Human Flower Project

Thursday, January 08, 2009

About Winter

Slanting light and bare branches electrify memory and switch on the gardener’s nerve. Thank you, John.

Pollarded willows near Fen Causeway

by the River Cam— Cambridge, England

Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

Winter suits some places and not others. Winter suits Berlin. I’ve never seen it in any other season; walk in the right places and everything’s grey. Then again, there’s Winter light that catches memories for me that no other season does. Catching the mid-afternoon sun off a clock face by Great St. Mary’s opposite King’s College and back to a Friday afternoon in 1970 walking up Liverpool’s Edge Hill to the Metropolitan cathedral to sit in warmth under stained glass in a small side chapel after a teaching week of memorable despair; walking across Fen Causeway at dusk and thence to 1963 and student efforts to film King Lear (after seeing Scofield’s at the Aldwych) on a football pitch in South London (the closest we could get to a heath that day).

Winter’s useful for garden planning too. Everything that went into the wrong hole last year; right hole, wrong depth; right hole, right depth, no sun; hole, depth, sun, no space; wrong plan; right plan, wrong continent. Bared.

In 1980 I had a plan that worked, more-or-less. The right plants in the right number for the plot I’d got. Plants in the garden, plants in the greenhouse, plants in the conservatory (the lean-to nailed onto the back wall). Cuttings taken each year, potted up, planted out. Seeds sown, bulbs trowelled, alpines troughed, delphiniums unclumped, clematis trailed. Readied for traditional deckchairs, lemonade, fruit salad, straw hats, fine novels and Sunday morning newspapers in not-too-many-months time. Winter promised it. It was the Golden Age of my gardening. In my dreams.

 

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