Human Flower Project

Garden Going Since Before ‘Gardens For’

Revisiting nurseries and public gardens, John Levett catches sight of Henry James but still hasn’t found “The Pottering Garden.” If you have a map to it, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) in Cambridge, England.

At Cambridge Botanical Gardens

Photo: John Levett



By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Since when did the thought of going to a garden bring about palpitations of anticipation? Not recently? Not since the last time? Err…about 1984? Well, sometime around then. Or maybe it was just the last time when the arrival matched the picture in the head. Maybe I’ve had enough of gardens. Not gardening (although I start to flag this time of year). Just other people’s.

I was walking with a friend around Docwra’s Manor  just outside Cambridge last year and realised it was the walkin’ and the talkin’ that made it and the thought of ‘this is the sort of place you get cream teas with scones and clotted cream and homemade blackcurrant jam and sticky fingers and nuclear strength tea imported in wooden casks from the Empire’ (it wasn’t).

Similar thing the year before. A friend was house-sitting for the Summer somewhere on the river near Hemingford Grey and would I fancy coming over for the evening and I did and it was The Manor where Lucy Boston had written the Green Knowe books. It was late evening and chilling up and friend’s dog went missing and so did I on the search and walking through the garden silence gave grounds for belief in the underworld.

So back to 1984, which had the best of times. And Ingwersen’s Nursery  down in Sussex. For reasons now lost I’d got a passion for alpines. Read the books, bought the troughs, got the greenhouse (Yes! I know it’s not the same as an alpine house but it could pass for one!), seed from the Caucasus and points east sown but I wanted Instant Alpine and Ingwersen’s looked like it had the pedigree.

It was early April, bright, frosty, dawn. I drove down the A1, cleared London passing a ‘Troops Out’ protest in Parliament Square (Ireland in those days) and ate breakfast of salmon sandwiches at Biggin Hill overlooking the Weald listening to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Stardust.’ It’s still that clear. Ingwersen’s wasn’t a let down. They had the troughs and the alpine houses and the stone outcrops and the miniscule flowers which looked just like the illustrations and a steam railway at the bottom of the garden. It only needed three children in buttoned-up costume and their mother gathering her skirt and an old gentlemanly gentleman and ‘They were not the railway children to begin with.’ The thing I can’t recall is how much I spent. Guilt and memory consorting.

From that moment that nursery came to be a special place. Mustn’t go there too often then. So I didn’t but when I did it was always the first Saturday in April and the start time and the route and the salmon sandwiches on Biggin Hill stayed the same. Going back to special places needs its routines and its history. Then going back’s past its time. My last visit reminded me of what I knew—place has to do with time and how we were then and who and what was in our life.

Kew Gardens  is like that for me, too. My mum, gran and me were always going to go to Kew for a day out but we never did. Gran died, then mum, by which time Kew had taken on myth. I got there in 1988 when life was spiritless and a friend called and said ‘Here’s a day out.’ We had lunch at The Old Rangoon near Hammersmith and thence to Kew but for my life then it was Hardy’s heath or Bronte’s moor at their most bleak. I arrived back there last year to see the new alpine house. Closed for repair, so I walked through the trees and sat by the Thames at Syon Reach, out of the crowd’s way, read and slept.

Cambridge Botanical Gardens

Photo: John Levett

I had similar feelings last week. I had a morning when I wake up and think ‘I’m closer to death than I was ten years ago so why am I spending time doing this’ and then restructure my morning accordingly but fall off the plan at half-past-one and take the (metaphorical) dog for a walk. To Cambridge Botanical Gardens.  I’ve lived near botanical gardens (or ones that look like them) throughout my life and can see the Nineteenth Century point of them and they make sense in the current epoch when seen as places of work but I’ve never got much fun out of them. Which meant that I turned up there with a strop on. (Going places annoyed at the thought of being there is a part of me I should deal with.)

History first. Darwin learnt there and C.C. Hurst speculated there on the origin of the rose. Enough.

I got taken with incidentals—the age of one to whom a seat was dedicated (forty-four’s no age to die); the noise of grass cutting, tree felling and traffic on Trumpington Road; a cat stalking ducks; a group of day-trippers tripping from bed to bed; yet another alpine house under renovation. And gardening as an industry.

It wasn’t so many decades ago that I used to stop off at the Rose Society’s gardens in St. Albans on my way home from a day’s teaching, shattered and in need of head-space; hardly a soul around; seats and beds and acres of island. Standing-room only now. Last Thursday it touched me that I’d become a Larkin-like mitherer—the crowds and the prams; the intrusions of working days into one’s own day; the concessions to the current public taste. Maybe it was the acknowledgement of the current zeitgeist that we have to be gardening ‘for’ something—the Dry Garden (no watering required), the Fen Garden (repopulate the wetlands), the Winter Garden (no time off for good behaviour elsewhere in the year), the Fragrant Garden (now with wind chimes).

The Pottering Garden? I couldn’t see it. The one where you walk about clipping a bit, thumb-in a cutting, layer a trailer, scrape a space for some bulbs, shift this to there. I passed the ‘listers’, secretary-like with pen and pad, readying for the raid on garden-centre, website and Tesco. Clear the space, break the pot, heel in. Sorted ‘til the next generation. Like decorating a room.

Towards the end of the afternoon I walked out towards the far edges of the garden to where the staff were finishing off. There was a young lad there, maybe late teens, maybe an apprentice. I remembered leaving school in 1960 aged fifteen. There were three employment options open—metalwork, carpentry and gardening. It was still (just) the age of ‘a job for life’ and there were still lads who’d go into gardening, maybe in the municipal gardens, maybe on an estate, and stay there for the duration and into a pension. I wondered if this lad tidying up the beds of hardy geraniums, wiping off his tools, collecting the scattered pots would still be hoeing fifty years hence, not rushing but giving plants, and himself, time.

Cambridge Botanical Gardens

Photo: John Levett



I was going through one of my periodic ‘Modern Times’ moments—remembrances of gardens strolled through by Barbara Pym characters and maiden aunts with grans. Then, for reasons unknown, thought of Henry James. James furnishing Lamb House in Rye; choosing plants for his walled garden as he chose furniture for his rooms; matching foliage to brick as he would tapestry to panelling. Then I thought of him arranging his papers and his pens, his shelves, his working ways with his views, his chairs with his fireplace, his comfort with his protection.

Then I thought ‘just like me’. The garden as comforter. I reflected on how I arrange my chairs around my garden; the morning site, the mid-morning-coffee site, the lunch-time-snack site. How the time must be ‘just so’ to catch the sun above the warehouse wall (no problem for James with that one!); the annoyance of next door’s children out early on Sunday (very Henry); saving the un-read article to partner the cake-treat from Fitzbillies (how to explain that, should he be seen?) My garden for me is the pair of slippers, the useful cardigan, gloves that fit, Marty’s recliner, Norm’s bar stool. Sometimes ‘the garden for the bone idle’; other times ‘the GWF Hegel garden’; in my mind’s eye ‘the John Cassavetes garden’ (think scripted but improvised); never ‘the Princess Diana bring your lame and sick garden’ (ten years and still no miracles?).

I walked towards the exit in late sun and met a couple sitting near the water garden; a daughter and her father who was working in the gardens at the outbreak of war in 1939. I thought of a conversation with him but thought better; he looked tired, or lost elsewhere. I left with a pleasantry and went looking for tea. I snuck something out and sat in the part of my plot known as the woodland garden—nine square metres underneath next door’s tree, next to my ferns and R.Davidii with its autumn heps. There was probably noise. No mithering.

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