Читать книгу The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise - Antony Woodward - Страница 12

A glance around at the landscape should have warned us what we were in for. Where rowan and hawthorn trees bend at permanent right angles, man wasn’t meant to plant Jerusalem artichokes and rhubarb.

ELIZABETH WEST, Hovel in the Hills, 1977

‘Was Granny’s garden in the Yellow Book?’

‘It was.’ My father could compress much meaning into two words.

‘At Rookwoods?’

‘At Rookwoods. And again when she moved to Bath. She was very much the magnanimous charity worker, remember’ (that was pretty loaded, too). I’d been sporadically quizzing him about the National Gardens Scheme since hatching my plan, but it had only recently occurred to me that Rookwoods itself might have been in the Yellow Book.

‘And…?’

‘Well, it was the kind of menace you might imagine. We all had to dance attendance and ended up doing most of the work. On one occasion she announced she was going on holiday the week the garden was opening, leaving us to take care of it. You can guess how well that went down with your mother.’

‘So you helped, too?’

‘We all had to help.’

‘Didn’t it occur to you to mention this?’

‘Mention what?’

‘The fact that Granny was in the Yellow Book? I’ve been asking you about the Yellow Book for weeks.’

‘No. You never asked that.’

It was July and our move to the sheep-run pastures of Tair-Ffynnon was complete. We’d driven over to the Mendips for one of our periodic Sunday lunches with my father. He greeted us with his usual mock exasperation. ‘Late as ever.’

‘You’d be disappointed if we weren’t.’

He gave me a bottle of champagne to open. He always gave us champagne when we came now: a reminder how special these occasions were, and how seldom we saw each other since my brother and I had young families. Today, however, I had a private purpose in coming. If I were going to make a garden I needed to learn all I could about gardening—fast. It was so vast a subject it was hard to know where to begin, and my father seemed a good start. My mother may have been the botanist, but the garden of our family home was very much his. So I did something I’d never done before: I requested a garden tour.

I regretted it almost immediately. Full of pre-Sunday-roast bonhomie, we’d hardly carried our glasses to the low raised bed outside the kitchen—‘This, as you know, is the Eucryphia…it has the most wonderful big flowers in August’—before the first pang of deep boredom set in. It wasn’t what he was saying so much as what it brought back. Suddenly I was at Stourhead, aged seven, standing on aching legs by some tree or other, while my parents banged on and on about it. And it wasn’t just Stourhead. It was Hestercombe, Barnsley House, Prior Park, Westonbirt Arboretum…all names whose mere mention made me thankful never to have to be a child again.^*

With specialised interests, opposite characters and very different backgrounds, my parents ostensibly had nothing in common. The garden was the closest they came. ‘This, as you know…’ my father’s voice brought me back to the present. ‘…is the Philadelphus. It has the most glorious scent…’ Then there were the Latin names. I could almost hear my mother shouting from the kitchen window: ‘Behind the Eucryphia…No, you noodle, the Eucryphia, not the Euphorbia…’ I didn’t discover plants even had English names until my mid-twenties. As academics of the pre-spin school, my parents never seemed to feel the need to make their subjects interesting or accessible, to supply context or simplify.

My father had now moved on to explaining his principles for choosing plants, his preference for foliage over flowers, but it was hard to separate the information from the associations. ‘This is Rhus cotinus. Another shrub you grow only for its leaves…’

‘What are these, again?’

‘Stachys lanata.’

‘Do they have an English name?’

‘I think some people call them Lamb’s Ears.’

It struck me that going round a garden with its owner is not unlike looking at someone else’s holiday snaps at their pace. (‘That’s Jackie, the person I was telling you about. She was so funny.’) Yet, having specifically requested the tour, I could hardly ask to speed things up.

We walked back up the lawn, past the kitchen, and up the steep path towards the open fields behind the house. The garden wasn’t large, perhaps a quarter of an acre, but it was much divided around the house because of the way the site had been bitten out of the hill-side.

‘Did Ma help much with the garden?’

‘Did she actually do anything, d’you mean? Heavens no. She was far too busy with her horses. Full of advice, of course. Sometimes she used to “pop things in”, as she called her cuttings. She was extremely tiresome in that regard.’

As we returned to the front door, we encountered something I could confidently identify. ‘Purple sage,’ I said.

‘Mmm…herbs.’ The word was invested with a scorn it’s hard to convey in print.

‘Why, don’t you like herbs?’ I knew perfectly well what his views were on herbs, and the reasons he’d give for them, but I couldn’t stop myself.

‘They’re a nuisance.’

‘A nuisance? How can herbs be a nuisance?’

