Books Do Furnish A Room

Wolves and trees

An interesting article in The Times yesterday, about the impact of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone national park.  In a word, it's had a dramatic effect on the elk population and this, in turn, has allowed trees - notably the aspen - to flourish again.  The offical abstract of the research paper concludes with the words, "The initial consequences of wolf recovery support the premise that wolves may naturally achieve densities above their threshold for ecological effectiveness and contribute to significant changes in ecosystems, including the amelioration of ungulate-caused landscape simplification".  That means that the top predator can survive, that it eats herbivores, which allows more plants to grow!

There's a valuable lesson for my beloved Scotland here - we need keystone species.  The introduction of the the wolf, the lynx, and the beaver are essential to regenerate the forests and the wild country (as well as being required by EU law).  The risks to man are trivial, and the Yellowstone experiment should encourage us all. 

Garden of the Finzi-Continis

I (and Rhys, as I know from a comment on Harriet's recent post on translation) have been reading Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Bassani is famous for this novel, and also for discovering and publishing Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo - which I've named in Italian, rather than calling it The Leopard, because I like the word so much!  I don't know why it should be, but I enjoy a number of Italian writers - Primo Levi, Italo Calvino among them - rather more than I do, say, French.  No doubt this is my loss! The book came up in Rhys' comment because the translation was 'clunky', a criticism I certainly wouldn't make about mine.  Own up, Rhys, are we reading the same one!? 

I'm reading it in the new Penguin Classics edition, very smart in their silver livery, translated by Jamie McKendrick: this elegant book is complemented by a cover photograph of a girl in summer, drink and racquet in hand, oozing the restrained and demure eroticism which pervades the early chapters.

It's a beautifully written novel about Jews in Ferrara during the Mussolini years, the young boy growing up concious of the Finzi-Continis as slightly apart due to their wealth, but also to an ironic detachment of the soul.  But he grows close to Micol, the young girl, at tennis parties in the garden when the racial laws were beginning to make it difficult for Jews to participate fully elsewhere in society.  But before he declares his burgeoning love, Micol goes away.

She returns, but in his passion, he is uncertain, clumsy, and makes all the mistakes of adolescence - and enjoys the tortures of rejection and betrayal - under the lengthening shadows of political chaos.  He is banished by Micol, who is banished eternally by being transported to Germany with her family, and "no one knows if they have any grave at all".  We learned this right at the beginning, so the sunshine and the laughter is always guilty, always dark and nervous.  Beautifully written, but too wistfully gloomy for me, though I loved the early chapters.

Walking round London 3

A vigorous seven mile walk on Saturday, the next stage of my walk round London.  I'd planned to do more, and planned it for the Sunday, but fears of Noye's Fludde made me change the day.  Started off in a railway station, South Kenton, and walked for about a mile and a half through residential areas, all of them with concreted front gardens for their cars, most dispiriting.  But then, into Fryent Country Park, starting with the ascent of 282 foot Barn Hill, up through pleasant woods to the summit pond and a very close view of the new Wembley stadium - and a very distant one of Canary Wharf, which gives a measure of the walking still to do before I turn westwards again.  The pond was covered in small yellow lilies, and there were a lot of different dragonflies about.

Down from the hill, and into open meadows, and a second smaller summit, with extensive views to the north and west, where I could plainly see Harrow-on-the-Hill. The meadows were home to a lot of kestrels, and I could admire their plunging hunting, and their lovely hovering and swooping, but this photograph was the best I could manage.

As I left the meadows, I cam into Kingsbury, where I passed the "new St Andrew's" church - actually built in 1847 in Marylebone and transported here, stone by stone, in 1931 - where it is next to "old St Andrew's".  Musing on this,  I made my way out to the end of the Brent Reservoir.  Like Barn Hill, this was completely unknown to a west Londoner like me, and is really rather attractive.  It is over a mile long, and was once a major London tourist attraction in its own right, with its own railway station and pub (The Welsh Harp) - and in 1948, the Olympic rowing was held here.  Now its a pleasant lake for sailing, a bird reserve, flower meadows and of course, a reservoir - a large expanse of water formed by damming the tiny Brent river. 

In the meadows of Fryent, and around, Brent, summer is in full blast, but the harbingers of autumn are already here, blackberries,  horse-chestnuts, rowan, and sloe. 

 

When I left the Brent reservoir, and entered Hendon, I noticed two buildings on the first shopping street I came to - one had very rough worn brickwork, not unattractive, with tiled decorations, high up above the fourth floor.  And the other was an an ethnic restaurant, still relatively unusual in London, designed to make me feel at home (although the welcome was dampened by the fact that it was shut!).

Bookish references on this walk were limited, so I allowed the charming woods of Barn Hill to inspire me to share The Way Through The Woods and The Woods of Westermain with you.  The first of these is a lovely description of how the woods roll back over a road when the traffic ceases:

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again;

This is Kipling at his gentlest; for a more deliberate, more brutal version of similar events, see Letting in the Jungle in Jungle Books.  The second, one of Meredith's most beautiful poems, is a romantic vision, and a challenge.  It's long, full of lovely words (a yaffle is a green woodpecker, for example), but the opening stanza will give you the mood:

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

Flowers of Scotland

No, not that dreadful tune!  Mr Cornflower came to stay earlier this week, straight from Auld Reekie.  At first, I was disappointed, as flowers did not spring from the pavement where his feet had trod, and epigrams did not crystallise from the air around his brow.  But he came laden with books, one literally about flowers, and both figuratively flowers of Scotland.

First, there was a kind gift of Flora Celtica, an interesting account of "plants and people in Scotland"; slightly more informal than Flora Britannica, but rather wider ranging in its account of traditional uses of plants, and covering the whole gamut, including seaweeds.  Great fun! The cover shows the Burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia, which they call 'the white rose of Scotland', although it grows freely across all of Britain ("in dry sandy places near the sea, or calcareous areas inland" says Flora Britannica - not habitats I associate much with Scotland, I confess).  There is excellent material on traditional trees and their uses, and the types and names (cuddie, scoo, or maun, for example) of woven baskets, to pick just two fascinating areas.

