Asparagus

The hoar frost hangs in the trees, bright against the dull grey cloud of a winter sky. But, for the first time in ten days, the ground frost has lifted. My asparagus crowns arrived unexpectedly on Christmas Eve, fleshy-rooted with sturdy growing tips, needing to be planted as soon as possible. They are the finest I have ever received in twenty years of professional gardening. I managed half of them on 28 December and have been waiting impatiently ever since to finish the job. As I wasn’t expecting the crowns so soon, some of my ground was unprepared. The weeds which germinate even in cold temperatures had germinated and were growing, albeit slowly, in my future asparagus bed. The soil had not been workable since mid-September due to the heavy rain. I believed it would be workable now.

And so it was. Perfectly so. It is a clay loam with a high percentage of organic matter, dark and rich. It inclines to wetness, but only because it is on a plain below a hill. As I pressed the spade into the soil I felt and I heard the solid mineral element of it against the blade – the sand and the grit. It yielded easily and fell from the spade cleanly. It could not be more perfect.

I dug my trench and raised a ridge down the centre of it. I placed the growing points of the plants on the peak of the ridge, and spread the roots down each side, one per foot or three per metre: imperial and metric are human constructs which mean nothing in the vegetable world. I cover the fleshy tips by crumbling the soil through my hands above them, then a little more to anchor the roots. I return the rest of the soil with a rake, and it mounds over the trench. In future years, this will be the locus of the organic matter, which will enlarge the mound year on year.

As ever, I’m thinking about time. The time these plants have been growing in Italy before they were lifted and posted to me. The short interlude I have had to plant them, before all the accumulated strength of their previous life is wasted. The time it will be before a harvest can be taken. Asparagus usually takes three years, but these crowns are so strong that it may only be two. Time will tell.

There is no beginning or end to the gardening calendar, but the solstices and equinoxes seem like turning points all the same. It is comforting, in the coldest, darkest time of the year, to be planting for a harvest which is the epitome of summer.

Still Water Moves

Consider water. Water, and its possibilities. It brings colour to a garden, but what is the colour of water? It is the colour of light changing direction, whilst leaving some of itself behind, caught and lost to the fluid. A still pool can form a mirror which changes moment to moment. I have stood on the terraces of Versailles and watched the pleasure-boaters row among the clouds of the Canal, and I knew I was in the demesne of a sky-god. The surface of the water was still as glass and the clouds played across it, bringing patterns to life for moments only. Even still pools move. A breeze passing over the surface raises ripples, scattering the light. There is a pattern to the movement, a tempo. They move without moving, in constant flux as the clouds reflect.

Many years ago, I was sat in the gardens of New College, Oxford. It was nighttime and I believe it was winter. The garden there is enclosed on two sides by the northeast corner of the medieval city wall. As I sat on my bench, watching the stars and thinking, I became aware of a fog spreading out over the sunken lawn. The water vapour had lifted from the nearby rivers, the Cherwell and Thames, flowed up Long Wall Street and entered the garden through the modern pedestrian gate in the eastward wall. When the basin had filled, I retreated from the cold. Venturing out later for a final walk before bedtime, the whole garden was filled with fog so that only the battlements of the wall remained visible. In the years following, I have designed gardens, on paper at least, which can provide a theatre for water to act in this way. The trick is to include differentials of height and a combination of enclosure and permeability. A pool at the top of a slope can ‘overflow’ in this manner down a flight of steps. Confine the steps between low walls and the effect will be stronger than that created by a permeable structure such as a hedge. Provide no restraint and the effect will disperse as soon as it begins. A sunken area, such as the lawn at New College, can be filled to its brim, even to the height of city walls!

As for water, so for scents in the garden. I stood on the south parterre at Versailles, looking out over the Orangery to the Pièce d’eau Suisse. The breeze was from the southeast and had been cooled and moistened from its passage over the lake. It was September and few of the citrus trees on the terrace below were in flower. Earlier in the year, in the heat of summer, the air I was breathing would have been scented by them. I have designed for scent in this way. Some enclosure is needed to allow the scents to concentrate. I know it is possible to direct the flow of scent with the air current, but the essential oils are volatile and ‘lighter’ than water – less biddable as a result. I have always gardened in Britain and my efforts have achieved successes which are only shadows of what is possible. This small temperate island rarely experiences the degree of heat and the duration of that degree for the scents to develop to the desired intensity. The possibility exists though, and the promise is erotic.

