Gardening for glory—or at least for memory and experimentation’s sake. John Levett reviews the stand-up efforts of early summer around his neighborhood in Cambridge, England.
Feverfew and pansies. Photo: John Levett.
Always for me and always with a capital letter Summer begins on June 1st and ends on August 31st irrespective of movements of planets, moons and poets. The plants in my garden have a similar timetable. The early species are going to heps and the ‘old fashioned’ are in full bloom; the ramblers are stunning as always; the irises are down to the last bud.
The irises are fundamental to my garden. In 1981 I went with a friend to Giverny at Whitsuntide. I can recall my friend and I being asked at Giverny if we were artists; together we said: “We’re gardeners.” As can often be the case with travel, the object of the travel can have its own ideas—the water lilies in Monet’s garden had been eaten by water rats. Never mind, there was other stuff and the parade of irises was it. Ever since, I’ve always wanted irises in my garden. Mine don’t get enough winter sun I’m told but I remember irises growing under trees at Giverny; whatever, I get blooms and I can walk down my own parade.
Hollyhock entry. Photo: John Levett.
I’ve always been of the mind to try anything, anywhere & give it the chance to survive. I had a successful raising of delphiniums last year and planted out the result (forty plants) earlier this year. There’s no space for them so I followed the sun round the garden for a day and planted one in every open spot that the sun touched. So it is with hollyhocks. These are true working class plants. When & wherever I grew up they were in every back yard; they were so ubiquitous that you could pass through the ages of one to five thinking that the only plant was a hollyhock. I recall a radio story given by Ivor Cutler who described walks with his parents in which everything they came across was named. Thus, “This is a tree” was part of Ivor’s learning and it was some years before he recognised that not all trees were just ‘a tree.’ So it was with hollyhocks for me—not all plants were hollyhocks. They are now back. I’ve got seven plants from a disappointing sowing but a friend brought round some more seed yesterday so I’m sorted for hollyhocks for the next decade.
I don’t know what to do with the troughs. I got hold of a couple about ten years ago but never had any success with the plantings. I bought in from Pottertons in Lincolnshire so the stock was fine. Perhaps I was going through a Randian phase of Get-on-and-grow-or-die. Alpines are another part of the heroic side of gardening. My friend calls it the daft-idiotic side, an alp being in short supply in these parts. I’ve enough reading matter on these things and I can walk past some front gardens nearby which have alpine meadows of Andean expanse but the tykes have yet to prosper in the troughs.
Windowboxes, “herbies” and pink door. Photo: John Levett.
I can’t recall how the interest in alpines began but the collecting of them started with visits to Ingwersen’s on the southern Weald every Spring in the early ‘80s. I walked through the alpine houses and filled my boots. The place even had a restored steam line at the bottom of the nursery—collect plants and play at being The Railway Children. Ingwersen’s is no more, killed off by the out-of-town one-size-fits-all centres I’m guessing.
There’s magic in the old nurseries and I think that way not only because I’m old. I’ve just noticed that the above remembrances are of plant collecting in the ‘80s. My mother died in 1979 and the garden she had was what she hadn’t had through her life but still hankered after—rose gardens front and back, conservatory for geraniums, greenhouse for tomatoes and pot plants, beds for anything that took root, a lawn that shrank year on year and sweet peas on the allotment. After hear death I carried on the tradition until I didn’t any more. When I came back to gardening in the late ‘90s it was to the same plants and nurseries that I returned; but it was to the tradition of looking out for the hard-to-come-by and the pain-to-raise that I knew was the challenge that kept her in the garden—the heroic side of gardening.
Perfunctory standing – English longhorn. Photo: John Levett.