And then there were Alice Howlett's poems, seen here with books by her publisher and the author from whom she draws her title.  Don't you love the Tusitala edition, with its South Seas name, its gold page edges, and its intense respectability?  A really fine book to read about Stevenson in the South Seas is Alberto Manguel's dark and  beautiful Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.

Alice's poetry has impressed me since I read Edinburgh (New Town) a year or so ago  - here are a few lines:

I survived the winter on a cache of photographs from July,
when months of rain had grown the gardens wild, making
the Dean Valley an emerald rift in the basking city,
shoals of light alive in the canopies of silver birch and lime.

The pictures are dappled with glare. Light flows
white-hot between leaves, suffuses like honey,
plays upon greenery in thousands of shades,
adorns with sequins the towering willows.

I kept that day, pinned it above my desk to remind me.
Autumn marched through and swept out, pulling
winter down on our heads as it left. Edinburgh turned her colours,
faded to sedate grey, but blazed still at late afternoon.

This, and the other poems in the book, are most accomplished, and I recommend them to you - and remember her name, you'll be hearing it again, I've no doubt.

Prices

A couple of things brought prices to my attention recently.  The first was a London Library book, published in 1840 (more anon), but I don't know when this extract from the rules was pasted in:

Needless to say, you won't get away with an annual subscription of £3.15 (a translation I offer for those of my readers who didn't recognise the currency), nor can you go dancing for the afternoon at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse for "half a crown" or 12.5 pence, as this advertisement at the tube station suggests!

Finally, Price's was the name of my school, famous for men's hockey and its unusual crest, a lion rampant but facing back over its shoulder, not forward.  Mr Cornflower will remember it well.

Il miglior fabbro

In 1922, T S Eliot published The Waste Land, the poem of the twentieth century.  After the epigraph, came the dedication: "For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro". This is a reference to the astonishing act of editing Pound undertook on Eliot's draft, brutally hacking and tightening it into - more or less - its current form.  It was an act of great poeticism, and of tremendous but rather terrible friendship.  To read the original, with Pound's annotations, is to read a different poem.

For example, on the first page of the first section, The Burial of the Dead, Pound's editing, which you can see below, left not a word of the original! Click it larger to have a look. How Eliot felt when he first saw this, one can only imagine.

And why am I talking about this today?  Because the working title of the great poem was an adaptation from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens: He Do The Police in Different Voices, my inspiration for yesterday's post title.

And to end, a few lines of the final version (which I once memorised whole, and recited to the mountains of Scotland when alone (and sometimes when not alone!)).  This is the second major part of Burial of the Dead, and is as near to a one paragraph encapsulation of the whole great poem as you will ever get:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der heimat zu

Mein Irisch kind

Wo weilest du?

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;"

"They called me the hyacinth girl."

--Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.      

And if you're tempted to ask what it means, remember Eliot's own response to the student who asked, "Mr Eliot, what does "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree" mean?"  He replied, after some thought, that "It means, I suppose, "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree""!

He do the poet in different voices

There was an interesting piece by Harriet Devine a few days ago about translation, which prompted me to think about my own monolingualism.  I read a lot of foreign literature, and I often find myself thinking how well or how badly something has been translated.  How would I know!?  There are exceptions, when - as with Borges - the translator works with the author, who is himself fluent in English; I'm pretty sure I'm getting the real Borges here.  But there is one author, where translations are something of a hobby of mine.

Yes, I have a dozen volumes of Homer, and they don't even include Chapman, in whom John Keats found - and through whom he gave - such wondrous pleasure.  As a child, I grew up loving the Odyssey in my parents' Penguin classics translation by E V Rieu, a book I still have (my library operates what I recently heard called "a zero de-acquisition policy"!).  But as I grew up, I realised that the Odyssey is a fine, wonderful poem (have you read Erich Auerbach's Mimesis?  Great first chapter comparing Odyssey and Genesis - the Old Testament book, not the rock group), but that the Iliad is greater far.  So I thought I'd compare four translations of a few lines of Book XVI.

You remember the scene: Patroclus is wearing the armour of the great Achilles, who is sulking in his tent after losing his girl to the arbitrary king.  He is fighting valiantly; but his pride, buoyed up by his success, makes him ignore Achilles' warning not to fight the Trojan hero, Hector.  E V Rieu provides a calm and presumably faithful prose version:

"Three times he charged with a terrific cry...and every time he killed nine men.  But when he leapt in like a demon for the fourth time - alas Patroclus! - the end came in sight.  In the heart of the battle, Phoebus encountered him, Phoebus the most terrible.  Patroclus had not seen him coming through the rout: the god had wrapped himself in a thick mist for this unfriendly meeting.  But Phoebus Apollo stood behind him now, and striking his broad shoulders and back with the flat of his hand, he made the eyes start from Patroclus' head and knocked off his vizored helmet."

He's dead of course, the inevitable result of any "unfriendly meeting" with Apollo.  The classic Victorian translation, by Butcher, Leaf and Lang, is clearly translating the same Greek, but is more knowing, more Wardour Street, more self conciously 'poetic' in spite of its prose form:

"Three times then rushed he on ... shouting terribly, and thrice he slew nine men.  But when the fourth time he sped on like a god, thereon to thee, Patroklus, did the end of life appear, for Phoebus met thee in the strong battle, in dreadful wise.  And Patroklus was not ware of him coming through the press, for hidden in thick mist did he meet him, and stood behind him, and smote his back and broad shoulders with a down-stroke of his hand, and his eyes were dazed.  And from his head Phoebus Apollo smote the helmet ..."

Well, I know which I prefer - this is precious and inelegant to my ears, and lacks the drama of the Rieu; and the language is alien - "dazed" is really weak, and "in dreadful wise", forsooth!  But you can see the same Greek behind the words, and you get the same story.  Try this for comparison:

"Then rash Patroclus with new fury glows,

And breathing slaughter, pours amid the foes.

