It’s that time of year. ‘Still,’ Helen says when I meet her
in the queue for coffee this morning.
‘Nothing is happening – things just turning brown.’ At mid-day it feels like summer, vivid skies
dotted with cloud, sun hot on my arms.
Mornings and evenings are suddenly cool, though. ‘A bit back-endish,’ Jack’s dad used to say. His favourite joke, delivered always on June
22nd, as soon as the longest day was over: ‘The nights are drawing
in, then’. That wry northern
humour. I’ve dug up my northern roots
but, five years after my last days in a Carlisle classroom, I remain tangled in
the patterns of the school year, so that the second half of August takes on an
ominous quality: results looming, unfinished paperwork piled up, planning not
done; my nights disturbed by bad dreams.
Stop. Listen. Never mind the echoes of the past or worries
about time passing. Here and now.
Which since yesterday evening is not Cambridge at all, but central
Brittany: late morning, warm sun, cloudless sky. Not a breath of wind, the lake like glass
when we swam first thing, the poplars that rustled as we arrived yesterday
evening are silent, barely moving now. There
is a white buddleia in front of the house which is busy with butterflies, and a
young hollyhock on the end of the trellis which reminds me of home. I haven’t found hollyhocks in the Botanics
yet though I’m
sure there must be some but they were there as I cycled to the
library yesterday, palest lemon, peachy pink, with that deliciously seductive
floppiness. In the Botanics, clumps of michaelmas
daisies have been clamouring for my attention, their lovely violet-blue faces turning
I imagine towards the sun. My friend
Nancy grumbles about my inclination towards the commonplace: ‘all those
wonderful hellebores,’ she said, ‘and your first pick is a bloody ajuga reptans’. She won’t think much of my current favourites.
I wonder if part of the attraction is familiarity. I am at present feeling rather overawed by
the size of the thing: not just the physical spread of the garden’s 40 acres
but the huge range of plants that I don’t know, the complexity of the various taxonomies,
the weight of all the accumulated knowledge; and not least by the enormity of
my project. How can I put all this into
words in a few months? ‘A garden is
people first and plants second.’ So says
Katherine Swift. I think of all the
people who have shaped or tended or visited Cambridge’s botanic garden over its
almost 200 years of history. Sometimes I
think I can hear the voices of the long-dead chattering at me from the edge of
the lake or the systematic beds: like Caliban, for me this isle is ‘full of noises’. My own childhood memories of gardens and
gardening are not happy ones; still, I recognise the snapdragons now arrived in
the bee beds – and those lovely purple daisies – as old friends.
I
suppose this is something to do with points of reference, of knowing my way
around my world. I have laughed in the past at my rather
neurotic insistence on knowing the names of things – but perhaps this is no
laughing matter. I’ve recently read
Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s Naming Nature, a
fascinating and accessible review of science’s 200-year quest to ‘order and name
the entire living world’. Yoon raises
the key notion of umwelt, our
perception of the world around us, and suggests that most of us ‘have forgotten
that a natural order even exists’. The words
we have for our
environment have been replaced by product names and logos so
that we have become ’mute in the language of life’. She suggests that we need to reclaim, not just
our relationship with nature but with the names we have for it, whether we opt
for Linnaeus’s Latin binomials or the rich resource of folk names: the pansy,
for example, viola tricolor, is
variously called love-in-idleness, heartsease, johnny jump up, jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me,
herb trinity, three faces under a hood, kiss behind the garden gate, pink of my
john, call me to you, pensée, tickle my fancy... gaining a sense of self’.
Nick is crouched over the buddleia with a butterfly book. ‘A painted lady,’ he says. Di reminds me of her project, as yet unrealised, of a year getting up and going to bed with the light; something about tuning in to the rhythms of a place. Here, now, time for lunch: bread, cheese, maybe a glass of wine and savouring the delicious prospect of two weeks holiday.