Is my hypothetical garden with its raised pool only truly perfected when the water vapour flows? When the design has its fullest expression? Of course not: a garden has many perfections which change over time. In my mind, the pool is placed at the crossing of two paths. The paths are edged with low box hedging or similar and the flower beds thus defined are planted with herbaceous species. In winter, the herbaceous plants are cut down to ground level and the design is pared back to its bones: the straight, hard paths; the hedges functioning as architecture, being living walls; the round pool like an oculus, opening to the sky – no wonder the celts thought of water as gateway to another world. The design must please even when dormant, when the purity of the lines and the proportions are paramount. The forces of the world can still express within it. There may be frosts and frost-shadows created by the pattern of the hedges – again, the water moves. The different thermal qualities of the materials – the water, the stone, the soil, the leaves – hold the frost for differing lengths of time, creating the possibility of another set of changing patterns. Through the growing season, the herbaceous plants grow, filling the space with colour, scent, texture, form, and volume, whilst changing its aural qualities: external sounds are softened, insects hum and buzz, the breeze caresses foliage. Each season is unique as the different species respond to the changing pattern of light, temperature, precipitation, and their own changing natures as they mature year on year.

The water vapour may or may not rise from the pool, covering the ground and suspending the flowers in the air above a sea of mist. Someone, other than Berkeley’s God, may be there to see it or it may pass unwitnessed. Without a pair of ears, the tree falling in the forest is silent. Without an audience, a work of art signifies nothing.

Plant selection allows the designer a range of freedoms. If I choose to plant a garden with F¹ hybrids, or daughter plants which I have propagated using cuttings from a mother-plant, then I am using plants which are genetically identical. These clones will not grow identically within the garden because their growth is an expression of their genetic nature in response to their conditions, but the range of that expression will be limited and, to an extent, predictable. Homogeneity can be appropriate to certain planting schemes such as the Victorian favourite ‘carpet bedding’, or the seasonal infill on a box parterre. These planting schemes tend to be in open ground, with near uniform levels of light, exposure, fertility, and moisture provision. Uniformity is what I desire, because the feature is tightly composed and controlled. Elsewhere in the garden, I may choose to plant species raised from seed. Immediately, there is variety. The random combinations of sexual reproduction and spontaneous mutation are encoded in every cell. I have opened the design to the possibility of surprise, for the free expression of the variety of life.

Space can be left in the design for plants to seed freely. Some move under their own power, having dehiscent seed pods which burst open with force, scattering the contents. Seeds can be carried on the wind or moved by animals. This spatial permeability allows for the non-human agents to act in a garden although it is likely that the gardener will ‘edit’ the results so that the integrity of the design remains intact.

Some intended combinations may succeed, some may fail. I planted Paeonia ‘Duchesse des Nemours’ with Iris germanica ‘Frost Echo’. The contrasting forms of the flowers combine pleasingly, whilst the creamy white of the peony and the palest silvery-blue of the iris harmonise beautifully. Both are scented, but with very different notes. They flowered concurrently twice in six years, but the possibility that they could do so every year if the season favoured it contributed to the suspense and excitement of the garden.

What of flowing water? Florence Yoch, the American Landscape Architect most famed for her film sets, described it as ‘the voice of the garden’ (design notes ‘The Little Garden of Gaiety’ (Yoch, James J., Landscaping the American Dream, Sagapress, New York, 1989)), although I would prefer a voice: a garden is polyphonic. In the age of gravity-fed fountains the flow rates would have varied and the spray patterns and sounds of the fountains correspondingly. The fountain has become an instrument through which the rainfall on a distant mountain finds its song. Even as the water jets above the pool it is falling – don’t be fooled by appearances.

In the spray of fountains, Descartes saw rainbows which only Descartes could see. Rainbows are unique to the viewer, being formed by the angular relationship of the light, the refraction and the eye of the beholder. When I see rainbows in fountains, I enjoy them superficially. I do not think that when I walk around a fountain that I am creating something in the world which exists for me and for me alone. Perhaps I should: for Descartes they were the start of a philosophical investigation.

