TRANSLATING PARADISE
Copyright ©
Carmel
Bird
August 1999.
All rights reserved.
This is an essay I wrote for the new collection The Nature of Gardens which is edited by Peter Timms, published by Allen and Unwin
The Lord God planted
a garden eastward in Eden.
Genesis 2,8
My father cultivated our suburban garden; he also had an interesting library, some of the books being books about gardening and gardens. I took an early delight in the garden, and also in the books. In fact I developed a lust for reading, and also a lust for, not so much gardens, as flowers, taking inspiration from pages and petals. There were two small olive green-covered books with elaborate gold embossing that I found specially fascinating. They were by Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee and Life and Flowers. The stately prose and the curious way of looking at the world tickled (it’s the only word) me. You can’t easily go past a sentence such as: ‘Among the plants that have ceased to defend themselves, the most striking case is that of the Lettuce’.
It seems that the white juice in wild lettuces is latex which is there to defend the plants against ‘the attacks of the slugs’. In cultivated lettuces, however, there is less latex, and so the plants are susceptible to snails and slugs. ‘One is inclined to think that the cultivated Lettuce loses its head a little.’ (I note that I keep packets of snail-bait in bright green boxes on my bookshelves, sideways on, like books. I do this so that they are handy and I don’t have to go to the garden shed to fetch them when I need them which is often, against, as Maeterlinck says, ‘the gluttony of the slugs and snails’. Also in the bookshelves you will find handy orange boxes of fertiliser.)
‘Let us mention the ingenious ideas of some very simple flowers, in which the grooms and brides are born, love and die in the same corolla. The typical system is well enough known: the stamens, or male organs, generally frail and numerous, stand grouped around the robust and patient pistil.’ The events take place in a ‘dazzling tabernacle of love’ and in most flowers the female organ is ‘a more or less viscid little tuft which, at the end of a frail stalk, patiently awaits the coming of the pollen’. There are many, many methods by which the plant can be fertilised, and Maeterlinck takes pleasure
in describing them, always in human terms.
A flower I liked very much when I was a child was Nigella Damascena, commonly known as Love-in-a-mist or Devil-in-a-bush, a small sky blue star held within a nest of long thin tangled leaves. Fertilisation, according to Maeterlinck, takes place thus: ‘At the source of the flower, the five extremely long pistils stand close-grouped in the centre of the azure crown, like five queens clad in green gowns, haughty and inaccessible. Around them crowd hopelessly the innumerable throng of their lovers, the stamens, which do not come up to their knees. And now, in the heart of this palace of sapphires and turquoises, in the gladness of the summer days, begins the drama without words or catastrophe which one might expect, the drama of powerless, useless, motionless waiting. But the hours that pass are the flower’s years: its brilliancy fades, its petals fall and the pride of the great queens seems at last to bend under the weight of life. At a given moment, as though obeying the secret and irresistible command of love, which deems the proof to have lasted long enough, with a concerted and symmetrical movement, comparable with the harmonious parabolas of a five-fold fountain falling into its basin, they all together bend backwards and gracefully cull the golden dust of the nuptial kiss on the lips of their humble lovers.’
And that was only one kind of flower. There are other descriptions of the goings-on that are equally ingenious and entrancing. A child could learn a lot less by watching Sex Life on television. Richard Attenborough shows you some of these flowery rituals in his programs, but he is rather less frank, and also less romantic than Maeterlinck. Who shall tell us, Maeterlinck asks, the mystery of the miraculous strength of the squirting cucumber?
