I sometimes worry that my enjoyment of walking in gardens is just another sign of having one foot in the grave, and of course I want to seem preternaturally youthful.
However I (temporarily) overcame my worries last week as I wandered into The Phoenix Garden, a green space and community garden, tucked in between the dwindling number of bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the similarly dwindling guitar shops of Denmark Street, and right by the Elms Lesters Painting rooms in Flitcroft Street (now no longer painting rooms).
The Phoenix Garden is great, not big, though it seems to have expanded since I was last there. It’s a work in progress and at present parts of it are wonderfully chaotic, and although it’s not a place for a long walk, it’s a great place to wander around.
And what really appealed: the things that the gardeners grow there are pretty much the same things I try to grow in my own humble patch: acanthus, euphorbia, cardoon:
and above all echiums, though it must be said that The Phoenix Garden has rather more success with echiums than I do:
Photo: Caroline Gannon
Given the cold it wasn’t a place to stay for too long and I certainly didn’t want to hang around sitting on a bench, though somebody else apparently had done, and then left behind, abandoned or lost, a couple of books.
The one on the right was a rather fine notebook containing various not very legible pencil notes about art and film. In other circumstance I’d probably have taken it away with me as an acquisition for the Nicholsonian Institution but I was already quite laden and in any case the book was soaking wet. I left it for a more or less discerning walker/collector/scavenger.
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