Moving water can stand still of course, just as still water moves. When fountains freeze it is as if gravity were a function of temperature rather than mass. The frozen spout of the fountain rising above the pool, the cascades held in the air mid-fall to the pool below. It seems impossible that this could not occur in a moment, an instant change of state from liquid to solid, and yet I am told it is gradual. So many possibilities exist when water is given a place in a garden.

Water is a home. Place fish in a pool and they will swim in ways to please themselves, but in so doing can please us. Water draws birds to itself to drink and to bathe, and their pleasure in the garden enriches our own. Birds are another of the garden’s voices, and trees decked with caged songbirds or aviaries were once common features of the grander gardens. Today, the demotic practice of the garden bird table has not only affected species frequency – goldfinches have become more common – but are a source of evolutionary pressure – the beak of the great tit is growing longer in British gardens. Like water, food is another enticement, a provision for the birds which then act as birds will, but which we invite to act, because their participation in our gardens pleases and enriches us.

A gardener can construct a theatre where the world can express itself, the gardener can direct its expression, but there will always be a Knut moment: the tide will come in and the world will express itself regardless of the will of the gardener. It may do so beautifully, realising a possibility which to that moment had existed only as a possibility, such as the beauty of the icicles of the frozen fountain, or it may do so destructively with the storm-wrecked tree.

I confess that my idea of a gardener so far has been Deist – the gardener has been creating the garden, a theatre of possibilities, and that has been the extent of his work. Although, as previously observed, gardens are dynamic and never finished. The work of the gardener, or of other human agents in the garden also has the potential for exploiting the conceptual and spatial permeability of the creation. A simple annual task such as the raking of autumn leaves can be transformed into a work of art. There are constants – the reach of my arms, the length of the rake’s haft, and then there are the variables – the volume of fallen leaves, the wind speed and direction as they fell and thus their distribution across the lawn. As a result, the point at which I reach the tree and need to accommodate its trunk changes and the curve I take around it ripples out across the subsequent rows. The work is my purpose, but the beauty manifests.

This post is an abridgement of a chapter in the forthcoming The Aesthetics of Imperfection (Bloomsbury, London).

Buxus sempervirens

The year ends as it began, although everything has changed. I am in a garden with a glass of chilled champagne – one of my favourite sentences in the English language. I am expecting friends. I am alive again.

The box tree is dressed with lights which turn its dark evergreen leaves into spheres of shadow. Joyce wrote of dusk that it is the light which falls, not the darkness. I’ve always wondered if that was an observation born of his myopia. I wonder some more as I sit waiting. It could be that the darkness rises from the earth, that the true state of the garden is not one of the colours of the leaves and the flowers, it is chthonic. As Badiou writes in Black, ‘Let’s see what the satyr’s eye enables us to understand. Let’s see what plants […] are:’. The tracery of the naked Fagus sylvatica trees, the dense twiggy stems of the Crataegus coccinea like a witch’s broom, are dark against the sky. The windows of the hotel are leaded and light spills out, and my mind jumps to Mondrian. The trees testify to a simple truth – that plants take light and make it solid and, in so doing, give us life. And I think of what the Czech playwright Capek wrote in his The Gardener’s Year, that gardeners do not tend flowers, they tend the soil. That the most important element of a garden is the one least seen, least considered.

I have written elsewhere of the three elements which define a garden – the boundary, the intention, the gardener. All the elements of a garden are here. The boundary, an old stone wall, less than 2m/6′ tall wraps us in its arms. Its shelter is emotional more than physical. A simple fountain falls water into a basin, giving the garden a voice. Two blackbirds greet the coming night with rapid scolds as they seek their roosts. I am a gardener, but today I am enjoying all the care of another’s labour: the weeded beds and the low, clipped hedges, the paving swept of leaves. The roses and wisteria on the walls, yet to be pruned – those tasks are just around the corner. It is a space to be still, a place for conversation, and companionship.

When the year began, I did not know what my subjects would be each week. Of the forty-eight postcards, as I think of them, anachronistically, only ten of my subjects have been UK natives: our garden-culture is globally rich as befits our maritime history. Ten have been trees, which surprises me. I love trees, but I didn’t quite realise before just how significant they are to my aesthetic life. I have given you the botanical names along with the common as the botanical names require no translation. Like mathematics, they are one of our attempts at a universal language.