Some years before I read Life and Flowers I planted, when I was six, my first garden. I put in the bulbs of red tulips, little brown papery globes. The garden bed was a soft triangle, almost heart-shaped. I can’t remember having seen real tulips before I planted mine, perhaps I had, but I know I had a colouring book of botanical drawings in which there was a picture of a tulip, and I was too scared to paint the tulip in case I messed it up. We also had a framed reproduction of an exquisite watercolour of two tulips boldly candy-striped in pink and white, one open, one half closed, one stem bent, one naked, thin, vertical. There’s a russet butterfly nearby, and I really liked that too. I realised the tulip was an emblem of Holland, and I was interested in Holland; I had Dutch dolls and a curious little china bowl with a matching china spoon on which were painted an image of a sunset, a tree and a Dutch windmill. But it wasn’t the dutchness of the tulips that really got to me, it was the idea, probably from pictures, of the scarlet silky cups, their throats slashed with gold, their stamens black furry spider-leg shapes with a life of their own. In due course my own tulips gleamed in the bed, a pool of crimson water.
The earliest recording of a tulip is a drawing in a twelfth-century Italian Bible manuscript. The plant probably originated in the eastern Mediterranean. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Austrian ambassador to Turkey took some tulip bulbs home with him when he left Turkey. A French botanist took some from Vienna to Holland, and they became very popular and highly prized. A craze for them developed, and by the 1630s people were speculating in tulip bulbs, and the phenomenon became known as ‘tulipomania’. Hundreds of people were ruined when the bottom fell out of the tulip market in 1637. Tasmania, by the way, where I grew up, was ‘discovered’ by the Dutch five years after the tulip crash. There I was, three centuries later, another victim of tulipomania. Maeterlinck was still alive when I planted my tulips. And I don’t think I planted any more red tulips until last year. What happened was our beloved cat died, and when we went to the nursery to get things to plant on her grave, the girl at the nursery said that they were giving away bags of red tulip bulbs with every sale that day. When the tulips came out they were not quite the miracle of my first tulips, but they were very shiny, very red.
Among the children I knew when I was a child, I was the biggest flower freak. My father would have to stop the car on country roads so that I could gather wild flowers from the edge of the bush. I was forever taking roses and prunus blossom to the teacher, forever nicking flowers hanging over fences. I took over a whole garden bed where I grew prize-winning gladioli. I adored petunias, the velvety purple ones and the white frilly ones, I liked to suck the nectar and eat the petals. One day, as I removed the white-green head of a guilder rose from somebody’s tree, as I stood for a moment staring at the snowball of captured air, a red-faced man appeared from behind the fence and yelled that if he caught me doing that again he would ram the flower down my bloody throat. Perhaps there is a motif of flower-eating in my imagination; I find it in my fiction. I am writing a novel that starts with a family eating fish soup in which are floating the petals of marigolds. And inCherry Ripe a boy watches through the window as a girl eats a daffodil belonging to the teacher.
‘He sees her as she goes up to the daffodil. He sees her bend over and sniff the flower, and then he watches as she strokes the stem and leaves upwards with her palm. She cups the yellow trumpet head in her hand and stares down into it. Then she opens her mouth wide and she eats the daffodil. Pearly Power has eaten the daffodil.’
When the house where I grew up was being sold, years after the deaths of my mother and father, I visited the house, and went to the place where I grew the tulips. The heart-shaped bed was there, but it was filled with a kind of weed we used to call shivery grass. This is a densely packed grass of pale green, very fine blades, with balloon-like seed-heads made from papery scales. I sensed the grace of the past life of the red tulips, but only because the flowers were vivid in my memory; anyone else would have seen only a small flower bed full of weeds. The shape of the space was there, but the soul of my garden was invisible. Only for me was the place haunted by tulips. One of the delights of flowers is that they are ephemeral; so bright, so alive, so fragile, so quickly withered and gone. The shape of the rest of our old garden is there, all the garden beds with the paths running between them, the fruit trees old and troubled. In spite of the wilderness, the design set out by my father in the thirties is still present.
