A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively

Author:Penelope Lively
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141922522
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Cedar of Lebanon and Erigeron karvinskianus

Landscape is silent until you unlock the codes. The English landscape with its fields and hedges is just an agreeable and apparently arbitrary patchwork of shape and colour until you know something of its private language. But when those undulations become ridge and furrow, when that die-straight hedgerow is an enclosure boundary, when those lumps and bumps are a deserted medieval village, then the whole place speaks. Cities likewise: brick, stone and glass are merely that until they can be sorted into a chronology, until you know what came before what, until that scrap of wall is sited in its distant century and the curve of that street explained by vanished circumstances.

Gardens, most of all, need interpretation. Stepping out of the veranda door at Golsoncott you looked down into the rose garden and thence beyond its parapet to the sloping lawn below the grass terrace. The great cedar of Lebanon presided over the lawn, which rolled down to the ha-ha. Beyond that, pasture separated the garden proper from the woodland-stream garden and the orchard. Depending on the time of year, you were delighted by the huge pink camellia beside the veranda, the wisteria that draped the house itself, the Erigeron karvinskianus that gushed from the walls of the rose garden, the regale lilies, the crimson leaves of Vitis coignetiae. If you knew something of garden history you would note the influence of William Robinson (that cedar of Lebanon, the considered but informal effect) and of Gertrude Jekyll (the sunken rose garden with its drystone walls and wide curved stone seat, its lily pond and sundial). Essence of Englishness, you would think, the English garden.

Not so at all. The garden is a cacophony. It is polyglot. It is a global reference system. In fact there is hardly anything here that is English, except for the good offices of Mr Robinson and Miss Jekyll, along with the yew, the primroses, the snowdrops and a handful of other plants.

When I was six I sat in the rose garden making a daisy-chain. It was September 1939. We were living in interesting times, but I was not aware of that. My companion that day was Margaret Reed, also six, whose parents, Tom and Edith, worked at Golsoncott. A photograph shows us brandishing our daisy-chains, looking rather pleased with ourselves. We are sitting amidst the foaming multitude of the pink and white erigeron and our satisfaction is entirely justified. E. karvinskianus does not lend itself to daisy-chain-making. It does not have the thick fleshy stem of a meadow daisy but a thin wiry one which requires very precise application of the thumbnail in order to split it effectively. I can recover the experience to this day, the frustration as the thin green wire broke, time after time. E. karvinskianus is very much a Gertrude Jekyll planting, almost a Jekyll hallmark, you could say, sparkling down from walls in Jekyll gardens like Hestercombe, softening the hard landscaping and serving as a backdrop to a planting of lilies or groupings of Jekyll silver foliage plants.

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