Thrice on the press like Mars himself he flew,

And thrice three heroes at each onset slew.

There ends thy glory! there the Fates untwine

The last, black remnant of so bright a line:

Apollo dreadful stops thy middle way;

Death calls, and heaven allows no longer day!

For lo! the god in dusky clouds enshrined,

Approaching dealt a staggering blow behind.

The weighty shock his neck and shoulders feel;

His eyes flash sparkles, his stunn'd senses reel

In giddy darkness; far to distance flung,

His bounding helmet on the champaign rung."

Personally, I think that's wonderful - and so it should be, it's Alexander Pope - and it has drama and excitement enough for anybody.  But quite a bit of it is not in the original - as Richard Bentley told the author "It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer"!  But some go further from the original still.  Christopher Logue, in his wonderful War Music, which he calls not a translation, but "an account", has this:

"Patroclus fought like dreaming
His head thrown back, his mouth-wide as a shrieking mask —
Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind
And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,
To lock them around his waist, red water, washed across his chest,
To lay their tired necks against his sword like birds.
— Is it a god? Divine? Needing no tenderness? —
Yet instantly they touch, he butts them,
Cuts them back:
— Kill them!
My sweet Patroclus,
— Kill them!
As many as you can,
For
Coming behind you through the dust you felt
— What was it? — felt Creation part, and then
Apollo!
Who had been patient with you
Struck.

  His hand came from the east,

And in his wrist lay all eternity;

And every atom of His mythic weight

Was poised between His fist and bent left leg.

  Your eyes lurched out. Achilles’ helmet rang

Far and away …"

My goodness, that's strong and exciting!  And he uses the drama of the typeface to help him, putting just four words on one double page, as you can see below, where the Logue is contrasted with my Pope's Odyssey, with its tiny type.

 

Does all this prove anything?  No, I don't think so, except that Homer is many different, inspiring things to different writers.  I read many versions of Homer, but the ones I go back to again and again are the plainest - the Rieu - and the most imaginative - the Logue.  But talking of all the different voices, does anyone know the source of my title (without using Google, dark Puss!)?

Lords of Creation

Yesterday to Lord's to enjoy a wonderful day's cricket, with England batting most of the day against India - building a winning position which at the time of writing looks to be in vain, as rain and bad light are preventing the coup de grace.  But yesterday was good cricket and good weather, and I enjoyed being there for its own sake.

The archetypal literary cricketing match is, of course, in A G MacDonnell's "England, Their England" a wonderfully funny book which is well worth reading, and not just for the cricket chapter.  And you don't need to be a cricket lover to enjoy it, any more than you need to be a golfer to enjoy P G Wodehouse's golfing stories.

Yesterday, Lord's was pretty full - but Finbow prefers it empty:  "'Why are we going to Lord's?' I asked. 'There's no match on.' 'We're going to Lord's because there's no match on', he replied. 'Since cricket became brighter, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground, and regret the past."  Complete nonsense, of course, but fun.  Finbow is a central character in C P Snow's Death Under Sail, an early work, but a pleasant murder mystery.  He went on, a maturer writer, to produce the great 11 novel sequence Strangers and Brothers, which apart from its intrinsic merits, gave us the phrase 'corridors of power'.  Snow returned to the murder mystery later in life with A Coat of Varnish, which is a little masterpiece and a real collector's item.  Note to Harriet D - you'll enjoy this if you don't know it, any lover of Innes will appreciate the writing and the mystery.

Finally, there's an excellent cricket match, too, in Dorothy Sayer's Murder Must Advertise, in which Lord Peter Wimsey is trying to be someone else and play a boring, quiet game - but he loses his cool when hit on the funny bone, and smites the bowing to all four quarters to win the match for the agency where he is working undercover.

Sunny wet day

I've spent the morning at the London wetland centre at Barnes again, and we had a pretty sunny morning; knowing that the rest of the country is under several feet of water, I thought some more cheerful pictures might be welcome!  Above, reedmace (not bulrush, please, although I gather some botanists have given way to the popular error).  And below, a family of mallard sport on a flooded lawn, and a Heathrow-bound jet is reflected in one of the deeper pools.

There's a lot in flower at the moment, and I have chosen some water lilies, and great drifts of a white flower I think may be a veronica, looking almost wintry in fierce silhouette against the sunlight.  And on the same flowers, a peacock butterfly, a dark shape in the centre, and a closer version - not a very good photograph but such a lovely thing that I could not leave it out.

Tulips and myths

I have been reading a new book about tulip fever in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - Tulipmania, by Anne Goldgar, ponderously sub-titled Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.  It’s the kind of book I belong to libraries for - I like to buy my books, but there are some so entrancing, yet so forbidding and remote (and so expensive), that buying is not realistic, especially if you are not sure whether you will be entranced or bored.

But I am the first person to have borrowed this from the London Library - as you go in, they have a seductive double bookshelf of new acquisitions, which is always a fertile ground for distraction and discovery.  Although Goldgar’s technique is to amass detail on detail to demonstrate her point by sheer weight of evidence, there is a really interesting story brought to life by domestic and civic detail.

From the late 1690s onwards, gardening became a major interest of Dutchmen, and they began to collect the strange and the beautiful as well as the useful.  Among the flowers which attracted them were tulips, and they quickly became much sought after and collected, often on expeditions to the Near East and beyond.  But instead of being propagated and marketed, and the price dropping as they became a commodity, they remained rare and were collected and bred for variety; they became, for certain specimens, enormously costly. 

Tulips seem to have been seriously collected from the 1590s onwards, but the really rapid rise in prices took place in the last few months of 1636 and the first few weeks of the following year; although most tulips were not wildly priced, a landmark was the famous Alkmaar auction of 5 February, in which two bulbs were sold for just over 4,000 and 5,000 florins respectively (modern purchasing power about £30,000 and £37,500, although these figures may understate the situation, as 1,000 guilders would buy a modest house in Haarlem at the time).  The most valuable tulips were those with ragged petals and a variegated or striped pattern, caused by a virus.  Tulips were on a par with art, in that they were a collectible according status and admitting connoisseurship; the great floral paintings of the period illustrate this in abundance, although there is no truth in the story that tulips appeared in memento mori paintings after the crash as a comment on the dangers of worldly speculation - they were appearing long before that. 