There used to be a pear tree, but it is gone now. Next to the pear tree, my father built a playhouse which has survived. I used to boil up flowery concoctions on a gas ring in the playhouse - rose, lavender, violet water. On this final visit, I go into the playhouse with some friends, and we take some photos. One of these is taken through the open doorway, out into the chaos of the overgrown garden, the place where my gladioli used to be. When this picture was printed, the garden seemed to have become more ordered than it really was, and there appear to be white cabbage moths flitting through it. These are only tricks of the camera. The odd thing is that the open doorway and the garden scene beyond closely resemble the picture painted for the cover of one of my books, years ago - the doorway, the colours in the garden, and the white moths. Had I photographed the tulip bed, would phantom scarlet tulips have come dancing into view?
Our garden was an ordinary suburban one, and not really very old. Yet it was of a type that you don’t see much any more because people’s needs in gardens change, fashions change. We had no pool, no barbecue, no patio. Lots of fruit trees, raspberry canes, vegetable patches, roses, blossom trees, lemon tree, passionfruit vine, flower beds, ornamental shrubs, Virginia creeper, mint, thyme and rosemary, palm tree, lawns and a cypress hedge. Chooks. In summer there was a whole lattice wall of sweet peas - dreamy pastel colours and heavenly perfume. I think the only native plant we had was a grevillea, spiky dark leaves and convoluted pink and white flowers that reminded me of snails. Ours was a garden that owed its nature to the modification over time of gardens in England. It was a world, fenced in to contain us, our lives. Over the back fence there was a dairy, a lane full of blackberries and wild mint, and a small orchard. The smell of the mint, and the smell of apples rotting on the ground, of rosemary, of raspberries in the sun. Of cut grass. Apricots. Cherries. Damp earth. Lavender. Lily of the valley. Solomon seal.
My father was always pruning and grafting and budding, weeding and spraying. We also had a man called Mr Larrissey who came once or twice a year to do some kind of special spraying of the fruit trees. He wore goggles and a mask and gloves and was swathed in mysterious and terrifying grey cloth. He carried a drum of poison and had a huge brass spray that sent out a fine fan of mist. We had to stay indoors when Mr Larrissey was there, and we watched him from the sunroom windows, a figure of mystery and terror.
He was spraying, we knew, deadly arsenic of lead, something we pronounced as ‘arse lick of lead’.
We ate the vegetables and the fruit, made jams and preserves and exchanged buckets of these things with neighbours. We were forever cutting the flowers to put in vases, and making posies and bouquets. My grandfather lived in the country, in an ancient house with a steeply pitched roof. The vegetable garden was at the back of the house, and at the front was a garden divided into four square flower beds. The block was fenced with pickets, and nestled in the heart of a forest of tall gum trees. My grandfather kept beehives among the trees, not far from the house. Down the track were the horses and the sawmill. In the four garden beds my grandfather grew flowers, particularly dahlias and chrysanthemums. All colours and types of these, little pom-poms and huge shaggy mops, petals straight and spiky, petals looping round in great curlicues. Black-red, yellow, russet gold, fairy pink and whitest white. These flowers were not for casual picking. They were for breeding; they went to flower shows or they just stood there in the beds until they died. I wanted to tunnel through the tall stalks; I wanted to pick bunches of flowers to take home. Grandfather’s front garden was a forbidden paradise.
This was a fairly typical colonial set-up, with the piece of bush cleared, the house and garden fenced in as if against evil, and the plants from the northern hemisphere cultivated to feed the family and embellish their lives. The bush is a dense grey-green, frightening, dark; the garden is a pool of light and air, an alien paradise in a hostile setting, a scene translated from elsewhere, put down in a foreign place. Even when I was child I could see that there was something strange about the way we had drive up tracks into the bush to discover the house and garden in the depths of the forest. It was perfectly clear that the bush was going to win in the very end.
I sometimes used to sit on a hillside near our house, in a very old and decrepit graveyard where early Scottish settlers were buried in tombs dug into the side of the hill and enclosed by rusting iron doorways. I would look down into the valley, across the town to the river. On the slope nearest me was the Chinese garden, where a couple of small men in straw hats worked
up and down the rows of vegetables. This was another mythic, paradisal place, a place with a promise of other worlds beyond the everyday.