‘You have food that tastes of nothing but herbs, rather than what it’s supposed to taste of.’ For my father, cooking was a chemical experiment: instructions were followed, tasting was unnecessary and final temperature (piping hot) was the key indicator of the success of the meal.

We had to go back into the house to reach the patio. The house was my father’s Great Modernist Experiment, the product of his love of architecture in general and Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion in particular. In time for my arrival in 1963, they needed to add onto my mother’s cottage, which had only one bedroom and a wide landing where Jonny slept. My father devised a contemporary solution. Modules precision-machined off-site by Vic Hallam, the Nottinghamshire company made famous by its pre-fabricated classrooms, were bolted to a pre-formed, cantilevered concrete deck. Twenty-eight polished Ilminster stone steps led up from the poky cottage’s front door to an airy, light-filled, flat-roofed glass box, containing sitting room and bedrooms. These were furnished accordingly: razor-edged steel-and-glass coffee table, brick-hard, angle-iron and foam-rubber Hille sofas, Ercol bentwood table and chairs. Comfort took a holiday. And so Modernism made its brazen progress from Bauhaus Germany, via New York, to our ancient Mendip lane. Nothing like it had been seen before in rural Somerset.

The patio arrived in Phase Two of the Great Modernist Experiment, an extension forced upon us by my mother’s riding accident almost a decade later. It was my father’s most successful garden space, enclosed on three sides by the house, and on the fourth by the rising ground of the hill. It was, as he’d intended it, an astonishing suntrap. In raised dry-stone beds he’d planted acers, a green one with broad leaves and a couple with more dissected leaves in red and bright green. I ran my hand along one of the smooth, shapely branches. After thirty years the trees were sculptural, contributing a calming, vaguely Japanese air to the space that set off the severity of the square brutalist concrete pond and the glass and cedar of the house.

During the Modernist years, my father had maintained the pond, with its floor of raked pea shingle, in a state of stark clinical perfection, washing it clean of algae several times a summer so the water never clouded. But in later years he’d given up, planted lilies in the corners, stuck a round stone bowl in place of the water jets and even, the final capitulation, added goldfish. It was softer now, but less dramatic or coherent.

I wanted another drink and for the trip to conclude. We took the path round to the back of the house, north-facing and enclosed by a conifer plantation. Towering into the sky, straight as a missile launcher, was the tree with my favourite name.

‘There you are: Metasequoia glyptostroboides.’ My father pronounced it perfectly, slowly, with just the right amount of ironic inflexion to wring out its full, polysyllabic absurdity. ‘It’s a remarkable tree,’ he said. ‘One of the few in the country when we planted it. Your mother got hold of it through some botanical thing she was doing. Looks ludicrous now, of course, it’s got so big.’

It wasn’t the only giant. Blocking the view in or out from the lane was a stand of three vast leylandii.

‘What possessed you to plant those?’

‘It’s all very well for you to be sniffy about them now, but at the time they were the wonder tree. We’d never come across anything like them. Fast-growing. Dense. Evergreen.’ He sighed. ‘But they do grow like triffids. I’ll have to take them out.’

Was any of this remotely useful or relevant for Tair-Ffynnon, I wondered? We went in for lunch. Midday sunshine streamed through the south-facing floor-to-ceiling glass, the same glass that on winter nights used to seem so cold and black and endless (and still makes me yell at wide-eyed couples on Channel 4’s Grand Designs as they order their steel and glass boxes: ‘Don’t do it! You’ll feel cold and vulnerable and watched! You’ll spend a fortune on curtains and ruin the look!’). Four candles on wall sconces in the dining room, comically drooped and corkscrewed, testified to the opposite extreme. But today, with the doors open, the house was perfect: warm and light and airy.

After lunch, while Vez, pregnant with our second child, lay snoozing on the sofa, and my father played songs on the piano for Maya, I ransacked my mother’s bookshelves, as Uncle William had advised. Here were floras and herbals, catalogues and regional guides. Many of the names were familiar: Hillier’s Manual of Trees and Shrubs and H. J. Bean’s doorstop volumes of Plants and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles (a title which for some reason always conjured images of plants swathed in brightly coloured cagoules and scarves battling up a hill), though I’d never opened them before. And I now saw, as I pulled a few out, what a wise course this had been. It would be hard to devise books more calculated to repel a potential plant lover. All appeared to share the same striking characteristic: not a picture to be seen. I was puzzled because these volumes, I knew, were mere holiday-reading, lightweight warm-up acts, alongside the vade mecum of my mother’s day-to-day existence: the much-thumbed Flora of the British Isles, which I now pulled out. Its cheerful yellow jacket, with a picture of a flower, was at iniquitous odds with the 1,591 pages of closely written print within. This was the immortal ‘Clapham, Tutin and Warburg’, named after the three distinguished professors of botany who were its editors. Each entry matched absolute incomprehensibility with mildly pornographic lang uage. A sample might run:

