The Art of India

 

I’m not sure exactly how I came across this book, “The Art of India” (1954) by Stella Kramrisch, but I’m pretty certain I read Allen Ginsberg talking about it.

That naturally led me to want to hunt down a copy. But this was at the tail of end research for “Retreat” when I was consciously attempting to dial back my focus on Eastern philosophy. Not an expensive book, really. But I satisfied myself with finding a PDF of it on archive.org.

A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around in my wife’s study. Disturbing her when she was trying to write something on Le Corbusier, probably… As I was looking through her bookshelf, my eye caught upon the spine of this copy of “The Art of India.”

When my grandfather, the art collector Michael Ingram died, once their family’s house sold, the entire family was invited, almost as though we were vultures, to take whatever we wanted from the building. I was very fond of my grandparents and remember being a bit dazed. I think I took only one item, a small iron frying pan that I remembered my beloved grandmother frying me an egg in.

Thank god, Mrs Ingram had her wits about her. She took the Kramrisch book from his massive library of art books. In its frontispiece there is this review notice from Phaidon, announcing the publication to the reviews department of The Illustrated London News, which was our family business. Unprompted, and without any unseemly pleading from me, she gave me the book.

My grandfather took a deep interest in the culture of the far east. This ran in the family. His uncle was Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram – famous for saving for Japan one of their cherry trees.

By 1926, he was a world authority on Japanese cherries and was asked to address the Cherry Society in Japan on their national tree. It was on this visit that he was shown a painting of a beautiful white cherry, then thought to be extinct in Japan. He recognised it as one he had seen in a moribund state in a Sussex garden, the result of an early introduction from Japan. He had taken cuttings and so was able to re-introduce it to the gardening world as ‘Taihaku’, the name meaning ‘Great White Cherry’. His 1948 book Ornamental Cherries is a standard work.

Wikipedia

His father Herbert Ingram, son of William Ingram, was a collector of Chinese porcelain, whose collection is the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford’s collection.

The arrival of the Sir Herbert Ingram’s generous gift of over 3,000 Chinese and Japanese objects to the Museum of Eastern Art in 1956, then housed in the Indian Institute, more than doubled its original holdings. In 1962, these were moved to become part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum.

Eastern Art Online

In spite of his father’s generosity, their house was still full of lovely ancient pots, urns, and vases. But my grandfather was also fascinated by Eastern thought. I remember this quote from Confucius pinned up in their kitchen:

“If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations.
When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.”

Confucius

This is, of course, the same call for “bottom-up” action which bewitched the counterculture as it rebelled against the political activism of the previous generation.

There are two particularly lovely pictures of the Buddha in the book.

And an exquisite “Tree of Life of Knowledge” perfect for this blog.

The Story of a Raised Bed

I had grown a little before November 2021, zinnias from seed and dahlias from bulbs in 2020, but never vegetables or indeed anything with serious intent.

It was a combination of two things, reading Theodore Roszak’s collection of essays “Ecopsychology” (1995) in August 2021, and watching an interview with Eliot Coleman in October 2021, that truly set me on this path. The latter providing the lightning bolt moment.

Immediately before this I had been reading Alfred Adler’s majestic “Understanding Human Nature” (1927), at the tail end of my research after “Retreat” , which carried on quite a long time after the end of that book’s publication in 2020. Indeed, I must have finished “Retreat” in mid 2019 and there I was still working through, not even yet fully integrating, the ideas I had unearthed in that book.

So, my journey into gardening had little to do with lockdown, as it did for many people. However, the same etheric conditions that we all experienced in lockdown, the ones which gave rise to other phenomenon like the huge growth in the amount of dreaming recorded in western populations, and the emergence of racial trauma out from the unconscious onto the social canvas, tracked in parallel my own etheric research into the dematerialised highs of LSD and meditation against the backdrop of the counterculture, and that generation’s subsequent post-countercultural integrated fascination with organic farming.

The immediate upshot was that I was keen to get involved somehow in growing food. I’m yet to totally work out how to make that transition in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a massive leap for a music-obsessed animator working in the centre of a city to undertake. A more etheric, less integrated existence it would be hard to devise, perhaps a coder working on a space station would be able to trump me? In consequence, the journey back to earth is harder to make.

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Working on my psyche art project, I got in the habit of picking up pieces of wood in the street. Some time in November 2021 I found two huge beautiful huge planks of wood in this skip on Pear Tree Street round the corner from where I live, and decided that they would make the basis of an excellent raised bed.

I cut them to size outside in the street, soaked them in linseed oil to protect them from the weather, and assembled them with beautiful rust-proof, stainless steel screws. The frame looked great already.

Because it was going to be resting on a slate roof, with a base level of large stones beneath the soil, I left a centimetre gap along the bottom to help with drainage. I didn’t want it filling up like a swimming pool and busting through the roof. Accordingly, I rested it straddled on top of a supporting wall which runs beneath the surface.

I designed the bed with a central column, so I could suspend mesh across it. The mesh to protect against insects, slugs, and snails. This worked very well, but was a faff to remove every time. Eventually, when it became clear that the black cat wanted to scramble over the top of it, I built a bamboo frame to rest upon the columns.

I bought a number of bags of a mixture of topsoil and compost. This is where I betrayed my ignorance, indeed none other than Charles Dowding rolled his eyes when I revealed to him that I had been convinced by a garden supplier that it was necessary to have a mix of the two. Compost on its own would have been superior. I mixed a huge bag of perlite in with this – both to lighten the mixture and allow it to drain better. I don’t really like perlite, an industrial product, with the benefit of hindsight biochar would have been better, if more expensive.

And so it was for nearly three years.

Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures I’ve posted of all the things I grew here over the past three years? Carrots, Cabbage, Spinach, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cavalo Nero, Rocket, and Beetroot. More besides.

But this year it had to come to an end.

I got sick of the rigmarole of removing and replacing the netting. I’m figuring that a small greenhouse, or a cold frame would be more interactive, that I might have more fun with something like that if we stay put.

Also, I needed to tidy up the roof garden because we’ve put the house on the market and, well, it looked too bloody eccentric.

So everything got harvested.

And the whole thing was dismantled. I was surprised how horrible and clay-like the first soil I used was. It came off in large clods. Also, how meagre was the inch-thick topsoil which I had created with fine mulches and biochar. This I bagged up and kept. There was no digging ever on this patch, and I would have liked to have seen more evidence of soil structure. Maybe that’s precisely what I had? Sure, it was productive…

And this is how the space looks now. Like a regular bourgeois roof terrace.

I’ve got to work out the big picture. Sure, I’m dismantling this tiny part of the dream – but I’m working on a much larger and transformative scale these days. Times are very hard in consequence, but that’s to be expected.

More news soon. Stay tuned veggies.