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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.

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Crataegus coccinea

The scarlet hawthorn sits in the garden like the timpani of an orchestra. For much of the year, all the action, all the noise and excitement seems to be provided by showier plants – floriferous roses, or the herbaceous perennials which rise from nothing to fill the garden with colour and scent throughout summer. But, just as the garden is exhausted and it is time to cut the other plants down to their crowns, or to prune the roses severely, there is the scarlet hawthorn in its autumn dress, all flaming gold and abundant large red berries. There are few more pleasing sights on a bright, frosty day with the low sun illuminating the tree’s crown. On a dull, overcast or rainy day, the scarlet hawthorn and other deciduous heroes seem to be the only sources of colour and light to lift the spirits.

Crataegus coccinea is a useful tree in the garden. It is genuinely small, as opposed to being small for the first ten years before turning into a monster like so many other ‘small trees’ of the catalogues. When mature, it reaches 7.5m/25 feet tall and, in truth, it is its round-headed nature which is more likely to cause a problem in a city garden as it will grow as broad as it does tall. I enjoy plants which give and give again at different times of year; the scarlet hawthorn is generous. In spring it is covered with white, slightly sour-scented blossom which is loved by the insect pollinators. In summer, it settles down to a reliable green – the sort of background noise in a garden which is only noticed when it is absent. In autumn, the leaves turn gold before they fall. I believe that in their native New England, the deeper cold turns the leaves to red and even to purple. The berries are a valuable food for birds, birds which may have nested in its crown, protected by its 5cm/2″ thorns. Even in winter, the scarlet haw continues to give, to us and to other creatures. I find the fissured bark visually pleasing. Ladybirds and other hibernating insects find it homely, which in turn brings tits and numerous insectivorous birds in search of a meal. I have spent many a happy coffee time, wrapped against the cold, watching the sharp-eyed birds flitting from twig to twig, picking the crevices for food. Like other hawthorns, the bark of the previous year’s growth ripens through the cold months, gaining a deep red lustre. Slowly, in the cold chemistry of the tree’s stored energy, the buds ripen and swell with the promise of life. These changes, expressed by the tree, are fundamental to the timbre of the garden as a living space as, indeed, are its movements, and the movements of the creatures which are drawn to it.

When first I encountered Crataegus coccinea, it was by a different name, C. pedicellata. The two former species have been shown to be one species. Coccinea, being the older name, takes precedence. It is a more accurate description of the plant, and I should be less reluctant about this change than I am.

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