Gardens of my childhood

Growing up in the countryside, I didn’t live in a town permanently till I was 19. I miss it but am reconciled to being stuck in the city now. That connection to nature, that is so easy to maintain in the country, is possible to establish here but one has to work harder.

Recently going through my own personal photos from the years 1987 to 1994 – just a handful of precious photographs in the way it used to be before one could take thousands – and I came across these lovely ones I had taken of the gardens of our houses. Evidently moved, even then as a young person, by their beauty.

We moved house a lot when I was a child, living in a total of six houses between my age of 0 and 17. Houses #2 (outside Stroud, Glos.), #4 (outside Haddington, East Lothian), and #5 (outside Cirencester, Glos.) had stunning gardens.

This is the walled garden of house #4, which was truly spectacular. In the summer it was divine. I have a real fondness for walled gardens.

The photo at the top has faded, so I graded it a little – just because…

This was the magnificent formal garden of our house #5. Click on the picture to enlarge it. It really looks very lovely.

My parents had some noted horticulturalists among their friends. For instance, I remember visiting her friend Rosemary Verey with my mother and Rosemary showing us around her amazing vegetable garden. So I guess marvellous gardens was just what you did!

I’m by no means complaining when I point out that what remains of this inflorescent opulence is my 20m2 of roof terrace. Even that is a luxury, of course.

Vincent van Gogh

 

Saint Paul’s Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1890.

Iris, 1890.

The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy, 1889.

Tree and Bushes in the Garden of the Asylum, 1989.

Hospital at Arles, 1889.

Undergrowth, 1889.

The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1889.

I was entranced by the Vincent van Gogh exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery. Mrs Ingram, who is a member, has been escorting various people along to it – her aunt, her mother, and now me. She’s taking a friend along next week, which will be her fourth visit. It’s that good that she doesn’t mind.

Last year we went to see the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam together. Truthfully, we were disappointed. We didn’t think much of the selection. I came to the conclusion that, yes, he could paint some wonderful portraits, especially of himself, but people weren’t really his forte. In 2019, we’d seen the Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. That too was an interesting, but faintly disappointing selection dominated by interiors, portraits, and urban scenery.

Garden with weeping Tree, 1888.

This exhibition, however, really seemed to nail it with a focus on pictures of trees and plants. People who follow this blog will be familiar with my interest in this axis of ecology and therapy. More than any of his other preoccupations, it’s in van Gogh’s drawings and paintings of the rural landscape and its vegetation that his work really comes together in spectacular fashion.

Van Gogh, at the time these paintings were made in 1888, had been diagnosed with “acute mania with generalized delirium” and “mental epilepsy”. He made many drawings in the grounds of hospitals and asylums. It seems like the therapeutic power of nature in helping the physically injured, as well as the mentally dislocated, was better appreciated in his era than ours, when it is only just creeping back into serious acceptance.

Drawings of Montmajour, 1888.

Van Gogh’s drawings of the countryside have a tremendous intensity. He was a big fan of the Illustrated London News, and in fact tried and failed to get work with my ancestors, who ran the paper. Visually, these drawings of his were inspired by the technical necessity of mark-making in newspaper illustration.

In print production, pictures would have been built up from the mark in the same way that halftone would later become the underpinning of printed pictures. It was not possible to render gradients of shade in any other way. But Van Gogh was fascinated by the technique of this mark making itself. He pulls it to the fore in a way that newspaper illustrators would have tried to make less obtrusive, as though it were an encumbrance forced upon them by the medium to overcome.

Van Gogh tailors his every mark in such a way to respond to what he is drawing: pebbles, grass, leaves, branches, the texture on rocks, everything has its own corresponding style of mark. Van Gogh’s responsiveness makes me think of Bob Dylan’s religious anthem, “Every Grain of Sand.”

In the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand,
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Bob Dylan

View of Arles, 1889.

Field with poppies, 1889.

The Large Plane Trees, 1889.

Landscape with ploughman, 1889.

Enclosed field with Peasant, 1889.

Wheatfield behind St-Paul Hospital, 1889.

A Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889.

The Sower, 1888.

