SOME BALLARDIAN WALKS

  

‘Towards evening, when the great shadow of the Palladian villa filled the terrace, Count Axel left his library and walked down the wide rococo steps along the time flowers.’

These are the first words I ever read by JG Ballard.  They’re the opening of ‘The Garden of Time,’ a short story which I read in Introducing SF: A Science Fiction Anthology, edited by Brian W Aldiss, published by Faber. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time and it would be at least a decade before I read anything else by Ballard but it stayed with me, and when I read Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, it suddenly clicked, oh OK, these are by THAT guy. 

 

There’s a certain amount of walking in ‘The Garden of Time.’  The Count and has a lovely harpsichord-playing wife strolling about the grounds, while beyond the estate’s wall there’s an undulating plain across which a great rabble is advancing on the villa.  The Count walks among the ‘time flowers,’ plucks one of them and the mob is magically sent back to the horizon ‘in a reversal of time.’  But the mob is getting nearer, the time flowers are withering, and (spoiler alert) those darned working classes triumph.

 

The story has been on my mind, and a few other people’s too I’m sure, since the Met featured a Garden of Time themed 2024 Gala.  Judging by the outfits I think it’s just possible that not all the guests sat down and assiduously studied their Ballard before making their fashion choices.

 

Although possibly Johnny Depp did.

However, the fact is that time gardens or gardens of time are more common than you might expect.  Of course all gardens are time-based, things grow and thrive and then do or don’t die.  No surprises there.

 

There’s a Time Garden in Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House, in Holland Park. designed by Jencks’s wife Maggie Keswick. I have actually walked there, briefly. At the rear of the garden is a mirrored door marked The Future.  You look into it and you see yourself in the present.  I love that.

 

At Colchester General Hospital there is a Time Garden, visible behind closed windows and locked doors, only accessible to a few terminally-ill patients who can spend time there with their loved ones while they still, briefly, can. There’s no Palladian villa but there is a kind of long cabin.  I’ve never known how and on what basis patients get chosen to occupy the cabin.

 

I never imagined that Ballard was much of a gardener, and in his memorial essay Michael Moorcock says that Ballard’s back garden ‘served as a pit in which he burnt review copies,’ which seems Ballardian in way, but also sometimes it was a ‘jungle of sunflowers,’ which sounds less so, unless they were killer sunflowers.  Here’s a photograph of the man himself, in his garden, by John Lawrence.

 

WALKING IDEAS

A couple of years back when I was in London I took a literary pilgrimage down to Shepperton, in order to walk along J.G. Ballard’s street and look at his house, which since his death was empty, closed up, with what looked like a dead potted palm inside the front room, pressing against the window, and a sagging Ford Granada in the driveway. 


I had some dealings with Ballard via Ambit magazine, but I wouldn’t claim to have known him at all, and I was certainly never invited down to his house. There’s an account of my walk in the British edition of The Lost Art of Walking.

Because of the kind of book that was, I didn’t include any photographs, but in a blog it seems fair enough.  Fairer still since the house is now up for sale: £320,000 for a modest semi, “in need of work” but perfectly placed for the commuter, with station just a short walk away at one end of the street, two pubs within walking distance, one of them actually halfway along the street, and a nice bit of open space, called Splash Meadow at the far end, a nice place to walk with the occasional low flying aircraft passing overhead.  

Beside that is a golf course where you could have a “good walk spoiled.” And beyond that there's a path with a tangle of overgrown greenery, and eventually this rather retro futurist ramp: 

part of a pedestrian bridge that takes a walker up and across the rush and roar of the M3, which leads into London, and depending on where you were heading, might very well take you via the Westway.

Hey, Mr. Ballard, where did you get your ideas?