The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith

Author:Sue Stuart-Smith [Stuart-Smith, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-03-04T17:00:00+00:00

9

WAR AND GARDENING

Yet shall the garden with the state of war

Aptly contrast, a miniature endeavour

To hold the graces and the courtesies

Against a horrid wilderness.

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962)

MORE THAN ONCE in the course of writing this book I have felt rueful about sitting at my desk while Tom was outside in the sunlight getting on with things in the garden. One autumn, this feeling was particularly strong.

All summer I had been researching the origins of therapeutic horticulture in relation to the First World War. Industrialised warfare had been deployed on a scale never seen before and the devastating consequences strengthened the idea that people needed to get back to working the land. I had also been investigating the life of my grandfather, Ted May. What I eventually discovered about the degradations and cruelties that the prisoners of war in Turkey were subjected to shook me to the core. By the time autumn arrived, devoting so much time to thinking about war was beginning to have a negative effect on me. I realised I needed to put my research to one side and spend some time in the garden.

Several large boxes of bulbs were stacked up in our shed, so I loaded myself up with some bags of scillas and joined Tom in one of our large flower beds. What a relief to get my hands back in the earth! Working with a dibber and relishing the smell of fresh clean soil, it was not long before I found a rhythm and felt at one with the task. The weather was mild for the time of year and the warmth of the sun helped dispel a creeping inner chill that I had begun to feel. As I continued, it occurred to me that planting a bulb is like setting a time bomb of hope in motion. All winter long the scillas would lie in the dark earth then silently detonate in spring, covering the ground in shards of brilliant blue.

The way that seeds, bulbs, and corms rise up out of the ground, transforming themselves from something seemingly lifeless is something we can ordinarily take for granted. The experience of war, however, is one in which nothing can be taken for granted. All the assumptions that seem to hold life together are called into question. At the same time, the effects of natural beauty and human kindness are intensified. Extreme situations such as those encountered on the front lines and those endured by prisoners of war strip life right back and expose the value of experiences that might otherwise be obscured.

Warfare and gardening are in many ways the opposite of each other. Both are about territory, attacking or defending it on the one hand, and cultivating it on the other. The idea that one activity might counterbalance the other has ancient roots. In the great civilisations of Mesopotamia the skills involved in combat and cultivation were given equal weight. Writing in 329 BC, Xenophon described how for the Persian kings, the art of war and the art of husbandry were considered two of the ‘noblest and most necessary pursuits’.

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