I found a gardening book that had belonged to my Father. It was a gift to him from a Professor of Botany at Bristol University, where he was Head Gardener, and he would consult it like a Bible. He was a gardener all his working life, a very quiet man, totally absorbed by his work and the natural world. I remember the first time my Father said the seasons 'weren't right', which troubled him greatly.
From Bristol, he took the position of Head Gardener at Melksham Court, a large country house in the Cotswolds, its garden filled with mazes, pools, waterfalls, topiary avenues. secret areas with statues of gods and horses, and lots of woodland. We lived in a small tied cottage on the grouds - my Father as gardener and my Mother as the cleaner at the house - and during the long periods of the owner's absence, I had full run of the place.
My memories of it today are as much a blend of the remembered as the imagined. My fascination with the liminal space between garden and wilderness no doubt comes from a childhood spent in this enclosed, magical world, where I would run from the formal Cotswold gardens into the strangeness of the Stichcombe woods.
'The Deserted Garden' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning echoes much of my own childhood experience. In nature, there is often a strange alchemy that forges something more than the sum of its parts. The balance between flora, fauna, time, place and history creates a luminous, sentient landscape, its moods and atmospheres subtly changing, as the shifting light of a bright moon or the morning lights up all in its path. This magical presence is usually associated with wild places, but from my Father, I learned that, if you are sensitive to it, a garden can evoke the same poetry.