I remember a time before I was a gardener. I would walk around a place and it was like walking through a crowd of strangers. Now, I can be in any city in the northern hemisphere and I greet old friends with their names, names familiar from the gardens of home. I hope these short pieces have given you some pleasure. And some names with which to greet new, but now familiar friends.

Viscum album

It is easy to understand why ancient peoples considered mistletoe magical. It seems to appear in trees all by itself and grows without roots. In truth, Viscum album, European mistletoe, is a hemiparasite spread by birds. Its evergreen leaves and stems contain chlorophyll and it does photosynthesise to a degree. The mature plant is entirely reliant on its host for water however, and for the majority of its nutrients. It achieves this by penetrating the bark of its host – a process that can take up to a year – and tapping into the connective tissue of xylem and phloem with a specialised growth known as a haustorium.

I gardened for many years in Herefordshire, which has taken mistletoe as its county flower. It is entirely appropriate. It thrives in the wet climate and seems especially fond of growing on apple trees of which Herefordshire has millions, being a cider-producing county. It was a constant battle to keep our orchards clear of it, and not one I was winning. A heavy infestation of mistletoe will weaken a tree, even to the point of death. The visible mistletoe can be cut and has a value in the weeks before Christmas, but it will regrow. To eradicate it from a tree, the wood which has been penetrated by the haustorium must be pruned out and sometimes not very much tree remains. I suspect, in the years to come, mistletoe will prove to be an indicator species for climate change. There is a clear line across the country, south of which mistletoe thrives.

The tradition of hanging mistletoe over doors has a very long history and was a feature of the Roman Saturnalia – a December festival involving feasting and the giving of gifts. For the Romans, it was a symbol of peace and understanding a meaning, oddly enough, which the later Vikings shared. In Viking mythology, Loki tricks the blind god Hodur into killing his otherwise invincible brother Baldr with an arrow or lance of mistletoe wood. When order is restored, mistletoe becomes a symbol of reconciliation. For the Greeks and the Celts, the white berries were symbols of divine male fertility and thus human male fertility by extension. These different strands of myth seem to have found a synthesis in the English practice of claiming kisses under a bunch of mistletoe at Christmas, removing a berry for each kiss exchanged.

It is best to leave the eating of the berries to the birds though, as all parts of the plant are toxic. One of the joys of winter in Herefordshire was seeing the orchards fill with mistle thrushes, feasting on the bounty and ensuring future bounties would be there for them in years to come, as they spread the seeds from tree to tree.

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Hedera helix

Ivy is a much maligned, but highly useful plant in the garden. Although it can be slow to establish and often sits still twiddling its thumbs for the first three years after planting, once it does start to grow in earnest, it soon scales whatever wall or structure has been provided for it. One of the most effective uses I have encountered in in the gardens of the Palais Royale in Paris. There, it grows through a chainlink fence and transforms a rather ugly feature into a visually solid, but narrow barrier – it must be 10cm/4″ thick at most. Its reputation for thuggery is due to the damage it can do to a poorly maintained wall. A recent ten year study by the University of Oxford on new walls, however, showed that the ivy-clad wall was in better condition than the bare wall at the finish. Like other climbers on walls, in provides insulation against sound and temperature. Being evergreen, it insulates the wall through the coldest months of the year, thus reducing frost shale on the bricks. And, although ivy does no harm when growing up the trunks of mature trees, it does conceal problems. I do cut my ivy from roadside trees, but those within the demesne are safe.

It is an amenable plant for the gardener. It can be pruned at any time of year so can be adapted to fit the demands of the wider garden. There are times I try to avoid, of course. Birds love to nest in it, so I tend to leave it alone between the months of March and August. The abundant green-yellow flowers attract clouds of flies and wasps, so it is safe from my secateurs then too. In time, these flowers set berries which ripen into pleasing clusters of round black buttons on which wood pigeons gorge. I was in Worcestershire at the weekend and a friend had cut an enviable bucketful of berried ivy for a Christmas wreath. I am only seventy miles south, but my ivy berries are resolutely green, as pictured, and will not be ripe in time.

