Anna Reckin
‘Are you a member of the college, sir?’ A question addressed to my companion, with, as I remember it, a peculiarly British falling emphasis on the key word: deference edged with irony. We were sitting on a grassy bank on ‘The Backs,’ that almost impossibly beautiful green space along the banks of the Cam where it runs behind several of the most famous Cambridge colleges. The porter was playing safe by ignoring me: the college that was closest to where we sat would have been only in its first year or two of admitting women.
We were probably near or under a willow tree. Those trees and those green banks are one of my earliest memories, at a time when I might have been similarly chaperoned; as my (‘non-university’) mother told me later, she was not permitted to wheel a child in a pram or a pushchair along The Backs, even the sections that were supposedly open to the public.
* * * * * * * * *
Some twenty years later, fusing a surreal memory of a gate among trees on The Backs, which seemed to have nothing around it, with the garden of a square in Bloomsbury as seen from an office window:
Looks out
onto a solid mass of green. London plane trees tumble the length of the glass. Look down to street level, and the trunks are surrounded by railings. Trees and iron – belt and braces. But the leaves billow out over the spikes: froth of lace over a corset.
fichu fixed with tiny pins
The gates are locked at dusk.
* * * * * * * * * * *
And now, fall 2023, I’m still thinking about gardens and their edges, visible and invisible. The views which, like the trees and the plants, flow over, around and through. Little chinks and broad vistas. Leaks of light and flooding skies.
What I’m starting to lay out here – resembling the tangle of withered everlasting-pea stems that I’ve just pulled down from a bay tree and brought indoors to draw – is that gardens, views and exclusions are somehow inextricably related. But if I try and tease them out too rigorously, the parts will fall apart in my hands, as brittle as the drying pea-stems.
A few loose ends:
1) the small house on the beach at the centre of Derek Jarman’s garden has the name ‘Prospect Cottage’ (‘Prospect House’ was a name commonly given to Victorian and Edwardian villas)
2) The garden at Prospect Cottage is possibly the most open I’ve ever seen: on a level with the (unfenced) road, it gives onto shingled beach, has no visible boundaries.
3) And no particular ‘prospects’ or calculated sightlines: the features within it (its sculptures, rings of pebbles, etc) are part of an all-over pattern, more Jackson Pollock than Gainsborough
reaching further in, some knots and questions:
4) The idea of the ‘borrowed view’ – as in 18th-century garden design, often a pastoral scene whose animals were prevented from breaking through the fourth wall and into the main garden, with its lawns and flowerbeds, its walled vegetable gardens, by a ditch invisible from a distance, a ha-ha
5) but how, exactly, can a view be ‘borrowed’? Whether or not the landscape on loan from beyond the boundary also belongs to the person who owns the garden seems to be moot.
6) as in the case of a ha-ha; it seems important to think about whose sheep (or cows) those are
7) In the grounds of an English country estate (one with a ha-ha) the ducks on the pond, beloved by the care-home residents of the big house were also / really used for sport, rounded up in due season for shoots, out of sight. (We hadn’t asked ‘whose ducks? Whose ducks are they really?)
8) I had thought that the ha-ha was simply a ditch, designed in such a way as to be invisible to those looking outwards, from within the part of the grounds that surround a grand country house. When I check, I realise I have only ever seen one from that position: on the inside looking out. And from a distance, well back: from a window (visitor guide-ropes permitting), or from a seat on a sunny terrace.
Typically the ditch meets a wall that falls steeply from the edge of the garden to a lower level below. Seen from outside, the wall would be a defining feature.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Change the scene (summer 2023) to Bath. In very hot sunny weather (though not as hot as summer 2022).
stone, iron, daisies
limestone, in great arid cliff-faces of masonry, and also on steps and sidewalks, where wildflowers and garden-escapes find footholds in cracks and gutters, spill out over the grey-yellow stone
railings made of iron, quite tall, in very good repair, painted shiny black. As are the locked gates.
the daisies are in dazzling meadow-drifts, beyond the railings, within the squares. Look, don’t touch.
Do they look more lovely at street level, seen through railings, in glimpses between the mix of wild and cultivated taller plants and shrubs placed around the edges – hollyhocks, mock-orange, asphodel – or from on high, through the grid of 18th-century glazing bars, meticulously restored, at first, second, third-floor level?
(Or from even higher, up where the servants used to live, up steeper stairs, with smaller windows?)
I start to imagine an art project, with lines thrown across a square from side to side. At angles, irregular. Allowed to grow over them, even just for one season, all kinds of creeper.