But a crash there was in early February 1637, and prices plunged, although tulip trading did not cease altogether.  At this point, an element of myth takes over, involving widespread economic damage, poor people losing their all through foolish speculation - a story which is most famously told in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, probably still the dominant version today.  Historians like Simon Schama, in his seminal masterpiece, The Embarrassment of Riches, have offered a more nuanced account, but the wild myths live on.  Anna Pavord in The Tulip subscribes to some of the myths, as does Deborah Moggach in Tulip Fever - but Moggach is writing fiction, so is excused!

The truth was more prosaic, though no less interesting.  This was a trade between a small group of people, pretty expert and knowledgeable, and largely from the wealthy professional or trading classes.  Neither the very highest, nor the lower, levels of society were much involved.  And while the sums of money were large, Goldgar can find only 37 people who had spent more than 400 guilders (about £3,000 today), and they were largely men who expended much larger sums in trade or on art.  The trade was one of great judgement and trust, because the bulbs are only in bloom for a few weeks, and must - according to the Dutch gardeners of the period at least - stay in the ground from September until the flowers were over in about May, when cash changed hands.  These were futures contracts.  It was difficult to be sure what you were buying, and if you sold a garden, the bulbs might well remain with the seller - or have been sold on before to a third to even fourth party!  So at the point of the crash, none of the deals from the previous September on had been settled.  Although there was great consternation, and a lot of legal and public dismay, very little actually happened - no one was made bankrupt, and there was no discernible impact on the Dutch economy.

What did happen was that there was a moral debate about the value of tulips, and the vanity of worldly pleasure, and there was shock at the breaking of trust and honour, a crucial matter in a major trading nation.  But, the trade in tulips resumed in later years, and a hundred years late great prices were being paid for narcissi.  Art continued to portray the tulip, beautifully and as a symbol of earthly fragility, and the Dutch tulip business grew and grew, as any visitor to the Netherlands can see in any year in the spring!  The myth will doubtless die hard, but tulipmania was a brief moment of madness among wealthy connoisseurs and traders, which harmed no-one, and quickly revived after the events of 1637.  I got my spring bulb catalogue last week, and I shall certainly place an order!

Images courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library and Cornflower

New trees for old

It's relatively common to read about new species being discovered, such as beetles in remote jungles, weird fish from the abyssal depths, or niche mites from the eyelashes of a giraffe.  And it's not uncommon to hear of a species which has been occurred in Britain for the first time, having long been known in Europe, such as the cattle egret or various butterflies and moths. 

But a brand new species of tree in Scotland?  That’s what has been discovered in Arran - the Catacol whitebeam (Sorbus pseudomeincichii), a cross between whitebeam and rowan, but presumably a self sustaining, fertile one.

If you want to read more, you can do that here.

Liverpool

A short business trip to Liverpool prompted a number of different thoughts, all linked by the view from my hotel bedroom.  First, I could see the Liver Building, with its rooftop birds, obscure of species to this ornithologist at least.

I could also see the Isle of Man ferry terminal, with it’s endearingly old fashioned name, and the proud three legged symbol -  quocunque jeceris stabit.  And, of course, I could see the boats plying the three legged route across the Mersey , the iconic but apparently dying Ferry Across the Mersey - someone should write a song about that one day.

Finally, across the Mersey is Birkenhead.  To me, this means F E Smith and the tragic ship Birkenhead.   F E Smith was the Earl of Birkenhead, about whom a hundred anecdotes are told and retold.  There was the judge who complained to Smith that, after a long speech, he was no wiser - to which Smith replied “No, my lord, but much better informed”!  He was a great man, but prone to exaggeration, as when he remarked that  the Welsh Disestablishment Bill was one which had "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe", a comment which G K Chesterton ridiculed in his rumbustious poem Antichrist (GKC, by the way, was a committed and passionate Roman Catholic):

ARE they clinging to their crosses,

                                F.E. Smith,

Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,

                                Are they, Smith?

Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,

Wait the news from this our city?

….

For your God or dream or devil

You will answer, not to me.

Talk about the pews and steeples

And the Cash that goes therewith!

But the souls of Christian peoples . . .

                                Chuck it, Smith!

The HMS Birkenhead was sunk in 1852 off South Africa , and there were not enough lifeboats; this is the occasion which the legendary order “Women and children first” was first given; a contingent of Royal Marines was on board, and went to their drownings standing to attention - which Kipling referred to his manic poem about the Marines, Soldier and Sailor too!

To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you've cover to hand, and leave and liking to shout;
But to stand and be still to the Birkenhead drill
Is a damn tough bullet to chew,
And they done it, the Jollies - Her Majesty's Jollies -
Soldier and sailor too!

Acanthus

The acanthus in the garden is looking very fine just now, although the subtle colours don't always seem easy to capture in a photograph!  But in big clumps massed around the pond, they're very fine. This one is acanthus mollis.

The leaves are very beautiful, too, and are often found in Greek architecture, most notably in Corinthian pillar capitals.

Skyshape and Bristol fashion

Last week, in my first post about walking around London, I shared a picture of the sky reflected in the glass wall of a modern office building.  There were one or two kind comments, so I make so bold as to offer you a similar picture from Bristol, which I visited last week.

Walking round London 2

Today, I continued the circumambulation of London which I started last week - and did a mile and a half of last week's walk again in order to save too many bus changes and main roads.  As you can see, the route did not start in rural bliss, but the shopping centres were soon left behind, and within half a mile I was in flower meadows and walking along the Grand Union canal again - the Paddington branch this time.  Less of a sense of remoteness than last week, but still very green and remarkably quiet. Lots and lots of flowers, and some wildlife, like the terrapin, which shouldn't be there at all.

