Between the Boundaries by Adam Somerset

Author:Adam Somerset
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-912681-53-2
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2019-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

I Long the Arrival of the

Ship with the Seeds

In the 1980s, when Neil Kinnock led the Labour Party, a weighty book was handed out to the shadow cabinet for its collective holiday reading. Its author, Michael Porter, anatomised the strategies for industrial competitiveness that favoured different countries. Britain, a lead country of the post-Empire group, was depicted as best suited for living off dividends, auctioning fine art and manufacturing breakfast cereal. The auctioneers are now American and French and the best-known cereal name has been acquired by a company from China.

But, of course, it is not easy for politicians. Britain’s ninth-largest company spans the globe and is in an industry sector that did not even exist in 1980. When Labour came to power a decade on, its early Blair Cabinet members were also handed reading for their holiday time. The theme of one book was the psychology of happiness as discerned by a scholar in Chicago with the proper tools of research. Mikhail Czikszentmihalyi reported that across all the options for using leisure time, it was the activity of gardening that induced the most happiness in its practitioners.

The contents of the gardens of Britain are far removed from natural flora. They have become as they are due to a blend of science, trade and entrepreneurialism. On this June evening high humidity and a twenty-two-degree heat have created a crackle of lightning on the cliff journey north. The run of buildings that make Aberystwyth’s Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Studies appears deserted but there is one place of life. In the furthest lecture theatre the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society and the Ceredigion Historic Gardens Trust are jointly hosting a summer guest lecture.

Andrea Wulf has the polish and finish of the public speaker used to regular practice. She is fresh from a thirty-venue publicity tour of the USA. Her subject there has been her acclaimed biography of Alexander von Humboldt. The book was three and a half years in the making and her travel in the footsteps of Germany’s great polymath was formidable. The subject for this Monday night is a previous book that she has written. Its subject is closer to the audience than Humboldt. “The Brother Gardeners” are the chain of men who together formed the British garden as we know it.

No talk now comes without a screen, but Andrea Wulf uses it sparely. Her images are a means to illustrate rather than as a focal point to which words are subordinate. It is an uncommon speaker who can evoke a sense of how it may have been in a time that is not our own. Wulf does just that in her capturing the sheer thrill that the new discoveries created in her men and women of the eighteenth century. Their world brought excitement and colour to Britain.

The flora of the Americas were tightly packed into boxes by the hundred. Their crossing of the Atlantic made Britain the gardening fulcrum of the world. A country whose winter shades were uniformly brown became host to the reds and oranges of maple.

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