Imagine being let into the garden within the square to look up into festoons of Convolvulus mauretanicus (would it grow that high up?) Lathyrus latifolius (yes, the everlasting-pea), and all those not well-enough-known annual creepers: the Cathedral bells, Canary creepers, black-eyed Susans, Spanish flags, Chilean glory flowers and more. Numerous nasturtiums, many morning-glories
like being in a greenhouse, without the glass
At the end of the season, they could be cleared away, taken down like bunting.
By then, some of them will have seeded the gardens underneath. Some seeds, maybe, carried into walled gardens at the back of the grand tall houses
* * * * * * * * * * *
I used to be intrigued by walled gardens, as an idea and in reality. Especially the small ones, where at least three of the walls could be seen at a glance, from ground level. I liked (still like) the contrast of line and curve, hard and soft landscaping, the illusion of control and balance.
But now, and perhaps especially now that ‘my garden’ is simply a broad bed to one side of a communal outdoor space, with a four-foot wall to one side and a paved path the other, in a city, my ideas are changing, or perhaps I am becoming less naïve about walls and containment.
Now I find myself looking for images that hold inner and outer together, a parallel to figure and ground. Seeing a shadow cross the room and realising that it’s a bird flying outside, in bright sunshine, with no knowledge, in all likelihood, of my window, still less of the flicker it’s made in a human’s environment.
The self-seeded plant and the garden escape – my everlasting-pea, which is the descendant of something introduced from southern Europe at least 300 years ago. The red valerians (another ‘naturalised’ introduction) that settle into the gaps in the bricks of the wall, fringing the side view over my neighbour’s front garden. I trim them back when their flowering season is finished, but shall be glad to see them return.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Perhaps I can date this flip, this outwards turn, back to my first years in graduate school in the US, noticing vacant lots in urban neighbourhoods, writing
First, put stakes in the ground for the corners: one, two, three, four, tapping them with a mallet. They go smoothly through the moist soil, each inward slide precipitated by a blow. Walk around with the twine. Wrap it round the stakes, make a square:
– a control patch (others will be sprayed, dusted, weeded)
– the site of a building; its very first basic shape, hovering in air,
held by string and pins; earth not yet turned
Small creatures come and go under the string, which will itself be half-obscured by the end of the season, a line amongst the summer’s vegetation. Convolvulus will spiral the splintering stakes; tendrils of vetch will reach for strands of twine. Birds and insects will fly in and out again. It’ll be crossed by runners: brambles, wild strawberry; large leaves will encroach from neighbouring ground.
A plot full of stories. All I’m doing is watching.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Upwards:
Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition in the Turbine Hall at the Tate this last year: ‘You can go through, but don’t touch,’ the attendants say to the children coming along from their workshops. Even without a three-year-old brushing against it, the whole installation is in constant movement, a light sway of ladders and rungs and rigging reaching right up into the very top of the hall, some 27 m (88 ft) high.
I sit and watch, my stenotic spine glad of the little low benches placed all around in a circle, as I look up and down and through, sketching knots and loops and twists. The colours are like bleached stems and foliage, bleached bones. I try not to think too hard about resemblances between the suspended holes and channels and the diagrams I’ve been shown to describe the narrowed apertures of my vertebrae (wear and tear, I’m told) or the tendons and pulleys that are inflamed in my hands, make my drawing fingers stiff and painful.
I have always loved drawing bones.
* * * * * * * * * * *
An art teacher I had once told us he wanted us to draw with bones. He had brought a burlap sack of cow bones, for us to make shapes with on the floor. That’s one idea for the pieces of pea-stem, along with listening to the sounds of the pods as I rattle them. They twist outwards as they dry, in a series of helter-skelter turns. I had assumed an explosive movement, that I would hear them popping in my room, but now I think they uncurl slowly, in their own time, with the seeds dropping rather than being propelled through the air.
* * * * * * * * * * *
If I go to the front window to see where the pea had been growing, and how its removal has changed this small part of the view, I find it’s much more difficult than I thought. I have to stand close to the glass, risk misting it with my breath (it’s 44 degrees outside, a drop from last week’s unseasonal 70s), and crane my neck round the angle of the second-floor bay window, so I’m looking backwards (towards the near end of my garden bed, by the north-east corner of the building) at what I suspect was the tradesman’s entrance. There’s nothing to see.
* * * * * * * * * * *
One final note, a further move from map and plan to elevation: it’s not unusual to hear military aircraft in the skies above this city – this last week there have been more of them, and louder.
Anna Reckin is a British poet based in the UK. Her first two collections, Three Reds and Line to Curve, are published by Shearsman Press, and her poems, reviews and essays have appeared in the UK and internationally, most recently in Long Poem Magazine. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. This year (2023) she is in receipt of a DYCP grant from Arts Council England. She also works as a translator, currently collaborating with Norwegian poet Hanne Bramness on poems for her next collection in English, The Water Glass.