As we run down Arne Herbs, my daughter’s operation “Abri Herbs” takes flight, she’s just got the contract from her local Mairie to provide the flowers for all the roundabouts and verges in her village. Actually I didn’t know they had roundabouts down there, remote in the mountains and although it’s not for the medicinal herbs she prefers to grow, she has to start somewhere. An order for a hundred and fifty basils came as a nice bonus. So we both know how expensive and difficult it is to set up a thriving herb business, but what currently fascinates me is what happens when it (and us) come to the end of our natural span. Actually, to a limited extent I will keep growing not only because I like my food but I need the rare historic stuff to illustrate the Medieval glossary which becomes increasingly turgid. By this I mean that the further one progresses through the alphabet, the greater the scope for back referencing giving the impression of swimming against a flow of solidifying treacle. For instance this morning I was doing “Thapsia” of which the fourteenth century “Synonima” helpfully remarks “Tapsia id est sucus ferule” sending me scuttling back to “F” for Ferula. According to Rufinus it is also “herbe similis feniculo”, which, given that Thapsia is popularly known as “Death carrot” suggests an interesting result if you sprinkle it rather than Fennel on your nice fresh trout.
There are still sufficient plants here to provide callers with almost all that they want, but being sort of retired we don’t mail out any more, I always thought that the skilled packing required to ensure the plants’ survival in transit was a complete waste of Jenny’s time particularly when she is not only a brilliant gardener but actually enjoys it (I look upon it as not dissimilar to washing up, – endless repetition year after year with nettle-stung hands and thistle-pricked knees thrown in for good measure) and the vestigial profit margin vanishes completely when the post and couriers mis-deliver. So the tunnels are slowly emptying, it’s a welcome relief when the storms blow not to have to panic that the covers are going to blast off into orbit. Now as a door sails by like a flying jelly fish, I just shrug and say “so what”. On the other hand, I admit to having always been fascinated by derelict nurseries in the way that the Victorians loved ruined abbeys. Plants are liberated from the constraints of tedious commecialism to do their own thing, either dying or embarking on a maniacal struggle with all their mates for survival. The English honeysuckle is currently entwining itself around the poison ivy daring any humanoid garden control-freak to intervene, Rheum palmatum has cheerfully established itself on the rubbish heap and the rosemarys have grown through the bottoms of their pots, penetrated the membrane underneath and for all I know, carried on down to the Infernal regions below. Obviously this attitude is the antithesis of the patio slab gardening promoted by the media and has probably cost me hundreds of potential customers over the years, but if you’ve got to do a job you might as well enjoy it and sacrificing visits from those who treat their plants in the manner of gauleiters lining up a row of untermenschen can only contribute to the pleasure. having written that, I did actually take the loppers down to a couple of tunnels where trees had grown through the mypex and were threatening to continue ever upward and through the covers. The Sassafras has already done this, taking advantage of my good nature and the fact that it is undeniably special. The Slippery Elm is kept in check by the constant demand for cuttings or that too would be insouciantly engaged in wrecking the place.
I have just finished reading Bernd Roeck’s, “Florence 1900”, an account of the German artistic community in the city at the turn of the last century. Impossibly remote as it seems now, many of the people alive then were still ticking over when I was a student there in the sixties. It is notable as the best-written book I have picked up in almost as many years, and all in translation. One could say much the same for the English edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Clearly translators are an under-acknowledged lot and it’s a familiar cliché that if it wasn’t for the Arab scholars who rescued Dioscorides, the whole history of Western medicine would have taken an entirely different course, – Chinese has been suggested more than once. On the German theme, I wish I could speak more than a couple of words, it would be good to know what the herbs were that Kundry used to heal Amfortas in Von Eschenbach’s “Parzifal”. In fact medieval legends are packed with herb lore which is normally over-looked by academics intent on deciphering the herbals themselves. Chretien de Troyes is another writer who clearly knew his herbs, eating them, slapping them on injuries, sorting out mental health problems and employing them for insomnia and as aphrodisiacs. If one was going to be stuck in a medieval castle, I can’t think of a better companion. (Well if one has to be practical that is, obviously any man half way normal would prefer gorgeous feisty Nicolette from the French legend)
Listening to Bach in the bath last night, as I dozed off, the almost total absence of botanical references in music vaguely penetrated my waning consciousness (Oh God, here comes elfnsafety “It’s a safety hazard to go to sleep in the bath”) Visual arts is stuffed with them, from the exquisite marginalia of Bourdichon to Botticelli, – “Primavera” has so many that Mirella Levi D’Ancona wrote an entire book about them. Literature would be hard pressed for similes if the authors couldn’t draw upon plants, Nicolette’s physical charms are described in terms of cherries, roses, daisies and walnuts. But music, – almost nothing, Mahler 3 obviously,Tannhauser’s stick and that one in “Carmen” and that’s about it. But then inanimate flowers are pretty much incompatible with a musical idiom. Thank goodness, It does make for a more relaxing bath if one’s memory isn’t being jogged by a lot of attention-demanding plants just as one dozes off.
Lepidoptera really are the most perverse little beasts. It only takes Butterfly Conservation, one of the more worthwhile charities, to say that something is seriously endangered, for great clouds of the things to clog the air space. A few years ago it was Common Blues. The day after the press release, a couple flitted through the garden, the next day eight, then twenty-two and by the end of the week they were too numerous to count. This year it’s Garden Tigers. Within a week of the alarm bell sounding, the larvae were enthusiastically trashing the Pentaglottis and my pleas to my sister to protect them rather than massacring the (not very cute) babies as they turned her Wiltshire garden into an apocalyptic wasteland fell on deaf ears. Most remarkably, as I dumped an old radiator in a scrap man’s van, I rescued twenty eight caterpillars clinging to it. Many more must have dropped off whilst radiator was being carried from the back of the house where it had been temporarily dumped, to the van. So what is the attraction of defunct B&Q radiators? Should they become the next must-have garden feature and will they become incorporated into gold medal winning gardens at next year’s Chelsea?
Arne Herbs 