Human Flower Project

It Looks Ready


How firmly to cut back the roses? How lackadaisical to be this spring in the garden, or how obsessive? John Levett is back at it.


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“After a brief interlude of faith-loss”—it’s time.

The gardener begins again

Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

When I was young I liked going to chapel. I didn’t turn up at one on a whim; my mum sent me to Sunday School. I think she was a believer of the Pragmatist School—if there’s something in it you’ll be getting in on the ground floor of salvation; if there isn’t you’ll have a nice few afternoons listening to stories & bashing out some songs.

Not for me. I took to it wholeheartedly. I took to the chapel, the prayer meetings, the Bible study classes, the youth club, the three-times-on-a-Sunday services, the witnessing on the streets & the knocking on doors. It was all the community that I’d never had & I was accepted in totality for what I was. It became my life. Until it wasn’t any more. After a brief interlude of faith-loss I joined the Young Communist League. Different book; same routine.

Just before last Christmas I was watching David Harvey’s online lecture course on Marx’s Capital. After the last session I recalled a similar exercise in interpretation when I was a chapel goer. I’d bought a three-volume study course called ‘Search the Scriptures’ which was designed to take one through the Bible in three years. I must have started the course four or five times; never starting from where I’d left off, always starting from Lesson 1. It was a great lesson that Lesson 1; at a push I could probably recall its substance but never made it to the last volume.

imageNorth-facing and loaded with rambling roses

Photo: John Levett

All of that came back to me when standing at the back door at the start of February looking at the garden. Starting over. Lesson 1. Genesis.

The standing-at-the-back-door routine was, however, not quite the same as last year’s. As ever I had resolved to re-plan. The re-planning is annual but at some time it needs to begin. Currently my prospect is that I will break my neck trying to prune my rambler collection; either from the absence of a flat surface to park a ladder or falling through the roof of the warehouse next door. That needs to be addressed. I want to maintain an alpine collection, raise delphiniums again, cultivate a Monet’s garden collection of irises and generally try & match plants to plot.

The plot has a north-facing aspect. I’d like a south-facing small-holding on the South Downs in Sussex but I’m no longer up to attaching myself as a footpad to a Russian oligarch so I need to address the plot I’ve got, accept the warehouse, deal with the overhanging trees, practice acceptance.

How to do this?

imageRambling Rector overlooking Isphan, another spring

Photo: John Levett

I need to deal with the ramblers. I’ve started on that by cutting back drastically. This I’ll do on a yearly basis. I started with the Albertine on account that it fell off the wall at the end of last year & I’ll cut back each of the others year on year until each is manageable. I’m not taking any out; for me they are the pride of the garden & needed if I’m to consider that I still have a rose collection of note.

The hanging ramblers & the warehouse create considerable shade until early afternoon in the growing months. I have R. Moyseii Geranium & R. Highdownensis there & they don’t flourish; they give wonderful heps but they’re out of place. There’s nowhere else to put them so I might just leave them & work on shade-happy plants to keep company.

There’s a lot of shade on two sides of the garden. I tried to build a shaded plot some years ago with hellebores, ferns and the like but they got neglected & I’m going to have to rejuvenate that space. That’s easy. What is less easy is dealing with those sides that get sun. Here the roses are prolific to such an extent that any interplanting has never worked. What to do?

The problem with roses in what is almost exclusively a rose garden is that one cannot simply lift & replant without soil replacement or a couple of year of lying fallow. One solution is to relocate them to my neighbour’s garden & undertake to maintain them there. We’ve discussed it; I’ve yet to act. It would free up space for an iris parade. Irises need winter sun; mine only had it in the first two years of the garden and they’ve struggled since. I recall being with a friend in Monet’s garden just as the irises had opened. Admiring them and planning how many we’d have, we were asked by an official keeper of the house if we were artists. “We’re gardeners,” we said in unison. It’s why I want irises. It was the year that water rats had eaten the lilies in Monet’s pool.

