Well after a wildly inefficient morning of
London travel I’m back on the train – this time to Colchester and my final
garden stop at the Beth Chatto Gardens – after having spent a wonderful few
days in Sheffield and Oxford.
I left London on Thursday and spent the
night in the small town of Hathersage, a short, rickety train ride away from
Sheffield. Hathersage is nestled within the rolling hills and valleys of the
Peak District National Park, a more wooded and apparently busier (though it
didn’t feel like it) version of the Lake District. Needless to say I wish I had
more time to spend there. In London you often feel like a drifter in a
nationless city, surrounded by chain stores and immersed in languages from all
over the world so it’s always a relief to return to the countryside villages
that have two pubs, one gas station, and where the houses on the main road have
names like “Lilac Cottage”. In the small towns of England, you really feel like
you’re in England and for me it brought back a wave of memories of my days
spent hiking the Lakes. If I were doing anything else I would say it was
torture to leave the Peak District so soon – my hill-walking conscience is
making a good argument for returning to the moors – but on Friday I was meeting
another hero, professor James Hitchmough at the University of Sheffield, before
returning to Oxford. Nothing, not even my inner trekker, could compete with
that.
Friday was a grey day in the heart of
England and I spent a cool, dreary morning exploring the Sheffield Botanical
Garden which hosts one of Hitchmough’s earliest prairie plantings. The garden
is nice, but the prairie planting is a trademark unrestrained, chaotic and wild
riot of colour. Again, as at Kew, it’s always comforting to find familiar faces
in foreign places and Hitchmough’s palette of often includes North American
prairie species like Rudbeckia, Silphium and Aster, all comforting reminders of
home in an otherwise foreign and exotic collection of plants.
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| The prairie planting |
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| The long borders and glasshouse |
After my morning dabble, I walked to the
Arts Tower on the University of Sheffield campus. Though rainy and cold there
was a palpable vibrancy to the campus even though classes had yet to begin. It
feels like a great place to study and with professors like James Hitchmough
it’s little wonder. I met him in his office and after a brief detour to the
kitchen for a cup of tea we set to chatting. Immediately apparent is James’
unbridled enthusiasm for his work. His office is strewn with maps of South
African plant communities (he’s developed plant mixes that combine prairie
species from North America with wildflowers from the South African veld, both
of which are fire-dependent ecosystems), print-outs of presentation slides, and
a wall of some of the most appetizing books a plant-geek can imagine. James,
like Beatrice at Waltham Place, is another kindred spirit and was a gold mine
of knowledge and information. We talked about his work (he described the
Sheffield Botanical Garden planting as version 1.0, and said the University of
Oxford Botanical Garden planting was much better), his philosophy (don’t faff
about with subtlety, give them the wow factor), his collaborators (including
renowned American landscape architect George Hargreaves) and how they view
planting design (even the greats don’t always know their plants), and most
valuable of all, potential opportunities for me. In all we talked for over an
hour, which is far more than I had bargained for and fantastic considering he’s
the head of Sheffield’s Department of Landscape, so his time is precious and I
relished every second. There was never a dull moment and never a need for
silence as we bounced ideas around and competed against the other to get a word
in edgewise. It was the kind of electricity that happens when people with
similarly aligned passions and opinions meet and it was wonderful.
Riding a euphoric wave of inspiration I set
out into the rainy city with the promise of more kindred spirits – albeit of a
different nature – lying ahead. I was bound for Oxford and no Yorkshire drizzle
could dampen my spirits.
We all reunited on Saturday at the Vaults
and Gardens cafe, one of my very favourite Oxford haunts. Anywhere else in the
world, a building constructed in the 1320s would be designated a national
heritage site, but in Oxford, it’s a cafe. People drink tea and eat breakfast
under stone vaults almost 700 years old. The ordinariness of the extraordinary
is what makes Oxford so special, particularly for a Canadian from the country,
where buildings that are a mere 150 years old are revered as “historic”, and
most of the time they’re humble farmhouses. We all ate in this 700 year-old
cafe, catching up and taking a group trip down memory lane. After jumping all
over England, it was immensely comforting to come back to a place that felt
like home. I love London, but it has never felt like home, through no fault of
its own of course, just always a place to visit on a day-trip away from Oxford.
We walked up the streets and along the narrow lanes that thankfully hadn’t (as
historic cities rarely do) changed at all. A bitter jolt of reality set in when
we realized we actually had to pay to access the botanic gardens, but, for the
good of the group, we conceded. If Oxford is my favourite city, then the
University of Oxford Botanical Gardens is my favourite place in my favourite
city. Compared to the others I’ve seen (and on this trip I’ve seen a few), this
is the best botanical garden in England. It doesn’t hurt that it features James
Hitchmough’s fantastic Merton Borders either.
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| The Merton Borders |
This time of year they’re a joyous,
radiant, and rambunctious cornucopia of flower and even on a cloudy day the
seedheads of the grasses blazed below the rich yellows of the towering compass
plants and above the chaotic sprays of flowers and dried seedheads of the other
North American and South African species planted below. The entire border was
planted from seed, and the result is a plant community in every sense of the
word. The density is wonderful, space is used with mathematical efficiency, the
layering is intricate and the entire composition is a picture. If you’re
interested, take a look at the video:
I was in heaven and my friends were
gracious enough to let me revel for a while before we strolled through the rest
of the garden that even without the radical chaos of the Merton Borders, would
be well worth the price of admission. On a sad note, one of the sentinel pine
trees (apparently a favourite of Tolkien) in the garden had suffered the
following winter and had to be removed. Thankfully, it was the only real change
that we noticed the rest of the weekend. We drank in the same old pubs, browsed
in the same old Blackwell’s (I showed great restraint and only bought one book)
and ate the same old cookies in the same old covered market. It’s probably a
good thing we only stayed for the weekend. Any longer and it would have begun
to feel like we should be walking toward Marston and Clive Booth Hall instead
of the youth hostel, the old routines set in quickly.
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| Broad St |
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| The Radcliffe Camera |
It was a weekend of sheer, unabashed bliss
back in the place that I love with the some of the people that made it so
special, yet the fact that it’s been so wonderful, and the way everything has
felt so much like a homecoming, it makes it utterly heartbreaking to leave so
soon. I want to smile and I want to cry.