But this flat start was not maintained, for although we dwellers near the Thames forget it, there are hills in London, mainly in the north.  The two I 'climbed' today were Horsenden Hill, and Harrow. The school and village feel of Harrow is well known, but Horsenden was was a baby revelation to me.  Its about 280 feet, and while it would be an exaggeration to say I noticed the increasing cold and lack of oxygen, it did give excellent views to the west and towards central London.  Joking about the harsh climate of such great heights puts me in mind of G K Chesterton's wonderful fantasy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill - in which King Auberon designs warm robes for the snow bound land of North Kensington, and a thousand other delightful absurdities.  It's short, but it's perfect, especially for anyone who knows the western half of London.  But back to Horsenden Hill, with some views and a glance at the delightful oak woods.

The Post Office Tower is just visible in the centre of the horizon.

From Horsenden, I worked my way up to Harrow on the Hill, by way of Piggy Lane, a gloomy green lane in which I found a cuckoo pint - or lords and ladies - arum maculatum. This has lots of popular names which are pretty rude, and many imaginative ones which are not - often based on the flower, with its distinctive spathe and spadix, rather than the berries that I can show you.  "Willy lily" is a fine name I learned from Flora Britannica only today!

On through Harrow, which Churchill famously entered on the basis of writing his name, the numer 1, and a full stop on the examination paper.  Churchill is such a huge figure in British modern history, that we forget his fitful career - and Rhodes James' fine book, Churchill: A Study in Failure is an excellent account of the wilderness years before 1939.

Across Harrow's playing fields, and to South Kenton station through a golf course, where I noticed mature pods on the broom already.  Although it is not at all in the modern taste, broom always makes me think of A Runnable Stag by John Davidson, a nineteenth century poet who was in my school anthology. 

He sets the time of year for a stag hunt in Devon with these lovely lines:

"When the pods went pop
on the broom, green broom
And apples began to
be golden-skinned.."

The rest of the poem is here.

My seven and a half miles complete,  home by Tube, just making it before a tremendous thunderstorm which has cleared the air wonderfully.

No Such Thing As A Zebra?

No such thing as a zebra?  Sure there is, it's an African animal, black with white stripes.  Or maybe, a white animal with black stripes?  But, who's asking damn fool questions, when there's a group of them right there!

Well, who's asking the question is Stephen jay Gould in his essay What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?  I wrote about Gould recently in The Science of Writing.  It's a simple question which Gould writes about to illustrate a wider point: that there is no perfect way of classifying organisms, even though there must be a "right answer" if only we knew enough about evolutionary descent.  In his words,

"The potential dilemma for zebras is simply stated: they exist as three species, all with black-and-white stripes to be sure, but differing notably in both numbers of stripes and their patterns. ... Do these three species form a single evolutionary unit? Do they share a common ancestor that gave rise to them alone and to no other species of horse? Or are some zebras more closely related by descent to true horses or to asses than they are to other zebras? If this second possibility is an actuality, ... there is, in an important evolutionary sense, no such thing as a zebra."

To give an extreme example from human life, all redheads are not more closely related to each other than to their parents and siblings!  In fact, Gould concludes that the issue is not proven, that zebras may be a complete group, that the word "zebra" may really mean something precise and biological, but that it may not.

Just to doubly confound us, the same is apparently true of two other common terms - there is certainly no such thing as a fish!  Or a tree!

To quote from Ennos' Trees,

"..trees are not what biologists call a natural group. Whereas other successful groups of plants, such as grasses, all descend from a single common ancestor, the tree form has evolved many times in the course of history; their ancestors were quite unrelated plants."

In fact, there are trees which are grasses, roses, mosses, and clovers, and many, many more.

And to go back to zebras, in How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes, Gould concludes - on evidence from embroyology and pigmentation - that the zebra is a black animal with white stripes, not the other way round.

...has faded away

Two days ago, wonderful vibrant lovely flowers on another site prompted me to share Kipling's The Glory of the Garden. Of course, if the garden is not maintained, the glory fades away (sick transit Gloria Monday, as the reporter telegraphed when Ms Swanson had a bad Atlantic crossing early in the week).  Every gardener knows that fear, and while there can be beauty in autumn, there is none in desolation and the loss of love:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead. That metrical masterpiece is Swinburne's, from A Forsaken Garden.

Trees are (almost) immortal

According to the website of Kew Gardens, in the great hurricane, on 16 October 1987, the whole root plate of the Turner's Oak, one of the oldest trees there, lifted and settled back in the ground. This appeared to rejuvenate it, as it was showing signs of stress and decline due to compaction of the root plate from the many people who take shelter under the broad evergreen crown.

I quote this, because it's so common to find a belief that trees are fragile and easily killed or damaged.  Actually, the reverse is true.  Our forefathers did not burn down the wildwood which covered these islands, because wood in a temperate climate is almost impossible to burn where it stands.  A dead tree - and here is one, in Syon Park - may still stand for a hundred years or more without posing any threat to passers by - and, incidentally, providing excellent habitat for birds such as owls, for insects and fungi.

But too many trees are being chopped down now because they are dead or dangerous, allegedly.  You can only feel a desperate sympathy for the child killed by a falling beech bough a week or so ago - but that's news because its astronomically rare.

This stump, for example, belongs to a fine mature tree in Chiswick House gardens; its hard to see what is wrong with it - the wood is absolutely solid and hard right to the very centre.  Remember, it takes 10 minutes to remove such a tree in the name of health and safety - one contractor told me he had been instructed to remove certain trees in the park merely because branches overhung the paths! - but a hundred or two hundred years to regrow it.  You and I will never see a mature tree here.

But trees are extraordinarily resilient - they can be pollarded and coppiced, and keep producing pretty much for ever.  Elms are even now, in some places, regrowing from stumps left by the Dutch Elm Disease fellings.  Whole hedges of elm were single clones, regenerating and suckering indefinetely.