So often, when people recall the days of their childhood, they speak in terms of paradise.
‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth , and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.’
Wordsworth, ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’
People speak of gardens as paradise, and in any case, paradise is a garden. It is a place of surpassing beauty and of supreme bliss, of sensual and spiritual delight and perfection. God is there; it is the very heart of creation. We come from paradise and we hope to go to paradise. In the meantime we try to imitate paradise on earth. We make gardens. We have left childhood behind, have gained experience and knowledge, and no longer have access to the safety, innocence, freshness and beauty we knew when we were very young. We yearn for a return to this place we have lost; our yearning can be expressed in our love of growing things, and in our love of the shapes and spaces, the consoling colours, textures, sounds and geometries of gardens.
And it was natural when British people settled here (I always pause over that word ‘settle’ because it makes the people sound like a swarm of bees) that they would set about imposing their own visions on the land. It takes time, a lot of time, for deep perceptions of what constitutes a personal paradise to change. In the second half of this century there has been a gradual move towards planting native gardens, excluding foreign plants.
One way of interpreting the Fall in the Garden of Eden is to take it as a description of the way we must move from innocence to knowledge, and in the process feel pain and lose our access to what is most lovely. The first clear intimation of the death that is awaiting us at the end of life on earth.
And the central secret we learn, the secret of secrets, is the story of how we are made. So it’s the story of sex, the mechanism of creation, and sex is what gardens turn out to be all about.
We are still searching for the answer to the other question, that of where it all really started and how it got going. When we know that, maybe the whole show will be over, and the story played out in the Fall will be writ large, and there will be absolutely nothing left. Once you get the answer to the puzzle, there’s really nothing left to do anyway. Does the Book of Genesis offer us a warning that as soon as we know the real secret of life, there will be no more life?
In the meantime we make gardens.
The valley of the Nile in Egypt is where we suppose the earliest gardens might have been cultivated, and where paradise is often imaginatively located. So when we name a river ‘Nile’ we invoke visions of paradise. There’s a Nile river in Tasmania, and on the banks of this river is the property ‘Patterdale’ where an English artist built a house and garden in the 1830s.
This was John Glover who came to Tasmania with his wife and one son, his other sons and their families having already settled in Hobart. He was sixty-four when he arrived here, already a well-known painter of romantic landscapes somewhat similar to those of Claude Lorrain. He worked in watercolour as well as oils. His house in the Lake District of England was Blowick Farm where it so happens the romantic poet Wordsworth had also lived, and there is an echo of the poet’s nostalgia for the ideal scenes of paradise and arcady in Glover’s landscapes. Also within the romantic movement in nineteenth century European painting, were the pictures of rustic cottages with their simple, dream-like gardens full of flowers and vegetables, speaking of peace and a pre-industrial harmony.
When Glover started to paint the Tasmanian landscape, the soft European atmosphere disappeared, and he represented almost realistically the strange scenes of wilderness before his eyes, the unfamiliar light, and colours, and the weird of the vegetation. He remarked on the way the distant hills were visible through the branches of the gums. Even his pastoral Tasmanian landscapes have lost the European look, and are distinctly colonial.
And so he came to the village of Deddington on the Nile, and built his house and made his garden, and then he painted a picture. This is ‘A View of the Artist’s House and Garden, in Mill’s Plains, Van Diemen’s Land, 1835’. The picture is in the Art Gallery of South Australia, having been first exhibited in London. It is Glover’s picture of his paradise on earth, a Tasmanian cottage with its cultivated garden growing up around it, set in a scene of natural wilderness, a place from which the local native Tasmanians had fled when the Glover family arrived. It is like and also very unlike British paintings of cottage and gardens, for this house would seem to float, with its cultivated flowers and vegetables, on a sea below a haunted mountain which looms darkly close behind. I have always thought this picture is really spooky.