The landscapes, which are of special interest to me, often show fields of wheat, vegetable crops, allotment gardens and orchards at the edge of towns, (after Millet) sowing seed, or ploughing. Van Gogh romanticises this agricultural work. It represents to Vincent some part of his personality that has been broken from him. His paintings of it are an, arguably successful, attempt at spiritual reunification.

Sunflowers, 1889.

Sunflowers, 1888.

There are two of the exquisite sunflower paintings in the exhibition. As one literate in these matters, he must have reflected that the sunflower (Helianthus annus) was not just an ornamental flower but also a crop – and to that extent transcendent.

Oleanders, 1888.

But there are other highly distinct plants in these pictures: Plane Trees (Platanus x acerifolia), Cypress Trees (Cupressus sempervirens), Roses (Rosa spp), Ivy (Hedera helix) in the undergrowth, the Iris germanica flower at the top, a favourite of the Arts and Crafts movement and gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, and the Nerium oleanders directly above. This faithful depiction of botany was at once more normal in those times when the urban/rural divide was markedly less pronounced, but also unusual in van Gogh given his largely urban upbringing.

Olive trees, 1889.

One sequence of paintings of an olive grove is presented as though a study in light, like Monet’s series of water-lilies. Van Gogh, god’s lonely man, works there in the heat of the summer sun – and only in the last picture do we see other people, and the olives being harvested in the cool of the evening.

Tree Trunks in the Grass, 1890.

Long Grass with Butterflies, 1890.

“Long Grass with Butterflies” is the last picture hanging by the exit. It might have been my favourite painting in the whole exhibition. Every blade of grass here is sacred. The butterflies, Marbled whites perhaps, pollinators, flitter in the still Provencal air.

The Garden Mix

In the past, I waited until my books “Retreat” and “The ‘S’ Word” came out before pulling together complimentary mixes.

However, this time, with “The Garden” my book about the visionary growers and farmers of the counterculture, I am running the mix beforehand as it were to set the mood. I’m also marking the moment today when this book that the team at Repeater and I have been toiling over for years has finally gone to print.

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Music has become largely divorced from other contexts – to the extent that it’s become part perfume – part wallpaper – a decorative filigree draped over business-as-usual. If you wonder why some contemporary music (let’s face it, a lot of contemporary music) sounds a bit bland and empty – it’s not to do with the format, or the bit rate, or the way it was recorded… The hot music of the past, of the counterculture and other eras, was genuinely communicating something.

Mix is here and below.

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The Move: I Can Hear the Grass Grow
An extremely early salvo of hippie plant consciousness released in March 1967 – critical mass not reached until 1969. Roy Wood here makes the connection between taking LSD as prescribed in rural settings, and from thence getting in touch with mother nature on a more cosmic level.

The Grateful Dead: St. Stephen
The Dead denied that this was named after the home-grown spiritual guru Stephen Gaskin of Haight-Ashbury’s then-exploding Monday Night Club. However, I believe this is largely owing to the firm wanting to put some distance between their business and Gaskin’s. Subsequently, Gaskin was the leader at Tennessee mega-commune, “The Farm.”

The Beatles: Mother Nature’s Son
McCartney was The Beatle most in touch with the soil. In “Mother Nature’s Son” he stakes that claim himself. Elsewhere, in Paul’s “Get Back” Jojo leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona “for some California grass” (here, I think, implying San Francisco and marijuana, not the lush countryside). McCartney advises him to go back home to the country, like agricultural philosopher Wendell Berry did, returning from California to Kentucky.

The Incredible String Band: The Half-Remarkable Question
This track was mentioned to me in an interview by the legendary dairy farmer and sustainability guru Patrick Holden. The ISB themselves had strong rural connections, retreating as they did to Temple Cottage in Balmore, in the countryside north of Glasgow. There they worked on the songs on 5000 Spirits (1967) and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968). But this from their underrated “Wee Tam” LP.

Vashti Bunyan: Window Over the Bay
Bunyan dreamt of having a flock of white sheep, a dreamy-eyed cow, and a cockerel to raise her at dawn. Lorra livestock.

Ron Geesin: Breathe
Roger Waters, accompanying his friend Ron Geesin, laments that “Something is killing the land before your eyes.”