This willow by the Thames, for example, is pretty badly beaten up - it's been sawn off about ten feet from the ground, and a major branch has been torn out by a storm.  But, its growing, ever upwards, like a train, as the next picture shows.

Or - one photograph down - the stump in Turnham Green, which has some heartrot, which is quite normal, but is solid wood in a thick ring of many inches width.  But it looks very dead, a victim of local council chainsaws.

But the growth of a tree comes from a narrow band of tissue beneath the bark, the cambium.  This grows woody xylem on the inside, strenghtening and thickening the trunk - and phloem on the outside, the veins and living pulse of the tree.  And in this trunk, the cambium has not given up, not nohow.

This is amazing life and vigour, and if the local authority vandals stay away, this will become a tree again. If you want to read about trees in a British landscape, Oliver Rackham's many books - covering the whole range from the popular to the academic - are unsurpassed.  And if you want to know how trees work, and they are wonderfully complex and surprising organisms, Roland Ennos has a small, very readable book just called Trees for the interested non-specialist. 

And trees have one thing in common with zebras - they might not exist! But that's a story for another day.

The Glory of the Garden

Cornflower's luscious photographs and challenging quotation show a wonderful side of garden flowers - their beauty, their colour, their drama.  This interests me greatly at the moment, because I am just reading a history of the tulip craze in Holland in the early seventeenth century  - a future post when I know more.

But I recalled a wonderful poem, which is about gardens, but also about England.  It stresses the hard work that goes into a beautiful garden, and also the extra pleasure that comes from being part of the garden through working in it, and the ability of everyone, however weak or unexpert, to make a contribution.  My pond always looks more attractive when I have sweated blood over and in it for a morning!   Here it is, Kipling's The Glory of the Garden:

OUR England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all,
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ’Prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:—“Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinnerknives.

There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

And, finally, a challenge for Cornflower and all other readers, to identify this wondrous line (though there are so many great pieces of prose and poetry about gardens, that I think this theme may have legs):

"The temple bell stops but still I hear the sound coming out of the flowers."

Map me no maps

Of course, not everything on our shelves, or everything we read, is a book.  One of my great pleasures is looking at maps, to plan a journey, or to understand one.  Maps  - and this is my collection here, a bit overpowered by the Ordnance Survey's magenta - are not neutral: they may be accurate, but they make statements about where the centre of the world is, what is important; they omit and they emphasise; they assert and deny ownership and control.

I remember a wonderful exhibition of maps at the British Library some years ago. As the world has been better explored, maps have been less and less technically wrong - but a curved surface portrayed on a flat one always exaggerates some areas, shrinks others.  Africa is much bigger than we all think, Britain is smaller.  And then there are the judgements masquerading as cartography - a map of Victorian London with streets coloured for social class and wealth; the lowest category was "criminal"!  Nazi maps of European cities showing Jewish areas evoke similar horror.  Thus, perhaps, Fielding's exclamation:  "Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world".

Borges has a wonderful passsage on the perfect map, in A Universal History of Infamy, a book (like all of Borges), which I thoroughly recommend for its wonderful writing, fantastic perception, and piercing illumination of the human mental condition.  Enjoy The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate or the moody, almost hard boiled Streetcorner Man.  I will return to Borges, for sure, one day, but now, here is the whole of his Of Exactitude in Science:

"…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of
the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these
Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the
Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the
Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the
Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the
whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."

Walking round London 1

  On an impulse, I bought a book about the Capital Ring, literally a walk around London, about 6 to 10 miles from the centre, and I started doing it today.  I chose to begin at Richmond, as being convenient - those of you who can add (Dark Puss has special skills in this department, I feel sure) will see that the whole walk is some 78 miles - plus, I guess, another 10 or so getting to and from the route to public transport over the many stages.

I'm going clockwise, and I hope to complete the route in seven or eight goes over the summer and autumn, visiting familar and unknown London in the process.  Watch for further instalments!

I followed the Thames downstream briefly, then crossed over on the bridge at Richmond Lock.  This took me to Isleworth, where after gleefully using a right of way through the Town Wharf pub's balcony, I came to the church, where a modern body sits unhappily against the fourteenth century tower - the original church had long been replaced by an eighteenth century building, but this was destroyed in 1944, by vandalism, not enemy action.

From Isleworth, through the grounds of Syon Park, where I caught excellent views of a kestrel on the floodlights, and admired the Great Conservatory.

From Syon, you follow the river Brent (as in Brentford) and the Junction canal roughly northwards, and when the Grand Union canal joins, you veer off east along the Brent.  This is a revelation - amazingly wild and green, yet I walked under the A4 (the Great West Road), the M4, the Piccadilly Line and the main line railway viaduct to the west.  And in these circumstances, I saw heron, coot, swan, and other ducks in abundance.  And smart new waterside development have replaced the dirty, derelict warehouses at Brentford Lock itself, bringing life and sparkle.

Below (I hope - sometimes, I'm not in perfect control of where my pictures end up!) is a reflection of clouds in the GlaxoSmithKline building in Brentford, and the lowest of the Hanwell locks.

Finally, the route crosses more wooded and open land, including two golf courses, and ends in Greenford, whence I caught a train home - with fine views of Gilbert Scott's early church, St Mary's in Hanwell, proud and a little bit vulgar, and also of the Wembley arch in the distance, and lots of waterside flowers.  Altogether, a good nine miles of wonderful urban walking in glorious sunshine.

And the bookish connections I promise?  Well, walking by the Thames put me in mind of Jerome K Jerome's masterpieces, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel.  I also recall that in The Innocence of Father Brown, the accused in one of the stories (Hammer of God) gives as an alibi that he was in the Revival Mission in Greenford ("which sits all night, we save souls so fast"), where I finished today. 

Now all I need is the energy for the other 70 or so miles!

Box

Box is an unusual wood; it is very dense, hard, and fine grained.  So the wood of the mature tree - or its roots - is excellent for wood engraving, making precise, robust mathematical instruments and the like.  Of course, immature, clipped and managed trees are common in topiary, in which the wildness and toughness of the tree is lost completely.  The wood is so dense that it sinks in water, the only European wood with this characteristic.