At the start of every season I walk round the block and have a neb at what’s going on elsewhere. This is a strict up-one-road-and-down-another-and-back-before-bedtime stroll. It starts over the river and across Stourbridge Common. The cattle are back there now—Belted Galloways and Longhorns—the Longhorns looking a little less longhorned than in Red River. Seeing the cattle always reminds me of the myth-making qualities of mothers. This from my childhood: “Whenever you see a field of cattle lying down, there’ll always be one standing up.” I hear this being said to children even to this day with the consequence that generations grow and die but year on year look for the standing cow in the cow field.
Most of the houses that slope up from the river are small Victorian villas and terraces. What to expect? The climber over the front wall, the window box, the outsized tree, the lacquered pot—all on view plus the hollyhocks by the front door. What connects them all is toil in varying degrees. A large part of the toil is the one I experience myself—giving a lifetime it seems to growing stuff that would be happier elsewhere but which we need in our lives because we have a connection to it arising from elsewhere in our lives.
June couple. Photo: John Levett.
Last year I partnered a colleague in a year’s project in a suburb of north London. We were looking at how residents defined the boundaries of their locality and if there was a connection between where they lived now and where they had grown up as children. The connection is a strong one—the taking with us of a ‘folk-historical memory’ of time, place, resonance. There is a recently-published monograph by Alexandra Harris ‘Romantic Moderns’ on the ‘British’ sensibility in art of the inter-war years—Carrington, Piper, Ravilious, Woolf, Bell. Many of us carry that sensibility still—some time when everything was alright or was shortly going to be alright and ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow …’ and we can sit in this garden, on this patio, decking, paving and we’re safe. Usefully for this sensibility, whenever there’s an air display over at Duxford aerodrome the Battle of Britain flightpath of Spitfire and Hurricane passes directly above our estate. This is a large part of my own connection to gardening—Eden sometime in another century in a place I never knew. Shaw’s Corner, Monk’s House, Dartington, Garsington, Storey’s Way—out with the deckchairs and let’s all read Gibbon.
The garden toil is also about completeness: completing the move, completing the home, completing this part of the life. There’s still a lot of experimenting going on in gardens beside the one-stop-buy-a-garden-today affairs but the spaces available seem to get smaller yearly—space for the crafted or templated container and a hanging basket and not much else.
Garden on the sill. Photo: John Levett.
And then there’s the children. I am of the generation that had bombsites; the generation over the back fence has the bouncy castle, the slide, the trampoline, the race track, the hoop, the goal, the play house. Is that the choice today—garden or children—or am I not looking closely enough?
I caught sight of a window display of cacti. I’ve thought often of what I would grow if I had to leave this place and was without a garden. Cacti always come to mind first. It’s probably because the process of growing cacti as house plants is out of sync with their nature and raising them is a provocation. They’re also part of the same category of plants as alpines in my taxonomy of plants-that-shouldn’t-work-here-but-I’ll-see-that-they-do.
And convolvulus. In these parts it’s very rare to see any these days. It used to be triffid-like in its invasiveness and you could spend an afternoon and evening on a plot trying to get to the root at the centre of the earth. Maybe it’s called another variety of Morning Glory and sold at premium.
Convolvulus—or moonflower? Photo: John Levett.
And nasturtiums. These used to be in every garden, in every street, as omnipresent as the aforementioned hollyhocks. They became popular in the ‘80s with the Fancy Dan chefs but now they’re rare to see but the blast of vibrancy you get still stuns. They were in every ‘Junior Grow Your Own Garden’ pack in every seed merchant in every town. Seed merchant?
And the garden feature. It used to be the water feature in the ‘90s; no gardening programme was complete without how to build one. This was the most stupid idea in gardening unless you’ve got a natural spring or have decamped to a river. The amount of earthworks, plumbing, disruption of foundations, cleaning, maintenance, malaria outbreaks brought about by the water feature was the stuff of idiocy. Then it became mirrors ‘to enlarge the perspective’ of the garden—prune, hoe, dig, weed, plant and polish. Then the Zen garden. Now the kitchen-in-the-garden and the horticultural home entertainment centre. Where’s the struggle in that?
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