Trees: The Garden of Jane Delawney
UK folk rock from 1970 with a psychedelic edge.

Alicia Bay Laurel: Planting Day Ceremony
Here Alicia was joined by Ramón Sender Barayón, co-founder with Morton Subotnik of the San Francisco Tape Center and her fellow communard at Ahimsa ranch, to craft this lovely hymn to plants.

Joni Mitchell: Woodstock
Like her “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Woodstock” is positively bursting at the seams with luminous and eternally durable imagery. The line, “And we’ve got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden” gives my book its title. But as hippie legend, and Biochar pioneer Craig Sams pointed out to me, Mitchell also sings, “We are stardust/ Billion-year-old carbon.” Let’s not neglect to mention the track’s brooding, portentous sonics: Mitchell’s plaintive vocals soaring high above her Fender Rhodes like an eagle above a smoking, ravaged landscape.

Neil Young: After the Gold Rush
Famous for the line, “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s.” Neil has been farming since he bought Broken Arrow Ranch in 1971, where he lived until 2014. He’s been a stalwart supporter of the Farm Aid music festival.

Jackson Browne: Before the Deluge
“Before the Deluge”, with its apocalyptic mood, was from Browne’s 1974 LP “Late for the Sky”. It was picked up by a generation of back-to-the-landers.

Bob Martin: Midwest Farm Disaster
The title track from Martin’s jewel of an LP. Right at the country edge of rock, it was recorded at the same Nashville studio Dylan used. Heartbreakingly documenting the failure of small farms in the Midwest.

John Cale: Hanky Panky Nohow
“The cows that agriculture won’t allow.” Never mind the bullocks.

The Groundhogs: Garden
The garden chokes the house, however Tony McPhee insists, “I’m not going to cut a single blade of grass / My garden will look just like the distant past / Before the days of agricultural land.” Truly rewilded.

Dando Shaft: Rain
Martin Jenkins’ mandolin here like dancing raindrops.

Lal and Mike Waterson: Child Among the Weeds
Devastating and mysterious UK folk rock from this seemingly cursed LP.

Dave and Toni Arthur: The Barley Grain for Me
“The farmer came with a big plough and ploughed me under the sod.”

Paul & Linda McCartney: Heart of the Country
McCartney provides a homely update to his rural narrative.

These Trails: Garden Botanum
Organic Hawaiian psychedelia.

Mort Garson: Plantasia
Exotic synthesised precursor to Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack to “The Secret Life of Plants.”

Dr. Alimantado: Just the Other Day
The good Dr. says that no one wants to be a farmer but advises: “So, be wise there, for you sons an’ daughters of earth / An’ know dat you got to go to the soil to toil, as I would say / ‘Cause, if you no reap, you cyaan not eat.”

Julie Anne: The Gardener
AKA Judy Mowatt, was one of Bob Marley’s I-Threes, and later singer of the roots classic “Black Woman.” “The Gardener” deftly weaves the strands of the hippie, the spiritual, and feminine power into an underappreciated ecological anthem.

R.E.M.: Gardening at Night
This remains my favourite R.E.M. song – saying a lot for a band I loved right up to “Document” (1987) – first they jangled and then they choogled. The original inspiration for “Gardening at Night” was a nocturnal piss-stop – a car’s drunken passengers bundle out into the night air to urinate by the side of the road. Urine, of course, being high in nitrogen is great for stimulating plant growth.

Scott Walker: Farmer in the City
You can take the boy out of the country…

Smog: Let’s Move to the Country
There’s a perhaps unintentional overtone with the motif of moving to the country to retire, “When my travels are through.” It is as though one were taking a step closer to becoming the humus (neither ashes nor dust, please!) that should be our rightful mortal destiny.

Charles Ives: Thoreau
The fourth movement in Ives’ lovely Piano Sonata No. 2, or “Concord Sonata”. The first movement dedicated to Ralph Waldo Emerson also of the same small Massachusetts town where more historic events took place than seems strictly feasible.

Gurdjieff: Kurd Shepherd Dance
The great guru’s memories of rural Armenian folk music patiently notated by his shishya Thomas De Hartmann. For fans of Popol Vuh’s “Hosianna Mantra.”