I came to J. A. Baker – as with many of the people I’m referencing right now – through Patrick Barkham’s selections for The Wild Isles anthology, but he also popped up in a recent edition of Boulevard in a symposium section on the question of ‘silence’ in art. The silence in question in the writings of Baker was putative, potential, the maybe of his beloved peregrines becoming absent from the landscape. It was the silence of Carson’s Silent Spring. In both cases the writers were not talking about ‘silence’ as an absence of noise, but as an absence of ‘being’.
The silence that Baker and Carson feared (predicted?) wasn’t absolute silence, but the holes in the soundscape: the specific sounds we look forward to hearing again, and how it will pain us if we do not do so. The sounds of birds, specific birds, in particular.
They did their job, the pair of them, and all the others who followed in their slipstream, in getting the most pernicious chemicals of their age banned. By then, the War Office Order declaring peregrines as “enemy combatants” had already been rescinded. That such a thing was ever a thing is beyond belief.
On the other front, the war is not yet won, but equally Spring is not yet silent. My Spring resounds to blue tits and magpies, neither of which have the most beautiful early morning song, but why would I not want to be able to hear it? Being able to hear anything at all is a blessing, and being woken by birds, even cheep-cheep, crik-crick ones, is a more gentle way into the day than the next-door rows I endured for many years.
I read Baker’s intro to Peregrine several times over, hoping to find a line that I could leap from. I failed. I do not understand his notion of horizons as solitude. For me they are lures, magnets, pulling me onwards. We swim out, we climb up, we walk on, we sit and watch the light flashing out there on the line between sea and sky in the dark where an unreachable horizon sleeps and dreams the strata of misremembered perception. Horizons are places where unknown things are happening, where the new views begin.
He tells us that detailed descriptions of landscape are ‘tedious’ before going on to prove himself so very wrong, in beautifully crafted prose encapsulating land and history and the people who are or once were thereabouts.
But I know exactly what he means when he says that “honest observation is not enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.”
I lingered on that line the day that I came across a quote from Elif Shafak imploring us to reject the advice to write what we know and instead write what we feel “because your heart is bigger than your story.”
Thank you Elif, for justifying all my splurging onto pages in the hope that someone might read them, because all of this is my heart-feeling, and I hope it is bigger than my little story of a life lived easily enough.
I cannot give you a bird, not in detail.
Possibly I could tell you a robin or a magpie or an English jay bird, maybe a blue tit, a blackbird, in outline, but then I would falter.
If I were to give you a landscape, I would – today at least– I would have to reduce it to the scale of a garden. Small. Suburban. Part-tended, much-neglected. A small plot that matters to no-one but me. Just as – I suspect – Baker felt at the time that the peregrine mattered to no-one but him.
My garden will never have the significance of the peregrine, whether it survives or fails. Like the raptor, however, it would take a decade of dedicated study to give it some kind of meaning in the pantheon of witness to the changes in our land and landscapes.
I’m too much of a wanderer to dedicate that time, but I offer up the notion that townscapes and suburban gardenscapes are landscape too, and deserve such attention.
Indeed they are the landscape that most of us, in the UK, live within. They are the ones we are most familiar with and yet they are the ones that we pay least attention to as ‘landscape’. We use words like garden, built-environment, urban, suburban, town, city, park. We delineate, isolate each patch from its place in the wider ‘scape’, which is like talking about the mountain without the range, the lake without its river-feeders, the hillsides they tumble from, a mountain range without its tracks and trails and histories and drystone walls and cairns and monuments, the church without its village.
Then again, people will paint a mountain, a pass, a valley and call it “a landscape”…so why, then, not also a single, suburban garden?
It would take a decade of study to understand this garden, to give it something approaching meaning in the grand scheme of things – a study to show you what survived, what didn’t and if you were lucky maybe even explain why – the mistakes made, the choices, climatic influence, fashion,
laziness or a hundred other things – to tell you not only of the garden, the isolated plot, on a single suburban street, but to place it in context, to speak of the land before, and the land around.
I’m not sure I have a decade to spare.
As it is, if I want to talk about my garden – and I do use that term loosely – then I want to give you a little of its essence and, perhaps, my own as reflected by it: the emotions and behaviour of the watcher being also those of the creator and haphazard tender of this space.
In this garden the behaviour is wayward. I go through phases of wanting to control everything into pristine, painterly loveliness and phases of wanting to let it all have its own way.
I remember describing my garden as a teenager. It rebels, then it tries to please me, but I know– if only because I was a teenager once – it has some ulterior motive.
I know, just as, even though I’ve never been a parent, I understand the other side of that equation. I want to let it run free and wild and find its own way…but, actually, I don’t want it to pull the house down in the process.