The reference to Monet’s garden isn’t incidental. There’s nothing in my garden, actual or planned, that isn’t related to memory. Without giving a full autobiography, here are a few associations attached to my garden: Monet, St. Albans, the Horticultural Halls in Victoria, Bloomingdales, George Bernard Shaw, Beconsfield, Dunwich bird sanctuary, Southend Pier, the Edinburgh Festival, Van Morrison, Edward Upward, George Orwell, Luton, Berlin, Norfolk UK, Norfolk Virginia, Ebenezer Howard, Stan Smith, Edith Nesbit, the Humber Bridge, Lavenham church, mum.

imageDeckchair that follows the sun

Photo: John Levett

So digging up the garden, discarding, transplanting, allowing to wither is not just a gardening decision here. This is not uncommon I’m certain. First garden, last garden, garden seen on holiday, garden of the writer, garden of the artist, garden of the gardener and all the associations that attach themselves as gardening and life changes move on together. It’s the place where long biographies get read. Considering it’s in the middle of a public housing estate it’s amazingly quiet; it’s got the quality of being happy-making. I’ve acquired the skill of the thirty minute garden; the walk-around, the prod, the prune, the tie-in, the repot, the hoe—all in thirty minutes a day. We are at one with each other. So why change?

This is my problem with the planning. Resolve, inspiration, research and the rest. Then equivocation. Standing there and remembering the beginning of April when all that’s available is sitting amongst a palette of green before the first bud (Canary Bird) gets noticed followed by everything at once. Then shifting the deckchair through the day to follow the sun, the histories and biographies that get read, the long novels that only I only get through when I’m set up for the day with cushions, time and an empty To-do list.

Standing on the back step this February was lowering. This winter has been relentless in its drabness. The first snowfalls were fun because so rare in this place but then the drizzle, the continuous greyness and slushiness, the east winds without the sharp sun that compensates. The garden was sodden and sad. One of the advantages of growing ‘historic’ roses is that most of the pruning gets done after the single flowering (unless left for heps) and most of species need little attention bar thinning out. I trimmed up & the tidying got underway. In the last week we’ve had the first stretches of days of sun. Hoeing has been done, the first rose feed too. I’ve bought in mulch and hoed it in, repaired borders. It looks ready for something.

imageFebruary 2010 in the author’s garden, Cambridge, England

Photo: John Levett

What something? Enter Cecil. Cecil was someone I met sometime in the 1970s. My mum and I used to travel around East Anglia looking at churches and gardens. Some of the finest churches are in the Marshland just south of The Wash. We were visiting Terrington St. Clement one holiday Monday at Whitsun time. Curiously the church was closed so we began walking around the village. We came across Cecil tending the front plot of his cottage and got chatting. You couldn’t have crammed in another plant and what was crammed in were campanulas; the garden was stacked with them. It turned out that during the last war Cecil was one of a company who fought their way up the spine of Italy and upon the Italian surrender was dispatched to a mountain in northern Italy where he awaited action which never came. He busied himself with seed collecting having seen the whole cycle of of an alpine year. The seed he brought back was as happy as Larry in Norfolk and it was only when it started flowering that he bothered to find out that it was campanula. That started him off into collecting every species and variety of campanula he could find—nickable, swapable, collectable or buyable. He had satisfied himself that he was an obsessive and pleased so to be. Find out what brings you joy; find out what gets you up in the morning; find out what takes you outside just to walk around the plant; find out what’s impossible to grow and grow it. Don’t read a book; plant it, sit with it. It grows or fails. Cecil’s words. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Beckett’s words.

What something? My roses were always my obsession and I have them now. The garden this year will be a little later than last but it’ll be looking much like it did last year. Settle for comfort? Somewhere there’s a space for another obsession which will take me through the next decade. I’ve lined up the candidates.


Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10 at 02:55 PM

Comments

at least you’re faced with decisions about living plants
here in South Australia my beautiful collection of Bourbon roses has been decimated by years of dry
the driest state on the driest continent isn’t really meant for roses
and yet
they struggle on in graveyards
and in my dying garden [a graveyard of another kind]

Posted by india on 03/21 at 05:08 AM
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