Perceptions

Because William Turner continues to get ten times more hits a month than any other blog posted here, you were going to get “Hortus Conclusus” this month. It is a theme about which more arrant nonsense is spouted than any other aspect of historical gardening. Normally this rubbish comes from imbecilic columnists of the feminist persuasion, who like the idea of locking men out of their lives. These sad individuals remain unaware that in its purest form, the Hortus conclusus was initially an abstract concept in the heads of misogynistic priests. Later it was deployed in the material world by a gaggle of ignorant toffs, convinced either that their women were going to poison them, or at best, get themselves pregnant by some other man with which to provide a bastard heir to purloin their fortune. In spite of documentary evidence that their suspicions were partially justified. I am not going to write about these misguided people because unlike the academics,  readers who actually confess to enjoying these blogs never select the factual stuff as the first material they automatically turn to.

So Jenny, the acceptable face of Arne Herbs, tells me the plant-buying readership  prefers me to be a misanthropic old grump and please could I get on with being my usual self. Of course I find this image rather than that of the ever-patient, saintly and mild-mannered person that I habitually present to the world, totally unrecognisable. Mind you, the bloke this afternoon who didn’t understand how to double-click the left hand button of his mouse put a bit of a strain on my halo. Odd how people see you though, a group of Italian academics started to refer to me as “professore” a few years ago and I read on someone else’s blog that I was a Yale graduate. I can’t wait for yet another kind person to put two and two together and declare that I am a Yale professor. In fact my education was somewhat meagre prior to leaving school; all the mind-numbing nonsense of “muscular christianity” that was inflicted onto my generation not to mention the other stuff that we prefer not to go into. The most useful parts came later and whilst  a one-day plumbers course at Sparsholt was undoubtedly the most valuable, Yale and Italy undeniably played their part in the ultimate evolution of the collection of Dioscoridean plants here at Arne Herbs. That said,  I admit that whilst I was luxuriating in a  Florentine whore house beside the Arno, (accommodation unwittingly arranged by an eminently respectable British cultural organisation to which I will be eternally grateful), it never occurred to me that one day I would be running a rare plant nursery. This recollection is prompted by the a visit from my grandsons last night.  They looked at shelves of books containing literature ranging from “Gilgamesh” to modern writers like Durrell and Nabakov and visibly wilted. So I gave them a couple of "fumetti", the Italian horror comics, I collected off a market stall in the Pza della Republica in the early sixties.  The likes of such comics were banned and probably still are banned in Britain today though tame compared with the computer games modern-day kids play. Smiling happily, they sat down good as gold for the remainder of their visit.. Unlike the modern games, the stories in the "fumetti" have a sort of  tenuous narrative thread which can’t be a bad thing, I learned to speak more Italian from them than I ever did in a class room  and if they teach my already bi-lingual but alarmingly illiterate grandsons to read a story, it’s all to the good. 

“And what will I take away from Chelsea 2001?” asked The Dancer in her Sunday Times column followed by a load of subjective gush containing such words as “mesmerised”, “eye-catching” and “dazzled”  Oh dear!, Clearly it is not what she took from the show but what she took to the show that matters. If her bag lacked sun glasses she would have been in big trouble, but then all “personalities” feel undressed without their “shades” so I expect she was OK. She wrote that “excellence of the calibre found here can permanently influence how you garden and what you grow”. So compare and contrast this with Robin Lane Fox who is informed, objective and  usually quite amusing with it (even though he is on record as “hating herb gardens” a  recurrent theme repeated in his latest column where he says “I do not have a healing garden to soothe neurotic personalities”). In his FT column the same week he wrote “Chelsea flower show is on us again and after nearly fifty years of it, I ask myself a hard question : what does my garden owe to it? The answer, bluntly is nothing….I can not see more than a single plant which was decorated with prizes at Chelsea or launched with a press fanfare”  Well good for him,  I am a long way from being a god-freak, but I do go along with the medieval purists’ idea that messing about with the Lord’s designs is a heresy; more importantly, these modern cultivars with their absence of  scent and nectar contribute to the environmental disaster area that is modern suburbia.

I suppose when one gets to a certain point, it’s inevitable that what goes around comes around, indeed the traditionally confrontational editorial of the latest “Historic Gardens Review” is headed  “Why re-invent the wheel?” Anyway I was intrigued by a  brief mention of the Hillside Garden Club of Lynchburg helping to restore the garden of Anne Spencer,  the colored poet. I remember Lynchburg as a rather unexciting town “celebrated” in an under-stated kind of way for its college, run by a body that called itself “The Disciples of Christ”. They were decent enough to me though,  probably because I was the first Brit they had ever seen, but if that wasn’t creepy enough, there is a new college in town whose raison d’etre seems to be teaching a rabid form of fundamentalism Scarier still, Lynchburg achieved a hideous notoriety back in the 1930s as the centre (sorry “center”) for the experimental sterilization of the “feeble-minded”. By this of course, they meant blacks in spite of many arguing that when god created the white trash of Dixie, it was them that he had  somehow forgotten to equip with brains. Apparently all manner of eugenic practices were carried out which are OK to mention in the context of Mengele and his gang but if you bring up the subject  in a local bar, you. may well cause the citizens of Lynchburg to act in conformity with their town’s name (and yes, it was actually named in honour of the guy with the noose). So here we have the paradox of a city dominated by creationists and at the same time famous for having inflicted a corrupt form of Darwinism on its repressed inhabitants. (OK, OK don’t split hairs and tell me it was a state rather than city-instituted scandal which had the guards weeping all the way to the bank)  Hopefully, that is all in the past although the thinking was still alive and kicking back in the early sixties. The modern paradox of a presumably white  garden club helping to preserve the memory of a black poet leaves me breathless at the distance we have covered since those Freedom Rides of fifty years ago. I am sure I would come over all nostalgic and misty-eyed were I not such a cynic. Is it more than skin-deep, I ask, or is it just window dressing for the tourists? I have a deep and life-long love for Virginia, but as long as they continue to teach creationism, I will remain an uneasy  tourist in red-neck county, I mean what do they do to strangers after dark? If I have read Genesis 19, I am sure they have. Come to think of it, is it fair to blame Darwin for the abuses of “Darwinism”? I admit that I have scarcely picked up a copy of  “Origin” or “Descent of Man” since I was last in Lynchburg, but don’t  the successors of Gregor Mendel, coincidentally I am sure, another Austrian, have a lot more to answer for?