Not upon oath
5 January 2009
We have seen ‘gay’ appropriated. And ‘wicked’ and ‘cool’. It is all too easy to claim a word for a purpose, a cause or an occasion and to colour it, for the rest of us, and for good, with an association that puts its original meaning out of reach.
Sound-bites do the same with phrases. No one can link the words ‘wind’ and ‘change’ without Harold Macmillan’s drooping eyelids appearing momentarily in the corner of the frame. Of course there are coinages that enrich the language. Churchill gave us the Iron Curtain and Nelson ‘England expects’. But quotations need the protection of silent inverted commas, or they risk becoming clichés so embedded in the language that they no longer fulfil their function.
Freshness and toughness are two qualities essential in a memorable phrase. They are the spirit of the haiku; a verse form that must strike, surprise, resonate but remain faintly ambivalent and mysterious. They tend to feel fragile in translation. One of the master Basho’s most quoted is
‘old pond
a frog jumps in
the sound of water’.
I believe the sound of the Japanese (and perhaps the look of the characters) expresses more froggy thoughts than any English version. ‘Old pond ……’ nonetheless could make a pleasantly whimsical inscription beside the water in a garden.
2008 – no weather to speak of
2 January 2009
I didn’t recognize the awful wet summer everyone was complaining about last year, and there is certainly little sign of it in the daily record I have been keeping (for the past 37 years, I realize, counting the weather-stained volumes on the shelf). But then Essex is notoriously dry, with the corollary that we don’t do badly for sunshine. In fact we live halfway between England’s two best-known addresses for jam, Tiptree and Elsenham (the latter, alas, no more), so there is a long record of good fruit-growing weather.
Last August was certainly drizzly, with a trace of rain on two days and measurable rain on 13. Only ten days gave us any sunshine, while the highest temperature was a meagre 74° Fahrenheit (and the lowest 50°). July was a much better month, with nine days in the high 70°s F, sunshine on 16 days and measurable rain on ten. Still admittedly a disappointing summer, but certainly not a washout.
January was very mild, with no temperature below freezing, and what was billed as 'the warmest January night ever', or some such,
Protoblogs
18 December 2008
I feel more justified in being a gardening wimp, and having spent most of the past three weeks indoors, coughing, since the Health Secretary announced on the Today programme this morning that we’ve just had the coldest weather for 30 years.
Where does the government get its statistics? It hasn’t been pleasant, and I’m easily persuaded that the weather of recent Decembers has been deviant, but a few mornings of frost is scarcely a new Ice Age. Nothing in the garden has been damaged; not even the aspidistra that was too big for its pot and I divided to make a rather handsome clump on the way to the woodshed.
It has been the perfect stimulus to do some reading, though. Comfort-reading, to me, is usually something with no modern relevance. A hundred years since publication is generally a safe distance. Yet with gardening books little shocks of recognition are unavoidable.
The Gardener’s Magazine of the 1820s and '30s is one of my favourite wallows. It was ‘conducted’ by the frighteningly productive J.C. Loudon, author of the Encyclopaedias of Gardening and of Agriculture, of the Arboretum et Fructicetum Britannicum (my abridged edition contains 1162 pages), of the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture, of the Horticulturist, the Amateur Gardener’s Calendar, and more besides.
The ambition of The Gardener’s Magazine was one that many editors have expressed, myself included. When he launched it in 1826, Loudon invited ‘practical gardeners to come forward and support a work calculated for their own honor (sic) and advantage. Let them not make excuses as to not being accustomed to write, want of style, etc, but fix on a subject and begin at once, and write straight on to the end, regardless of anything but the correctness of their statements. This done once or twice a good style will come of itself.’
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Why all this? Ever since I started gardening here I have been tempted to caption, as it were, certain parts of the place with lapidary inscriptions. I love the look of letters carved in stone, and I want to share certain thoughts with visitors. We have a grove of young oaks I have deliberately pruned in the manner of a French forest: branchless boles to 30 feet or so supporting the leafy canopy. I tell every visitor that to me it represents and recalls the Fôret de Tronçais, the vast horn-echoing domain that produces France’s finest timber. Beside our Tronçais glade stands a splendid branchy veteran in the English style: a lion among gazelles.
