In the Garden
One can garden and one can go to a garden. I full under the group of people who must understand the ‘to’ as being part of an invitation and not as a verb. Gardens are places that I go to - the meadow in the middle of my memories and the place of endless imaginations. Truthfully, I do not know how to garden. The sub-category of putting flowers together equally evades me. I can tell you not to mix white flowers with red flowers and I know that my favourite flowers are a simple arrangement of white tulips. But I lack the talent to action any of this from seed to reality.
I adore flowers. But for me the main event, the headline act, the acme of excitement is a proper garden. Proper gardens - this is my post and I’ll decide, involve multiple flowerbeds put together in wonderfully haphazard order, a lawn of some sort, hidden corners, a stone wall, a warm sunny day, space to run around, space to lie down on cool grass, a tree to climb, a big house with some link to history attached to it, a whole open afternoon, the promise of a walk with someone you love, this garden must be patient against my mind as I stroll around it, I’d like the hope of a benign gardener (or even better, a grandparent) around the corner and on it goes. Because, in truth, the garden is as much a real place as it is an imagined space. It is the place where a lot of memories are shored up - safely held on some endless childhood day where my child’s imagination ran wild and ham sandwiches were handed out. There are, of course, real gardens - the beautiful lawns, the sort that a National Trust membership will assist with when the fancy takes. And the garden-variety gardens that friends and family beautifully maintain. These are the spaces where love, time and commitment hold forth.
When I reach back into my memories - and more on memories later - there are a few gardens that come back very quickly. The rose garden at Cheltenham College where my history teacher took us, one softly warm June day, to tell us about Disraeli’s second premiership. Why the rose garden? Well, it was nicer than a classroom. It also sat well with Benjamin Disraeli’s personality as an almost dandy - insofar that his greatest campaign was himself. There is a very lovely story about Dizzy - that as his coffin was lowered in the earth in 1881, the attention of the crowded mourners and reporters fixed on a simple primrose wreath amidst the mass of floral tributes left in the churchyard at Hughenden. It had been sent by Queen Victoria, with a simple message attached - ‘His favourite flowers’. So yes, the rose garden was an apt place to learn about One Nation Conservatism. And then there is the garden that Roger Rosewell kept. This is the sort of garden that must be fictional, so wonderfully devised for children that it was, replete with a chapel just a long a secret path beyond the tumble-down wall. At one end stood the mediaeval house and between that and the chapel was just about every game, imagination and adventure that my legs and mind could give me. It was truly wonderful. And then there are the gardens spread across England that I roamed on long ago summer holidays - the hedge mazes, the rolling lawns, the delicate private gardens, the blooms tidily arranged for guests to enjoy. I loved them all. They were -they are - where I go to find myself when I need to lose myself. Then there are the small London gardens - the smell of jasmine on brick walls, the potted flowers and the most hallowed and whispered about non-commodity of a metropolis, an actual city garden. There are many real gardens and I am grateful to all of them.
But a note on memories, on the nature of our past experiences and how gardens fall into this. Gardens are like memories in that they hover between the real and not quite real, the sublime and the ordinary. I have been re-reading Tom’s Midnight Garden, having stumbled across into it in Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden. Tom’s garden, the garden at the centre of this perennial child’s favourite, is wondrous. In that extra hour when the house’s grandfather clock chimes 13 he escapes (from himself, from his boredom, from his comforts, from his ‘she’s worse, because she’s a child-lover, and she’s kind’ aunt and I suspect, like all of us, from the fear that descends when the moon is high and our shields are low) to the new garden that has been gifted him. Though of course - and a plot spoiler - this garden has not been gifted to him. It is the garden of someone else’s childhood and as such he is more an interloper than guest. And this is the thing with gardens and memories. They are deeply personal and often dreamlike. Tom’s narration of this garden - ‘He could not think why he felt so happy, until he remembered the garden’, ‘he promised silently to the trees and the lawn and the greenhouse’, ‘he would hide, silent and safe as a bird, among the richness of leaf and bough and tree-trunk’, ‘he always remembered his first tree in this garden’ feels to me very similar to how I inhabit my own memories. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a beautiful illustration of the wonder of childhood, it is also a retelling of how, as adults, we find ourselves indulging in the make belief garden of our formative lives and the memories we long to return to. We are both owner, interloper and a guest to our memories. There are the memories that we want to enjoy, ones we return to again and again - sometimes as a balm and sometimes as a painful duel between truth and desire, and the mundane ‘oh gosh, I’d forgotten about that’ memories that often have more meaning than we might imagine. Tom’s Midnight Garden, the garden that he is rapturous to return to, when viewed as a garden created out of the memories of another person is quite peculiar. He cannot leave footprints in this garden, he can only enjoy it when Hatty dreams of it and he is - ultimately - evicted and replaced. Much like memories then - we can share them and recreate but we cannot leave new footprints or maintain falsehoods.
The books starts with Tom lamenting a spoilt summer with his brother Peter, one that was meant to be full of tree climbing and exploration. I’m still lamenting this myself. And maybe there is something in that - my favourite gardens, like my memories, are the one’s I have inhabited and grown up in and will always long for.