The sky is blue and flecked with a few clouds. A line runs horizontally across the centre of the picture, and this line, actually a primitive road, marks the place where the cleared land meets the wild bush. The hills rise up above this line, with, to the right of the centre, wooded with snow gums and manna gums, a mountain shaped like a pyramid, rises up. Almost in the centre of the painting is a large native tree-fern, like a sprightly fountain, painted to resemble an Egyptian date-palm. As the romantic painters of Europe would import Roman columns into their scenes to suggest ancient times, Glover has invoked the dawn of civilisation in Egypt, in his landscape by the Tasmanian river Nile. To the left of the centre, placed on the central line, is the house.
This house is of dark golden stone, with a high gable roof, unlike Tasmanian buildings, reminiscent of houses in the Lake District to which Glover had once planned to retire. He had sold Blowick Farm to buy an idyllic landscape painting by Claude Lorrain. Patterdale, and hence the painting, is very bound up with nostalgia for the Lake District, and is the artist’s paradise, his dream of a return to the innocence of childhood. Beside the house is a studio facing north-west, and a verandah feathered with young vines, as well as a low hot house with glass panes in its roof. The house is two- storeyed, with five tall windows and a central door, like a doll’s house. Before the house, filling half the painting, is the garden.
This garden is set out in a simple squared design, with straight paths between the beds, one of these leading up to the front door. A golden light in the central tree-fern is echoed in a burst of gold on two bushes of broome in the foreground. A little ornamental pond stands between two smaller tree-ferns to the right. A native shrub is flecked with snowy flowers in the foreground on the far left. Some red hollyhocks, white foxgloves, scarlet geraniums, and a predominance of fleshy pink roses in full bloom. There is a vegetable plot. Some plants would doubtless have come from Hobart, and the family brought seeds, seedlings and plants in pots with them on the boat from England.
This was the last painting Glover did before sending sixty-eight works to London for an exhibition, and it would have brought before the people in England his vision of his new paradise, part transplant of the old. The paintings sailed on the Protector, with a cargo which included the skins of kangaroos, possums and seals, as well as whalebone. Thus the cargo contained a striking record of the way colonists might make one kind of paradise while destroying another.
The native Tasmanians quietly disappeared from the area when the Glovers came. Their absence is no real surprise. The paradise depicted in the painting is a kind of alien fairyland which would, for one thing, have scared the wits out of them. I see in this painting a strangeness, a weird atmosphere of stillness. Everything has been arrested, but is about to shift, as if there are other narratives just out of frame, or hidden behind the flowers, lurking in the house, peering from the upstairs windows. Kind of like those pictures in children’s books where it says, ‘ Here is the garden; can you find the monkey, the rabbit, the snake?’ And it is interesting that there are no people, no animals to be seen. Their absence strikes a haunted note. I imagine the plants feel dislocated, are sitting up, alert, waiting for a command to move. Something un-earthly breathes in this picture, some faint element of the surreal. There is a godly glow shining from above. Light is sprinkled across the tips of the flowers in bloom, across the edges of the leaves. An element of magic informs the painting, as if Glover were the conjurer who brought the scene into sudden being, not once, but twice; once as a reality and once as a picture on canvas.
The house is still there, a startling apparition with its high pitched roof, standing in a green field below the mountain. The garden, even its shape, is gone. A few daffodils come up every spring, that’s all. All gone, the roses, the tree-ferns, the pond, the invisible monkey, the snake. Disappeared. I went there last year, knowing there was no garden, but wishing to look at the space where it had been. It wasn’t too hard to imagine it back in place, since the painting itself has that magic quality, the sense that the garden is quivering on the edge of reality, now you see it, now you don’t. I went to the Deddington chapel for which Glover helped to raise funds. In the grounds of the chapel lies an ugly great concrete slab marked with John Glover’s name, his dates 1767 - 1849, and the word ‘Artist’. Not a flower in sight. By another trick of the camera, two of the photos I took have become superimposed one on the other - the little white chapel sits forlornly in the dry field, and over it like a sheet of dirty glass, is the image of the slab of concrete bearing the name of John Glover.
