poplar trees which, like a choir, turn their singing silver leaves heavenwards. On either side of the garden door, fastigiate yews mark a welcome but also stand as guards, solemn and authoritative. Below them, catching optimum sunshine, a narrow bed below the wall strains to contain the swollen rhizomes of bearded iris, a spectrum of colour in early summer, my favourite clear pale blue, but rich deep russet reds and purples too, white and soft yellow.
Another entranceway to the formal terraced garden, an elegant wrought iron gate, frames a view through to a border of peonies, marking the boundary with the adjacent vegetable garden. Just to one side here, approached through a narrow gap with steps half concealed by tendrils of multiple clematis, a secret place keeps its existence hidden. A renovated pigsty is transformed into a teahouse, open fronted, capturing the afternoon sun. We ease ourselves carefully into low-slung canvas deckchairs to enjoy this quiet corner, another walled enclosure but much smaller this time, a gravel garden with a paved path sketching a short curve to a small gate opening into the field. Here my sister and I become miniature, lying on our stomachs, sharp gravel and the pointed corners of irregular shaped stone slabs pressing into skin, indenting. Our child’s imagination enters the pale ruffles of the pinks and thrift, the tiny rounded beads of sedums and the pincushions of saxifrage. At eye level and breathing them in. Ants, glossy beetles and once a lost toad, share in the warm suspended air of this place.
* * *
I realise now that I didn’t know the garden well in autumn. We would visit during school holidays and later when I wanted a break from university at similar points in the year. Easter, summer, Christmas. What did it look like with the flowers gone to seed? Did granny cut them back or leave them for the birds? How bright did the red of the hips show against the sky once the ramblers’ leaves had dropped and the bare stems arched in architectural hoops? Was Uncle Bill disciplined in picking up the windfalls, did he request Percy to rake the leaves? How long did it take to turn over the soil and layer manure from the farmyard next door onto the bare, compliant beds? This was perhaps the most labour intensive time of year, harvesting the produce, cutting back, dead-heading, pruning, making preparation for the following days and years, making faithful provision for an unknown future, out of a sense of love and in rhythm with the garden and an ancient heart beat. I never worked the garden, save picking some fruit, tomatoes off the vine, snapping off the spent rose heads as I watched granny do. A visitor, really.
* * *
In summer the garden was always brought indoors. A vase of loose roses welcomed us at the front door, recumbent and naively seductive. A posy of sweet peas filled a small china basket, gazing into the reflective surface of the dining table, augmenting their presence, their scent seeking out the hidden places, curling in the draft-disturbed air and wafting amongst the jungle of chair and table legs, racing towards the window panes and riding the warm sunbeams to the ceiling. Filling our pores. And in the depths of winter the garden continues to come indoors. The scent of hyacinth reaches us before we enter the room, their deep, velvet aroma, cool at first filling the back of the nose, followed by its lighter, sweet after tone. Pot azaleas are brought into the drawing room and put by the front door in place of the roses, splashing magenta pink and brick orange into the wintery monochrome like an impulsive flick of a paint brush onto a dull canvas. Outside the garden rests. These were the quiet times. Uncle Bill, sitting back in his deep leather armchair moulded over many years to his shape, one hand resting instinctively upon the head of his adoring black Labrador, the other nursing his pipe, perhaps making a mental note of the successes and failures in the vegetable garden. And granny, marking the pages in her gardening books, exchanging correspondence with Graham Stuart Thomas, tucking his letters for safe-keeping between the pages of her worn copy of his book on roses. I imagine granny closing the study door behind her, drawing the curtain across to check the draft, notating her Kelways catalogue, her imagination enriching the garden.
* * *
A whole year, many years. A lifetime. And then, when I didn’t know it mattered, you left us, taking the garden it seems, quietly with you, as though slipping a loved object into your pocket as you left a room. First Granny Joy, who had forgotten our faces but who knew her garden still. Then Uncle Bill. Trying to make sense out of a place that made no sense at all once diminished by loss. And now I find myself seeking out your garden in every other garden I visit, I look for it in every fold of landscape I explore. I try and dig it from other soils, form it from my own hands and reveal its nature. Looking for your shape imprinted somewhere intangible, but influential and inexorable.
To remember you, I capture your garden, the place encapsulating your spirit, my childhood and our future turned within the soil, under my fingernails still.