I have seen how short a space of time it takes for that to become a very real proposition. I remember (and keep photographs of) the trees growing tall and magnificent and their roots undermining the foundations of walls that I need to stand for a few more decades yet, the front path and rear patio long hidden under soil formation, whole eco-systems in what used to be gutters, elongated, semi-cylindrical flower beds just below the roof-line.
Two decades. That was how long it took for the wood to grow, for the foxes to raise their litters in
the shadow of the fallen greenhouse, and generations of mice to grow up under the workshop.
That’s the lost history of my garden. The one I chose to shut down, in order to rescue the bungalow. I took everything back to the ground. Including the workshop, glass-house, conservatory. I started over from what I thought was a blank page.
Not quite, as it turned out.
The beds that were blanket-sprayed with weed-killer and the cross-cut tree roots force-fed root-kill, didn’t understand that meant they were supposed to give up and let me start over.
Nature is very forgiving. Even in a garden. Especially if you are as lazy a gardener as I am.
We laid it out to a design, but somewhere between that laziness, ineptitude and curiosity I loosened the reins and – to be honest sometimes I regretted that and had to go back in with some severity – and other times, I’ve let be and watched how nature decides what comes and goes, what stays or doesn’t.
Unplanted patches threw up flowers. A process that continues. The mix differs year on year – poppies, white campion, forget-me-nots, green alkanet, vetch, buttercups, thistles, even the
occasional marigold. Dandelions obviously. Very few daisies. The most recent incomers or resurrectionists are the foxgloves. There’s ragged robin and columbine. Bindweed. Garlic mustard. Mallow.
It is no surprise that the brambles survived, and a full-time job it is trying to restrict them to a single hedge. A bay tree rebounded as did a rose and a forsythia. We saved the wisteria.
Where we laid it out, the deck is now splitting and warping, the raised beds that failed to hold the too-large plants we put in them, became a herb garden and are now beginning to rot away. We will need to rebuild them at the end of this season, but for now they have newly planted tomatoes, the
strawberries that should have delivered one season of fruit are in their fourth and clearly exhausted now, I’ll take this year’s harvest and then lift them. The so-called zen space of hard stone and a few shrubs turned out to be anything but zen because the shrubs took over and had to be thinned out, another ongoing process. I imagined a sitting space, a meditation space. It turns out it is meditative only in the way that hand-picking fallen leaves is a spiritual practice of Autumn, and the trimming of acers is the mindfulness of Summer, there’s always pruning to be done. Sadly the japanois screen fences are rotting out, turkey tail eating them from the inside, and their replacements will be less evocative I fear, so I need to remember the joy of having had them.
I am learning what a garden has to teach. Patience. Flexibility. Endurance. Resilience. We’ve only been together six and a half years and I’ve seen so many reincarnations. If I have learned anything it is that I am not in control and that I do not really want to be, not totally.
I remember the regimented beds of my parents' garden, and how hard they worked to keep it neat. It was colourful. They loved it. People stopped in the street to comment on it. Truth is: I’m not up for working that hard. Truth is: I am older now than they were then. Truth is: I’m delighted by some of the weeds that decide to take over. This year it was vetch…subtle purple flowers strangling everything in sight. I’ve pulled most of it away now that it’s finished flowering. The oddity is: that this year, the year that the vetch set about throttling one of my rose bushes is the year that said rose bloomed better than ever before…her white flowers exploding and holding through the rain storms, eventually fading pink-edged, before cascading their petals, even while new buds are emerging.
We dug out another two shrubs from the front, one was dying and the other looked a little pathetic without its support. I had the makings of a flower bed. It spent the spring thinking it might become part of the lawn, until I took a hold and dug it over. I’ve planted more roses. I have no idea if they will take. I dug out splittings of agapanthus from elsewhere and just plonked them in, covering their rootlings and hoping for the best. It rained and rained, and that may have helped. The tiny cuttings are not only standing up straight but sending up small flower stems.
Yesterday I spent hours pulling out the dead stems of the alkanet, and know that there are places where I will need to dig it out entirely. I cut bramble stretches, and got excited when I manage to pull a metre of rootage. Clearing space, for other things. There’s still digging to do. I didn’t get around to reseeding the lawn. I still can’t see the bird table.
But it was good to smell the earth and to feel the rain on my skin.
You might say it's just a garden and a not-well-tended one at that, but if landscape is where the land makes most of the decisions, then I think it qualifies. It is not isolated from the spaces around it. Hedgehogs wander through. Cats patrol, day and night. The occasional rabbit, the occasional fox. Salvias are favoured by bees, the californian sage is preferred by butterflies. The golden rod has escaped, but then I don't know where it came from in the first place. The jays are trying to plant their own oak wood, which I cannot allow, not yet. Squirrels would rather have limes. They too will have to wait their turn. I cut things back, and pull things out, and sometimes I put things in...but so much of what is here, is here because it has chosen to be, with no help from me whatsoever.