Hedera helix is an unusual plant in that it has two very distinct phases of growth – the juvenile and the arborescent. As the latter adjective suggests, the stems thicken and become self-supporting to a greater extent, and the leaves become less indented. If cuttings are taken from ivy at the juvenile stage, the resultant plants will mature accordingly, but if cuttings are made at the arborescent stage, the plants remain arborescent. This has fallen from favour, but in the Victorian era, propagation by this method provided another texture for topiary plants, particularly in locations where other species could not grow, such as in deep, dry shade, or under the toxic drip of a Taxus baccata, the common yew.

Ivy composed the thryssos of Dionysos, oddly, I’ve always thought, as he was the god of wine, among other things and I’ve never understood why ivy grew entailed in his iconography. It is more commonly encountered these days in the English carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, which competes with ‘Jerusalem’ for the crown of ‘most pagan song sung in church’.

Cortaderia selloana

I do not like Cortaderia selloana and I’m not sure why. It reminds me of my childhood, growing up in the seventies, when the range of plants available to the English gardener was a fraction of what is on offer now. Incongruous clumps of it would sit in the middle of otherwise perfectly reasonable lawns and I, being a curious child and quite possibly a slow-learner, would poke around in it, lacerating my hands with fine, deep cuts which stung for days.

A sizeable clump or drift of pampas grass, preferably at the back of a border, can be a handsome thing. The one pictured is in Oxford University Parks and stands at 3m/10′ tall. It’s foreground was a mixed bed of other South American natives, salvias, fuchsias and lobelias – all of which have been finished off by the frosts. Its magnificent culms, in size and shape, if not colour, remind me of another feature of my childhood – fairground candy floss. They come into their own at this time of year, not simply as the last plant standing, but the culms catch the light, particularly in late afternoon, and it is not unpleasing.

As an adult, I have been asked to remove established clumps from gardens and when a mechanical digger has not been available or was unsuitable, I’ve found setting them on fire quite effective, prior to manual excavation of what remains. They are tenacious. For the first time ever, I have been asked to plant Cortaderia rather than destroy it, and I have twenty small plants lined out in the nursery where they will stay until March when I will plant them in what will be an unusual meadow, seasoned with a variety of exotics for display in the final quarter of the year. We are developing a spring/early summer-flowering meadow down by the river which bounds the property – this will be native species.

A garden is many things, including a theatre for the exercise and nurturing of virtues such as patience – the work of gardens rarely brings an instant beauty to be enjoyed, turfing aside, but even that is a sleight-of-hand: the newly turfed lawn hides hundreds of hours. I have included Cortaderia in my English garden because it cultivates tolerance within me. I do not need to tolerate that which is agreeable to me, but that which I might find difficult and challenging. And faced with the challenge of using pampas grass creatively, I can see that I might feel differently about it as the work matures. It will, at least, be in a community of plants composed with a unity of purpose, and already, as I write, I am imagining how this space will be formed. I could create a ‘perfect world’ garden in which no weeds grew beyond their cotyledon leaves and only my favoured plants were present – it is possible, but this would not be a ‘real world’ garden. And, if physically realised gardens have anything in common, despite their infinite variations in form, they are realist compositions. Otherwise, they fail.

Bents and Fescues

The fine lawn grass species are the most common evergreens in the garden and yet are often overlooked and taken for granted, which is a pity as lawns are probably the hardest working feature of all. Herbaceous borders are not required to be beautiful and suitable for ball games or sitting on, but that is what we expect from a garden lawn.

Laying turf is one of the most enjoyable projects in a garden. As ever, soil cultivation and ground preparation are the most important parts of the process and take far longer than the turfing itself. I like my clients to go out on the day I lay the turf. They leave an area of bare level earth and come back ta-da! to a lawn. Because, if the preparation is done well, and the turf is good quality, it goes down like carpet.

The green expanse of a lawn is a useful fore-grounding to the colourful display of the flower borders and the sward can both frame the other feature and help to calm the colours down, to buffer them. But lawns are things of beauty in their own right. Mowing at different heights creates contrasting textures which can be used to guide the eyes or create patterns. Parallel stripes are the simplest of patterns, but mowing the area a second time on the perpendicular creates a chequerboard. The stripes are created by the roller of the mower laying the blades of the grass down in the direction of its passage, which causes the light to reflect differently. Like rainbows, which exist uniquely to each viewer, the stripes of the grass reverse depending on which direction they are viewed from. Each stripe is both dark and light. More complicated patterns are possible, limited only by the area available, the width of the mower, and the dedication of the person mowing.