I recently bought an engraving by Howard Phipps at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, printed from boxwood.  The engraving is only 8" x 6" or so (an engraving is made on the surface exposed when the wood is cut at right angles to the grain, so only small pieces are available - but the fineness and toughness of the wood allows great precision in the work - the detail to the left is about life size).  It is called Melbury Beacon and has a lovely eighteenth century feel to it, shades almost of Samuel Palmer.

Chiswick House, which I wrote posted on briefly a few days ago, has some simple box hedges in one of the formal gardens, but I could not get a really good photograph of a wild, gnarled, slightly tortured box tree - though one can see them easily enough in parts of southern England, notably Box Hill in Surrey.

And, to follow my habit and joy, now to finish with something completely irrelevant: boxty is an Irish word, for a bread made of raw grated potatoes and flour.

The Science of Writing

My recent post on Tides, mainly poetic, reminded me of a powerful piece of non-fiction writing - and lead me on to the general subject of science writing.This is something I spend a fair amount of time on, and its fascinating how much really good writing there is now on science, aimed at the intelligent but completely non-specialist reader.  And I'm not talking about books on the uneasy borderline between fact and fiction, but serious writers writing about their specialities in an informative and really entertaining way.  There are of course, some difficulties - without advanced mathematics, it's almost impossible to convey or to apprehend pure mathematics, or parts of physics or even biology - but it is amazing what can be conveyed.

There are some wonderful writers on speciality subjects - Dennett, Feynman, Pinker, Dawkins, E O Wilson, Steve Jones, Weinberg spring to mind - and I might come back to them another time.  But today, anthologies and essays.

Tides put me in mind of Rachel Carson, famous for Silent Spring in 1962 which woke the world to environmental issues, and whose campaign against DDT's indiscrimnate use has saved millions of birds of prey (predators are especially vulnerable, as DDT accumulates up the food chain and weakens their eggs).  Unfortunately, developing countries are robbed of one of the most effective weapons against malaria by unthinking opposition to any DDT use, but that's another story.  Before Silent Spring, however, Carson published The Sea Around Us (1951), a slightly over-written but passionate account of the history and nature of the sea.  It was destined to be quickly utterly out of date by the development and acceptance of plate tectonics, which makes large parts of her book plain wrong and even slightly laughable nowadays.  But the section on tides is high drama, and well worth a read - though I've no idea if it too has been superseded.  But he describes a world in which the moon, just broken off the Earth, is much closer than it is now, and which therefore causes mighty tides - hundreds of feet of rise and fall at every tide, waters therefore rushing many miles inland with enormous speed.

Her book is probably only for the specialist, the curio collector, or the historian of science - but a fine piece about the tides is excerpted in The Faber Book of Science, edited by the reassuringly literary John Carey.  There are about a hundred pieces, ranging across all the scientific disciplines, and starting with Da Vinci and working up to the late twentieth century.  It's a great book for browsing, especially at bedtime.

Other excellent books for browsing, though the pieces are rather longer and more complete, are the collections of essays by Stephen Jay Gould.  He's a fine writer, but also an outstanding scientist - his work on Bahamian land snails (no, don't be put off!) led him to important conclusions about evolution and put him at the forefront of biological studies for decades.  He writes beautifully, he's interested in all sorts of issues, current and historical, and he has an engaging ability to relate his questions to practical everyday things like the size of a chocolate bar or a sportman's averages without being patronising or condescending.  Ever Since Darwin or Eight Little Piggies are probably my favourites, but all the essay collections are worth reading.  For me, he's at his most compelling on evolution - snails, elk, humans, whales, you name it, but he's compelling and compassionate about some of the terrible crimes inflicted on humanity through false science like eugenics, or corrupt tests of IQ or idiocy.  He died at 60, surviving 20 years after being diagnosed with a cancer with a median survival time of 8 months, a subject he tackled in an essay called The Median Isn't the Message! I know you will find something to grab your attention, even if its his amazing ability with titles - what about Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples, or What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?

Weight of the Evidence

I have long been a fan of Michael Innes, so I was interested to read what Harriet Devine said about him, and specifically his academic thriller The Weight of the Evidence.  We agree that he is entertaining, and that he tells a jolly good story - but I don't really find him snobbish.  Appleby (Innes' detective) has come from a very humble background - we learn in There Came Both Mist and Snow that Appleby's grandfather baked the best bread somewhere in Yorkshire, for example.  And in The Weight of the Evidence Appleby eats tripe in the station buffet, and refers to someone as a silly old snob becasue he has such limited aspirations for the provincial university.  And Innes himself taught at Leeds, Belfast and Adelaide, aparently with great success and great enjoyment.

But this is to over-burden a slight comment with too much pedantry.  The stories are the thing, and I would recommend them enthusiastically.  Some of the short stories, such as Appleby Talking are very good, and I have a special pleasure in Journeying Boy and Lament for a Maker.  The first is a wonderful psychological novel as well as a thriller of great class; the second is a dramatic and rather sinister detective story with some lovely letters and fantastic characters - the solicitor Wedderburn (who spends Christmas Day in the Library writing a study of sevententh century land tenure, in-rig and out-rig) and the sutor (cobbler) Ewan Bell, whose language is sheer delight.  He add the Scots "stammagasted" to my vocabulary, and there's plenty more like that.  And, as the title will have told you, the whole is woven round Dunbar's great dirge, Lament for the Makaris.

Sen he has all my brether tane,
He will naught let me live alane;
Of force I man his next prey be:—
        Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death dispone,
After our death that live may we:—
        Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Enjoy!

Another hanging

Here is another recent print, an engraving by  Jane Lydbury.  It's small but very fine, and is a celebration of the machinery of a Shakespearean theatre. Its full of detail - notice the devils at the top, for example.

And talking of hanging, do you know the balled Hughie Graeme?  Isn't it wonderful - I came to it through June Tabor's album, An Echo of Hooves.