Basal sinus wide, coarsely dentate; cauline lvs. Pedicels erect, with small sessile glands. Densely tormentose with pickled, blue-veined spectricals. Sparsely ciliate on the petiole. Stipules and peduncles fili form indehiscent. Sepals lanceolate-aristate, hairy. Petals obovate cuneiform. Carpels pubescent. Naturalised in North America. Endemic.

Was this, I wondered, why places seemed so much more interesting than plants? Alongside Clapham, Tutin and Warburg, the architectural jabber wocky of my father’s Pevsner’s county-by-county Buildings of England series (another collection for which a few more pictures might not have gone amiss) read with Orwellian clarity.^*

Further meditations were interrupted by the soothing, familiar rattle of my father bringing the tea tray. Tea was an inviolable 4.15 tradition in the Woodward household (equal mix Lapsang and Earl Grey, minute, much-stapled tea cups, and, when she was alive, one of my mother’s cakes). As Vez stirred and sat up, and Maya hurled herself at my legs, I wrenched my thoughts from stipules and peduncles.

That summer was the record-breaking one. Back at Tair-Ffynnon, it seemed as if clouds had become extinct. Exchanging our hard-won London pad for a derelict hilltop smallholding seemed the cleverest move we’d ever made. We bought a big army frame tent (big enough to accommodate a Land Rover) to act as a spare room for friends to stay in. It came in two vast canvas bags, so heavy the delivery driver and I could only just move them. The military instructions specified at least five to erect it (‘pitching party—five men’) so we did it one day when friends came for lunch. We weighted the wide ‘mud cloths’ with concrete joists and breezeblocks and whacked in two dozen enormous iron pegs with a sledgehammer. Then, inside, we decked it out, until, frankly, it was the cosiest room about the place.

We’d got a new black Labrador puppy (christened Beetle after her propensity for eating dung) and twice a day I’d walk up to the trig point with her. The place bustled with activity. During the day there were walkers and riders, bemused school orienteering parties, pony trekkers, runners, mountain bikers, radio modellers, occasional motocross riders (on plateless scrambling bikes and always careful not to remove their helmets). Gliders would fly down the ridge, almost brushing the bracken, so close you could hear the air rushing over their wings. There were falconers, racehorses exercising from the local yard, whinberry pickers with faces and fingers stained purple-black. Walkers would stop to ask for water, or, exhausted, if we could drive them to their B&B. And when we heard muffled shouts and bright canopies billowed up on the far side of dry-stone walls, we’d know the wind was from the east. Then dangling figures suddenly appearing out of the sky would drive Beetle into paroxysms of territorial barking, a remit she soon extended to anyone wearing a backpack, rendering our walks a good deal less relaxing for all concerned.

But as evening came, calm would descend; the hill would empty, until the moment when it was deserted apart from the swallows. After all the bustle, the quiet seemed twice as intense. Day after day dawned cloudless and warm, some so clear and still that, in the way that silence amplifies space, the sky seemed twice the size. Far above us, vapour trails dispersed like gradations on some vast protractor. Stonechats arrived, their characteristic call like two stones smacking together. At ground level, the forests of thistles left by the sheep went to seed, sometimes filling the air with so much thistledown it seemed to be snowing. A red start nested in the baler. As the hill got drier and drier, the ponies brought their foals to drink at the bathtub in the yard.

October brought the first serious hill fog. We were used to inter mittent fogs lasting the morning, shifting with the wind which interrupted their opaque evenness, perhaps affording a glimpse of the shining white disc of the sun, or offering fleeting vignettes of things made strange by the randomness of their selection—a wind-blown thorn tree singled out from the hill across the valley, a distant farm, the top of Skirrid or Sugar Loaf. Occasionally a confused-looking pigeon or crow might make us feel momentarily less alone. Usually these fogs burnt off during the morning, but this one was different. It arrived one Sunday when our friends Nick and Kate were staying. Kate, who was pregnant, went out for a ten-minute stroll, only for dense cloud to sweep across the hill. When after an hour she hadn’t returned and twenty minutes of bawling her name into the murk met with no response, we began to worry. What made it worse was Kate was a byword for self-reliant competence. Another hour later, neighbours just the field below us called to say she’d found them, having lost the path and stumbled over tussocky moor, scrambling over five foot walls and barbed wire fences in her desperation to find civilisation. We sensed, as Nick and Kate’s red tail lights faded into the gloom, that they left few regrets behind them in the fog, now denser than ever.