A finer cut, and a better finish, is achieved with a cylinder mower rather than a rotary one. The rotary mower is, in essence, a scythe, but the cylinder mower is a pair of scissors. A freshly sharpened and correctly adjusted cylinder mower is a thing of joy. It will cleanly cut a single piece of paper inserted between its fixed plate and the moving blades, indeed, that is how to test it.

Lawns are often recommended as a low-maintenance solution, but only if the garden owner is happy with unkempt grass. To keep fine turf in top condition is time-consuming. In a previous garden, I had an acre of it under my charge. Grass grows at temperatures above 6 degrees Celsius and during the growing season, generally March to November, it was mown every three or four days, edged weekly (1km/0.6miles of edging) and fed monthly. In September every year it was scarified to remove moss and thatch, hollow-tined to improve aeration and drainage, and top-dressed with sharp sand; six tonnes of sharp sand. During periods of drought, it was irrigated carefully. This kept the lawns looking like a billiard table, albeit a very stripy one.

Tulipa

There have been frosts and the soil is cooling. It is time to plant tulips. I was taught, when I was training, that planting tulips after frost reduced the incidence of ‘tulip fire’, a fungal infection which distorts the leaves and flowers. Even if new bulbs are bought each year – and it is more economical to do this than to try and save bulbs year to year – I want to keep my soil ‘clean’, if possible. So, I have been planting tulips in the cutting beds: 4300 tulips.

Like a rower, I work backwards, and the distance I have planted waxes as the unplanted ground wanes. I find this easier as, whilst I work, I am at looking at the work done, not the work still to be done. My soil is clay marl and seems to absorb atmospheric moisture like a sponge, never mind the precipitation, which has been slight. I need to clean the blade of the trowel with my thumb between each penetration of the earth. When planting tulips to be cut for their flowers rather than for for their display in situ, a spacing of 15cm/6″ in appropriate. I line out two rows at a time as that is the furthest I can reach comfortably from the board which spreads my mass evenly over the easily compacted clay. Each bulb is planted 15cm/6″ deep – the same depth, the same distance, as the the length of the trowel’s blade. The tool carries my guide in its form. At other times, I use my hand. My clenched left fist is 9cm/4″ wide, and thus my measure for sowing beetroot, for example. My span is 22cm – I have just measured it – but it was always a reliable 8″ which I would use for planting lettuces, removing half the crop as baby lettuce, leaving the rest to mature further.

Tulips are classed as a tunicate bulb, meaning they have a skin or tunic, a papery outer layer which protects the life within. Modern cultivars have a loose association with their coats and often arrive naked and white. Perhaps it is the time of year – a week after the Armistice Day centenary, or the manner of rowing them out before I plant, but there is something reminiscent of the simple white stones of the British cemeteries in northern France, stretching out in lines without apparent end. Planting bulbs is quiet work, patient work. I have settled to it and I am asking myself, why do we plant gardens for our dead? Or, why do we plant our dead in gardens? I am thinking too of the Thomas poem – these ‘silent detonations of power without sin’. I am planting a minefield of future beauty, certainly. What does that make the tulip flowers of next April and May? – explosions of colour and beauty, for sure. Are they the resurrected soul of the buried bulb? Possibly. One of my thousand penetrations of the soil today brought up, on its return, a bright green caterpillar. It will be eaten by a bird or die otherwise – it won’t survive its exposure at this time of year. But, I realised as I worked, that I have no idea whether I am a caterpillar or a butterfly.