Tides

Walking home along the Thames the other day, with the tide running strongly for the sea, I began to think about tides in poetry, inevitably suffused with images of dramatic events, mortality, and merely of inevitability and ancient rhythms. Here are a few of the things that came to mind - mostly poetry with a word about tides in it, but one poem which has almost nothing to do with tides. And I promise you a whole posting on tides without mentioning Canute!

Let me know if tidal images conjure up other writing for you.

Time and tide wait for no man is a common enough saying, but I can find little agreement on its source, though it is quoted from the fourteenth century onwards in different forms.  Most authorities I have found (learned professors, help me here!) attribute it to Chaucer in the Clerk's Tale, although tide is not actually mentioned:

"For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde,

Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde" .

Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) next claims my attention, in a quotation (never will you see the barbarous bastard noun "quote" here) that is so well known as to be cliched, yet is such a strong and moving image:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries".

I wanted to end with Kipling, but personal considerations dictate otherwise - and his lines about Butser always make me think of Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, which is a long, self indulgent (but rather fun) paean on English history - and which starts with these fine lines:

Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Kipling settled in Sussex (his house at Bateman's is well worth a visit  from a literary point of view, but is also a lovely house and garden in superb countryside) and became a Sussex man through and through.  Here, in Rewards and Fairies (see Midsummer's Day on this site on 24 June), he reels off the names of the downs, the chalk whale hills of the south, ending with Butser in Hampshire (and the highest of the Downs, a fact that Kipling does not draw attention to):

THE WEALD is good, the Downs are best –
I'll give you the run of 'em, East to West.
Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill,
They were once and they are still.
Firle Mount Caburn and Mount Harry
Go back as far as sums 'll carry.
Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Ring
They have looked on many a thing,
And what those two have missed between 'em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen 'em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood;
And when you end on the Hampshire side –
Butser's old as Time and Tide.
The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!

With a bound we are in the nineteenth century, with "The western tide crept up along the sand" with sinister effect, in Charles Kingsley's Sands of Dee, when Mary went to call the cattle home, with such fatal and (it must be said) melodramatic consequences. A moody and affecting poem, which loses its emotional appeal on your seventeenth birthday, but whose word music is still haunting.  Then to John Masefield's Sea Fever, which will ever have an especial place in my mind, in excess of its considerable poetic virtues, as it was a favourite of my mother's and read by a very close friend at her funeral just over a year ago:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Sepia views in a Palladian garden

  Over the weekend, I visited Britain's first Palladian building, Chiswick House in West London. I shall return in future to this little gem, but today I wanted to share some sepia pictures I took in the gardens, which I think capture a mood very well. 

Designed in the 1720s, it replaced a Jacobean manor house on the site, and was the brainchild of the third Earl of Burlington, designed and built by architect William Kent.  It's of huge architectural importance, and sits in wonderful but neglected and tired grounds.  It needs a lot of tender loving care, and luckily, it's about to get several million pounds worth.

There is a lake of course, with an ornamental bridge, and delicately carved details on pillars and gateways everywhere.  And everywhere in the gardens are herms and urns.

Finally, I love the violence of pure white in a sepia photograph, much more compelling than in colour or black & white.  This water lily is in a small pool in the grounds.

I'll show you the house itself another day!

Parody

A couple of weeks ago, I promised a fine parody - and here it is, by Andrew Lang:

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,
Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled,
They know not, poor misguided souls,
They too shall perish unconsoled.
I am the batsman and the bat,
I am the bowler and the ball,
The umpire, the pavilion cat,
The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all.

For listeners who have only just joined Test Match Special, this was the original, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Brahma:

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Pry

Pry is the old English word for a lime tree, specifically the small-leaved lime, Tilia cordata.  There are now many cultivars of lime, but only three types of lime are of real interest in the countryside - the rest are all garden specimens at heart.  Apart from pry, there is the large or broad leaved lime (T platyphyllos) and the common lime, which is hybrid between the small and large leave species, and is known as T x vulgaris (the x indicating it is a cross and not a species).  There is, of course, no connection between these trees and the citrus fruit, shown here in an understated but lovely bowl from Vellow Pottery in Somerset. However, the pry is the Linden tree of the German song and place names like Lyndhurst in the New Forest.

In the glory of their profuse yellow-green flowers and seeds, just coming to an end now, limes are hard to overlook, though often not identified.  Their leaves are typically heart shaped with an extended point, and often have an asymmetric bulge around the base of the heart by the stem.  I spent a pleasant hour in Kew Gardens recently, down by the Victoria Gate and this noble unicorn, examining their collections of lime species and cultivars.

Limes are rather unjustly overlooked in Britain in both history and the present. Pry was one of the dominant species of the original wildwood in these islands, particularly in the “limewood province”, pretty much all southern, central and eastern England apart from Devon and Cornwall, commonly in mixtures with hazel, elm, and ash.  It forms large mature trees, possibly the largest native broadleaf of British trees, reaching 150 feet in one form.  It’s pretty impervious to coppicing and pollarding, regrowing vigorously, and the oldest trees in England could be coppiced limes in enormous stools, one famous example being over 30 feet across. But it's spread across Britain may have been halted by a colder climate, and sadly, it is very sensitive to grazing, so the widespread habit of wood pasture and deer forests told against the lime.  The wood of the limes is soft and pale, and makes beautiful wood for fine carving - witness Grinling Gibbons in the late seventeenth century in London churches, and the extraordinary work of Tilman Riemenschneider the fifteeth century in southern Germany .

Pry is now uncommon as a wild tree in Britain , though it does occur frequently in some areas, notably in ancient woods in Essex and Sussex.  The large leaved lime is not common either in the wild, though there is a fine stand of them in the Cotswolds at The Woodland Trust's Lineover Wood near Cheltenham.  The hybrid, the common lime, is extremely robust and has been extensively planted in parks, gardens and urban settings.  Many suburban trees in London are common lime, sticky with aphid sundew, and bursting with bushy secondary growth around the trunks and obstructing the pavements.