Next morning it was still there, deadening everything. Usually, depending on the wind direction, the sound of tractors, farmers calling dogs, chainsaws or even the railway were audible from the valley below. But not now. We could hear nothing. By Tuesday the oppressive atmosphere had begun to affect us; we were getting on each other’s nerves and taking headache remedies. Escaping to walk Beetle, usually the best remedy for every irritation, brought no relief; indeed, it seemed to compound the problem, confirming the impossibility of escape, while the heavy air made me breathless and left my clothes damp. We would compete for the chance to go down the hill, once we’d discovered the fog stopped at the hill gate and life seemed to be carrying on as normal down there.

After four and a half days, I opened the bedroom curtains and stood blinking. The fog had gone. No, that wasn’t strictly correct: it had moved. It was below us. Now we, Skirrid and Sugar Loaf occupied a lofty world above the clouds. Tendrils of water vapour lapped at the yard gate, sometimes reaching up as far as the front door, like waves on an incoming tide. Occasionally, the mist would rise up and engulf us completely, then sink back down again, the water vapour sliding off the roof of the house and rolling round the yard, as the first pink shafts of the rising sun broke over the roiling sea of cloud. We pulled on our clothes and walked to where the hang-gliders launched, then climbed the hill in the chilly stillness, to see how far this ocean extended. Over the entire world, it seemed.

Then, at the end of November, came the wind. It was not cold, but it was fierce. It arrived from the south-west and its strength, at least to start with, was amusing. It blew so hard we found ourselves frogmarched across the yard. It clawed at our mouths and eyelids, messed with our balance and made it hard to breathe. Walking up the hill became a comedy stagger, coats flattened like Lycra on the windy side, snapping and flapping crazily like loose sails on the other. Dustbins had to be weighted. Anything light and unfixed was swept away, collecting against west-facing walls. Parking her car crosswind, Vez found herself a prisoner, the door pinned shut. Unthinkingly, I parked the Land Rover with its back to the wind, opened the door and found it wrenched clean away. It clattered and bounced for thirty yards.

After a few days the novelty of this began to wear off. Loose corners of tin sheeting on the barns flapped and banged, the cut edges screeching like fingernails down a blackboard. Fast as I could screw them back down, the wind tore them loose again. The gale howled in the chimney. It tugged and strained at the house, searching for the weak points. The windows fitted so badly, or were so holed by rot, there were draughts everywhere. Open a door and the curtains would be sucked against the windows. We could feel the pressure changes in our ears as we moved from room to room. Lying in bed, I’d listen as the wind funnelled between the outbuildings and the house, and on round the tin barns, setting up a haunting, organ-pipe moan. Every now and again the note would change, as it veered or gusted. As it strengthened, its note rose from a scream to a shriek. I found it soothing and it lulled me to sleep, but it kept Vez awake. After a week, despite earplugs, she looked so grey and shattered I feared we might have to abandon Tair-Ffynnon altogether.

We knew we should be taking the tent down. We’d known it since October; not even our hardiest friends would volunteer to sleep under canvas now. We’d taken out the rugs and lights. But, as the terse military instructions declared (‘striking party—five men’), the tent was just too heavy for us alone and we never seemed to have enough pairs of hands. On Boxing night, we were woken by what sounded like a strong man vigorously and repeatedly slamming a door downstairs. The internal doors were all secured by Suffolk latches, but the sitting room door didn’t catch. I went downstairs to wedge it closed, to discover that even the doors whose latches caught were rattling. Usually inert parts of the house had come alive: newspapers rustled, dust filled the air, draughts howled around my ankles, window panes creaked and groaned. I shoved a chair against the door and returned to bed. An hour later we were woken again, to the sound of glass smashing. The heavy velvet bedroom curtains were billowing, and there was the unsettling patter of rain on paperwork. The bedroom window had been sucked out.

In the morning, the wind had dropped. As I drew open the bathroom curtains and peered out, something looked different. I couldn’t for a moment tell what it was. There was a patch of brown grass outside the barn. What had made that? Then I realised. The tent had gone. There was nothing left at all, apart from the row of breezeblocks and concrete lintels used to weight it. No frame, no ropes, no eighteen-inch iron pegs, no ground sheet, no mattress. It was a tidy job, as if the recommended striking party had come in the night. We eventually found it about a mile away, wrapped round the top of a tree. It seemed we’d had our last guests until the spring.