Because the house is still there, and because the painting exists, it would be possible to recreate the garden at Patterdale. Such a project would at least provide a sweeter memorial to the artist than the severe grave by the chapel. It would be a bit like a facsimile edition of an old book - not an imitation, not the real thing, but the next best. It’s the kind of thing we do these days, like building copies of the Tom Thumb and sailing round Tasmania, following the voyage of Bass and Flinders. We have a bit of an obsession for simulating the past, as if things were going ahead too fast, the past receding too swiftly into the mist. The recreation of the artist’s version of paradise, using his template as found in the painting, is perhaps justifiable, but perhaps not possible. Time does move on; other people own the land. Maybe they don’t want a whole lot of flesh-coloured roses and sprouting tree-ferns and bus-loads of tourists. Maybe all we need, when it comes down to it, is the painting.
I have seen two other Australian gardens where the present owners are recreating and developing domestic gardens on the original design brought here by European imaginations. One belongs to the Cottons at Kelvedon in Swansea in Tasmania, and the other belongs to the Forges at Friesia in Hawthorn in Victoria.
Kelvedon is outside the small seaside village of Swansea on the east coast of Tasmania. Separated from the nearby open sea by grassy flats and a lagoon, is the white timber, red brick and golden stone farmhouse built by the Cottons, beginning in 1829 when Frances and Anna Maria arrived from England. With the Cottons came Dr George Story, a surgeon to soldiers and convicts, who also lived in the house, and whose dispensary and library were at one end of the building. The family who met me when I visited Kelvedon were the fifth generation of Cottons to live there. One of the most
striking aspects to Kelvedon is the fact that the garden which George Story designed has lasted through time, and is now undergoing a vigorous program of preservation and re-development. The vision and imagination of Dr Story are still active in the garden - his neat and detailed plans can be seen in the records kept at the house.
This garden was being made at much the same time as the garden at Patterdale which was begun in 1832. In front of the two storey house with its slender french doors on the ground floor and twelve-paned windows on the first floor, is the principal garden, shielded from the sea winds by a row of trees. These are arranged so that when you walk across the grass in front of the house into the garden, you notice first the row of trees which consists of two each of cypress, laburnum, ash, hawthorn and Norfolk Island pine. Between the house and the trees, you walk on lawn into which is set garden beds, some rectangular, some round, the latter naively edged with large irregular blocks of stone.
When I was there the beds were all in the process of being freshly planted, two of them with dozens of roses. To the right and left of the garden beds there are stands of various trees such as lilacs (descended from lilacs which Anna Maria brought with her on the ship), bay trees and cypresses. To the far left is a dry stone wall clothed in the sweet silvery leaves of wormwood. And just in front of the wall are rectangular vegetable plots edged with timber. To the far right, and through a gate behind the row of trees is another little avenue of trees under which are the ancestral graves of the Cottons - some grassy, some covered with shells and pebbles, all marked with little headstones. The children can come here to play. This family graveyard is so much sweeter, more touching and less forlorn than the place where John Glover lies in Deddington, and I wondered for the first time where all the other Glovers had been buried.
There’s a pink rose blooming by the house, a rose which Anna Maria hung in a pot in the rigging of the ship during fair weather on the voyage out. Other reminders of the past are the huge black whale blubber pots to be seen here and there. George Story brought with him many seeds and bulbs, and he stocked the garden with flowers, vegetables and herbs, the latter being plants he used in his medical practice. He was active in horticulture world-wide, exchanging information and plants with the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, and with Kew Gardens in London. The is something very touching about the colonial doctor in his remote little seaside garden, reaching out to the great gardens of the world like this. And all the eucalypts in Israel came from seeds sent there in 1846 from Kelvedon.
