Thomas Hardy
As a Dorset UK kid, Thomas Hardy was part of my real environment through walks around his house and Dorchester in general and my virtual environment through education and study. Over time I have loved him and hated him and his writings. On balance though I have ended up understanding him more and loving him accepting his weaknesses in a way one learns to accept one's own. His love of the country certainly rubbed off on me. I suppose I visited his cottage last more than thirty years ago and have moody photos of the outside taken late on an autumnal day and the noise of crows settling nearby.
He wrote about the cottage where he was born and wrote many of his famous works in a poem called Domicillium when he was 16 in 1860, part of which is below:
"........
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof, Wild honeysucks
Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish
(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple-trees hard by.
Red roses, lilacs, varigated box
Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers
As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these
Are herbs and esculents; and farther still
A field; then cottages with trees, and last
The distant hills and sky.
Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze
Are everything that seems to grow and thrive
Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn
Stands here and there, indeed, and from a pit
An oak uprises, springing from a seed
Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.
........."
Written in his youth maybe I still defy the reader not to be able to visualise that garden of 1860.
For even greater insight the poem goes on about his grandmother's description (it was her husband the first Thomas Hardy who had built the cottage and after whom it is named)
“Fifty years
Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked
The face of all things. Yonder garden-plots
And orchards were uncultivated slopes
O'ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn:
That road a narrow path shut in by ferns,
Which, almost trees, obscured the passer-by.
Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs
And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts
Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats
Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers
Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;
So wild it was when first we settled here.'
So many of his books are peopled by characters he knew in the local landscape. I doubt if there is a book which will not show some aspect of how gardens and landscape were crucial to everyday life and are hard to separate.
Susan Hill
“The Magic Apple Tree” A Country Year Penguin Books. First published 1982. Into many reprints. She records the sights and smells, the people, the gardens animals births, festivals and deaths that mark the changing seasons in the small Oxfordshire community” of Barley. The engravings in the book are by John Lawrence and are in themselves a delight. The cover picture is a painting by Samuel Palmer called “The Magic Apple Tree””
D H Lawrence
It was Lawrence whose power of words to describe nature and gardens which had hit me with the virtual bat. I grew up of course with the scandolous “Lady Chatterley's Lover “ as my only real experience of his writing. I know now that as ever, the background for the book is again drawn for personal sources and loosely drawn from Lady Caroline Morrell's relationship with a young man who came to carve statuary for her garden. My brown papered cover of the book thumbed through and shared with a school friend almost blocked me from his descriptive powers - his detailed description of the miniscule rather than the breadth of the garden and the landscape later astounded me. There are so many examples but my epiphany came in a little anthology whose name has long escaped me. A quick check of some of the names of other poems reinforces this sense for instance "Bavarian Gentians" . But no, I find something different which hints of a memory and it come from an essay written by him called "Twilight in Italy No 4 San Gaudenzio". Passion passion more passion... here is a little snatch:
".....
Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and the apricot trees, it is the Spring.
Soon the primroses are strong on the ground. There is a bank of small, frail crocuses shooting the lavender into this spring. And then the tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream-sides, and around the olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of primrose. The few birds are piping thinly and shyly, the streams sing again, there is a strange flowering shrub full of incense, overturned flowers of crimson and gold, like Bohemian glass. Between the olive roots new grass is coming, day is leaping all clear and coloured from the earth, it is full Spring, full first rapture.
Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens and intensifies, like experience. The days seem to be darker and richer, there is a sense of power in the strong air. On the banks by the lake the orchids are out, many, many pale bee-orchids standing clear from the short grass over the lake. And in the hollows are the grape hyacinths, purple as noon, with the heavy, sensual fragrance of noon. They are many-breasted, and full of milk, and ripe, and sun-darkened, like many-breasted Diana...."
His expression of his love of flowers and nature as expressed in this passage speaks to me more than his novels generally do. So often overlooked.
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