Could I transmit these associations in a few words on stone? Could I or should I add a reflection on the reflection in the moat? There are gardens that lead parallel lives: a leafy one and a lapidary one. Stowe, for example, or Rousham, with their ‘worthies’. Little Sparta is a garden of stone-cut knotty thoughts that needs only their moorland setting to free your mind to follow them. ‘Language’, said its creator, Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘ambushes the visitor’. Unexpected language, monumentally inscribed, does more: it kidnaps his thoughts, contradicts his natural impulses and leaves him disquieted.
There are those who hold that modern gardens should do precisely this, disquiet, to have any claim to be considered art. They define art as a challenge. Its job is to remind us of the (miserable) ‘human condition’. The aggressive wit you feel in Little Sparta is thus its claim to be a work of art.
I could inscribe, at the entrance to my oak glade, ‘Forty cords of firewood’ or ‘Fifty thousand kilojoules (and rising)’. I could deconstruct the sum of nature and horticulture around us, or thread it with musical references or puff it up with poetry.
I won’t, though. Words are too potent, captured and cut, for the ambivalence of growth and light. Once we thought (or Keats did) Beauty is Truth. Even that, though, is too blunt a thought.
on the 19th, when the thermometer did not go below 54° F. There was 66 mm of rain, but in February only 15 mm (it was still mild), made up for by a constantly showery March with 85 mm. The only cold snap, with a snow shower, was over Easter on the 22/23rd.
April was mild and very dry again, with only 44 mm, half of which fell on the 29/30th, no temperature below freezing, and most days in the 50°s and 60°s F. May was warm, with seven days in the 70°s (and over two inches of rain around the Bank Holiday on the 25th). June was not too bad, with only 23 mm of rain spread over seven separate showery days, but a distinct sunshine deficit: only ten days when it was worth mentioning in the book, and only four days when the temperature rose above 70° F.
Such was the summer: like the winter and spring, tepid. September changed nothing: no day over 68° F, showers in the first ten days, some brighter weather at the end. October started dry, never warmed up and ended with eight damp days, followed in November by two weeks with some rain every day.
Others apparently enjoyed splendid autumn colours; ours were as unremarkable as the summer. There are always interesting tints, and a reliable show from amelanchiers early and oaks late. But maples merely fizzled. December was mild again, and dry, with less than an inch. The annual rainfall total was 605 mm or 24.5 inches - about two inches above the average.
The results were astonishing. They filled nineteen annual volumes with observations from all over the world. ‘Notices’ poured in from all over Britain and abroad. And not just from France and Germany, but from Russia, North and South America and even the infant New South Wales. Loudon’s correspondent in Sydney on November 15, 1827, admitted that ‘there was little prospect of agriculture ever being much attended to here’. ‘If we could get good gardeners’, he went on, ‘I think horticulture would even flourish with us, but all your good gardeners are so honest that none of them are transported…… Strawberries thrive remarkably well, and we generally have two crops: the first in October, the second about Christmas.’ I fear he would find the same lack of criminality among gardeners today. However does Australia manage?
It was the era when science was in its infancy but information was in limitless demand. We are wrong if we think the internet has started a completely new traffic in practical communication. Some of Loudon’s ‘notices’ are effectively pre-Victorian blogs.
This, for example, of 170 years ago: ‘Sir, Your correspondent on the subject of British wines (Vol II p.485) is most tormentingly tantalising. He raises our hopes, by stating he has had nearly twenty years’ experience, and that his family are now drinking wines twelve years old;...... and, finally, leaves us in the lurch, not giving us the least information how to make wine. My experience is very limited; but like him, I have studied Mr M’Culloch; and, as he very justly observes, have obtained from that gentleman’s book the only rational ideas I have been able to collect. I find the best wine I can make is from immature grapes; in that state they ferment rapidly, and communicate no bad taste. Indeed, the wine, if made with good lump sugar, is nearly tasteless; but flavour can be communicated to suit various tastes. I have racked some on the lees of fine claret, and others on the lees of Madeira, adding some bitter almond or peach kernels.'
‘The most successful British wine, but, at the same time, the most extravagant, is the imitation of brisk champagne; its extreme briskness, indeed sometimes breaks the bottle. I cannot yet succeed in giving this the true taste; but I am disposed to believe it may be done, by putting into the cask some few young cones of the spruce fir. These are extremely aromatic, and at the same time, have a little taste of turpentine, which, I think, I can detect, in a small degree, in true champagne.’
Complete the story if you will.
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