Cotoneaster x watereri

We have passed the autumn equinox. The year grows old and the light fails. In the garden, my eyes search out all sources of colour, of light, of warmth, of comfort. The autumn leaves are splendid this year; the trees being stressed from the drought, followed by some decent frosts to hone the colours. Their distress, physically expressed, is my comfort. But, I suppose my eyes are searching for signs of life, even so, not the senescent leaves of trees and shrubs falling into slumber. I am seeing the berries: the berries are alive. Within them, future lives are stored in seed. The berries give life to others also. As I walked across the demesne this morning, the first flight of Turdis pilaris, fieldfares, filled the sky. They will have flown in from Scandinavia or Russia to feast on the bounty of berries here. The first sighting is one of the mileposts of the year – it tells me, we are here and all is as it should be. I expect cold weather within the next month – they are the prophets of winter. It is a reminder too, that latitude is relational. The British Isles are south and temperate for millions of migrants every year. They come here to live. Political territories, borders, walls – these things are meaningless to them. Life is the imperative: and we are just fleas on the dog. A dog endures many generations of fleas.

The berried plants catch my attention. I see the hedgerow Crataegus monogyna, hawthorn, with fresh eyes. The humble Ruscus aculeatus, butcher’s broom, is transformed from a filler-in to something commanding attention. But, my particular attention is caught by the titular subject, Cotoneaster x watereri. Like the Ruscus, it is the chorus to the garden for most of the year. It provides body and depth, seriousness, possibly. Yet, for most of the year, like the god of the German theologians, it is experienced as an absence more often than not.

Type ‘artificial shrub’ into a search engine and numerous sites selling plastic plants will be generated. Cotoneaster x watereri is classed as an artificial shrub. Its parents may never have met in the wild – indeed, the parentage is disputed, or undetermined, at least. But, I feel its existence challenges our terminology in the same way that calling anything unnatural does. Surely, only natural things can exist. I stand with Terence, as so often before: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. My translation is free – I am a person, one of all of us, I recognise all of you. We are the same despite the differences.

I love Cotoneaster x watereri for its own virtues too. The arching branches are elegant. The ratio of leaf to berry is perfect to the eye, just beautifully balanced and proportioned, however complicated its breeding. The promise of the life in its berries gives me hope. A full life is a generous one.

Parthenocissus tricuspidata

This week’s postcard is all about identity. Parthenocissus tricuspidata, Boston Ivy, is not what it seems. It is not from Boston on either side of the Atlantic ocean, nor is it ivy. It is a native of Japan, Korea, and parts of China. Given its ability to reach 30m/100′ in the UK, I expect it has spread widely in any similarly temperate climate. The tricuspidata, which describes the leaf shape, is the easiest part of its identity to pin down, meaning three – toothed. Except it isn’t, as Parthenocissus tricuspidata is highly variable in form. Some have five teeth, whilst remaining entire, whilst some have five, but are so indented (bitten) that they start to resemble its cousin, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, the Virginia Creeper. The Virginia Creeper is native to Virginia, but also to Canada in the north and Guatemala to the south. To further complicate matters, Parthenocissus refers to ‘virgin ivy’. As aforementioned, it isn’t ivy, unless ivy is taken to mean a generic identifier for any climbing plant as, I believe, Coca Cola has managed to achieve in parts of the world for any carbonated drink. I have not studied Greek, hence I do not know where to divide the compound. The Parthenon in Athens is the temple complex devoted to the virgin goddess Athena, though.

It is one of the most useful of climbing plants. It adheres to walls with little pads which bind by a method of secreting Calcium carbonate – the stuff of snails’ shells and pearls. It is a chemical bond, rather than a physical penetration, unlike ivy, Hedera helix. These pads do no harm to the wall and the presence of the plant only benefits the wall. We return to the realms of the umbrella-parasol, the cloister. In a hot climate, the presence of the climber on the wall significantly reduces cooling costs. Not only does it insulate the wall from direct sunlight and the ambient temperature, the evaporation of the transpiration stream – the flow of water from the roots out through the lenticels of the leaves – also causes cooling. In cold climates, the presence of the plant, even in its winter, un-leafed form insulates the wall and reduces heating costs. In both climates, and at all times of year, it provides aural insulation – it softens sound, making it invaluable in enclosed spaces of heavy traffic, pedestrian or otherwise.

Those of a delicate nature might not welcome it on their dwelling. It is rampant and needs to be kept in check routinely. Much of the fault lies with the human agent who plants it though, expecting it to stay content with a 5m/16′ x 4m/14′ wall, when it will climb to six times that. But, it also provides a home for insects and spiders, so confronts us with the reality that the superficial choices that we make determined on form, colour or affordability, have unforeseen consequences. The world is full of other lives and needs and we ignore them at our cost.

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