The plants, and the design of the garden, as much as the house, carry the traces and souvenirs of the hearts and imaginations of the English people who came there last century. This is partly so because of the vision and energy of Dr Story and of Frances and Anna Maria Cotton, and partly because the Cottons are still there after five generations. The past is stamped into the garden and can be felt in the present, touched, tasted and smelt. Dr Story made a rose walk, and from the rose petals he made rose water, some of which still remains, retaining its aroma, in a bottle dated 1845.
From this rural garden on the coast of Tasmania, I went to the suburban formality of Friesia in Hawthorn, Victoria. This is a later garden, the house being completed in 1888. William Brahe was the German and Prussian Consul, and this was his house, a gracious single-storey place with a strong inspiration from renaissance Italy. By the time Warwick Forge, the present owner of the house, arrived in 1970, the house and garden were derelict. The last inhabitants before the Forges had continued to live here when it was a ruin, a lost and rotting paradise. These were the grand-daughters of Professor Cole who is renowned for his nineteenth century Book Arcade in the heart of Melbourne. These sisters were the ones who let the garden run riot, let the paths disappear, allowed a great tangle of ivy to roam over everything. They lived without gas, electricity or telephone in the sixties, and their rooms were in some places open to the sky. Neighbours would see the shadowy figures of these women flitting about with lighted candles inside the house at night.
It is a miracle that the Forges have been able to bring the derelict house and garden back to places of dignity and grace, and to preserve some of the intentions of William Brahe in both. The house stands in an area known as St James Park, and in 1982 this became the first in Melbourne to be named as an urban conservation zone. The movement to preserve districts considered to be of historic value is a kind of bureaucratic attempt to keep vigil on the fantasies of the past that flow into the present, giving urban places their particular spirit. It is part of an urgency that is now felt by many people to save some of the works of the past in domestic buildings and in gardens, giving a continuity to things which all too easily become lost.
The garden at Friesia is divided into four rooms. The front garden is symmetrical, a survival of the skeleton of the old design, with paths radiating from a central circular bed where the Forges have planted a Brazilian date palm, a tree very much in keeping with the vintage of the place, for late Victorian gardeners loved to grow trees from the far corners of the earth. Two plants from the original garden survive here, the banksia rose and the cabbage tree. Low box hedges line the tiled paths and outline the shapes of the beds. In the far left corner as you walk away from the house is a fountain, built over a second world war bomb shelter.
The rear garden is more informal, and follows the original design which is a lawn in the centre with beds around it where there are cottage garden flowers, climbing roses, fruit trees. A gardenia and a black-eyed susan survive from last century. There’s now a shop in the old stable at the very back, where you can buy books on gardens and gardening. To the west of the house is a modern outdoor dining garden, and to the east is the walk to the main door, which is at the side of the house. Here are camphor laurel, magnolia grandiflora, photinia, all giving mottled shade and a varied, leafy canopy.
At Kelvedon there is a deep sense of continuity in the garden; at Friesia there is a sense of history retrieved, of an old pattern being rediscovered, picked up and followed through. These are lucky gardens which have been defended and salvaged against weeds and pests and time; they are living places which capture pieces of the past and make the present graceful with shade and shape and colour and scent. They are small southern hemisphere reminders of the people who came here last century from the other side of the world, translating their personal visions which they stamped on the landscape.
But more than that, they, like every garden, are expressions a human desire and longing for paradise, for innocence, for glimpses of perfection and for participation in the creation of our world, and our desire to make a difference, to mark where we have been. Because they are living expressions, they are forever subject to change, and so are reminders of our mortality. Can we ever get back to innocence, to paradise? The metaphor in Genesis demonstrates the difficulty, telling how God defended the garden against Adam’s return by placing in the way some guards in the form of cherubim, and ‘a flaming sword which turned every way’. If we are really going to get into the garden, it isn’t going to be easy. The gardens we plant, the gardens we visit, can take us, for a short time, a short distance into paradise, give brief glimpses of our heart’s desire.
Maeterlinck, Maurice: Life and Flowers, George Allen and Sons, London, 1911.
Wordsworth, William: ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Rescollections of Early Childhood’.