STUMBLING IN THE SHRUBBERY (FOR INSTANCE)

I’ve been thinking there might be a book to be written, and one that I could possibly write, about walking in gardens. Of course I wouldn’t call it Walking in Gardens – that sounds like something Alan Titchmarsh would write – I’d be going for something like Shambling in Eden (yes, yes I know it needs work).

And of course it wouldn’t be all about the joys of walking around, say, the Chelsea Physic or Kew, though here, for reference, are some people walking in Kew:

I’d be more concerned with, say, the Poison Garden in Alnwick, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Charles Jencks’ The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and so on. 

Photo by Richard Tulloch (I think)

And of course I’d also be concerned with imaginary or fictional gardens, the suicide garden in You Only Live Twice

and perhaps most obviously the one in Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (Le Jardin Des Supplices), a book that’s obviously driven jacket designers mad over the years.

 There’s also a somewhat faithful film, Le Jardin Des Supplices 1976 directed by Christian Gion:

and there’s the 1967 film Torture Garden starring Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith that has almost nothing to do with the novel, but hey, it stars Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith.

 

And so, as research, I’ve been rereading the novel. The edition I own is the one above with Catherine Deneuve on the cover, and it also has a quotation on the back from my cineaste pal Anne Billson ‘This decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le denier cri in kinky exoticism.’  Fair enough. She knows of what she speaks.

Self-portrait by Anne Billson from her blog Multiglom.

There’s a key scene in the book where the narrator goes walking in the Torture Garden, which is at the centre of a prison, with Clara, the deracinated English ‘heroine’ who only feels at home and free in China, where the garden is located. 

(Spoiler alert - everything grows so well in the garden because it’s fertilized with the corpses of tortured prisoners; actually not much of a spoiler, you would almost certainly have guessed)

 

Clara started walking again, very quickly … She walked on – a hard shadow on her eyes and her eyes aflame… Clara continued walking.  I walked beside her and everywhere was a fresh surprise … Suddenly Clara stopped as though an invisible arm brutally descended on her. 

‘Do you smell it?’

‘I smell the aroma of peonies.’ 

       ‘No that’s not it ... it smells as it does when I make love with you … Here it is here it is oh my darling.’

In fact a powerful phasphatic odour, an odour of semen wafted up from that plant (a ‘thalictus’ in the text, the RHS prefers the term thalictrum)  

‘Why do so many flowers resemble sexual organs if not because nature ceaselessly cries out to living beings in all its forms and through its perfumes, ‘Make Love.’

 

I don't doubt that Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville West felt much the same way. 

 

 

 

 

THE WALKING GAZE, THE GAZING WALK

This is a depiction of a flaneur:

 

It’s by Honoré Daumier, and is an illustration for M. Louis Huart’s Physiologie Du Flaneur, 1841.

 

The binoculars are a worry aren’t they? I mean they’re not likely to be very useful for looking at anything in the street are they? Things are surely close enough that you don’t need a powerful lens to zoom in on anything.  Compare and contrast with the popularity of the basic 28mm lens as used by a great many street photographers, not least Garry Winogrand.

 

Though other camera options were available, as Diane Arbus demonstrates here.

This is the title page of Physiologie Du Flaneur, 

 

which does suggest that the flaneur is a bit of a lech, watching all the girls go by, maybe even following them.  This is of course all about the male gaze.  According to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in her Paris as Revolutionthe flaneur’s gaze ‘begins in the activity of following women.’  This seems impossible to prove or disprove. 

Certainly this fellow, Le Flaneur Parisien by Theophile Steinlen looks dead dodgy, whether he’s about to follow the woman or not.

At least you couldn’t accuse any of the flaneurs illustrated here of being sneaky.  You can see exactly what they’re up to, and I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s words: ‘Dialectic of flaneurie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man.’ These guys look completely discovered.

 

But you know, it was a different age.

 

CARELESS WALKING

It being the Chas and Camilla weekend, we motored over to The Place for Plants in East Bergholt, which is partly a plant-centre but also a 20 acre garden, where you can have a longish and surprisingly uncrowded walk.  The handout you get when you enter says the place is inspired by the landscape of Cornwall, though this would have passed me by if it hadn’t been pointed out.

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

There were ducks and bamboo and euphorbia if you like that kind of thing – and it so happens I do.

Last week it rained quite hard so it wasn’t surprising that parts of the garden  were wet and muddy, though in fact some parts weren’t.

 

Now, I may not be the most cautious of walkers but I’m not the most reckless either.  And although I understand that in the interests of heath and safety, when a garden is open to the public you may well need to put up a few warning signs, ‘Do not walk on the water’ and that kind of thing.  But I thought they overdid it at this place.

 

It seemed fair enough that there were signs telling people to take care:

But then there were signs telling people to take extra care.

And I’m really not sure that I know the difference between taking care, and taking extra care.  What would be the measure?  What  strategies should the extra careful walker employ, as opposed to the one who’s simply taking care?

There is possibly a philosophical walking conundrum here.  We went to the tea room.

DEAD MAN IN DEDHAM

My mate Richard and I went walking in ‘Constable Country’ – Manningtree, Flatford, Dedham, that kind of thing – about 7 miles round trip with stops for coffee and a beer.

 

I didn’t imagine the landscape would look exactly like a Constable painting

 

and that was just as well

 

 

On the walk we discussed

 

the political situation in Brazil

the Atacama desert

Richard’s experience with a dodgy scout master

smoothies for breakfast

Keith Waterhouse and Billy Liar

Sheffield Wednesday

the consolations of fandom

our shared indifference to the coronation and the local elections

who would be our head of state if chosen by the electorate – my guess was Judy Dench

muscular Christianity

notions of agency in children’s fiction

JK Rowling

‘magic’ in the bible

LS Lowry

the only time I’ve ever been thrown out of a pub when I was 18 for snogging –

Constable said, 'Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her I look for fame.' It seems an odd thing to me, to look to your mistress for fame. 

RAGE WALKING

The picture above is of Reginald Farrer who I only found about from Nicola Shulman’s wonderful book, A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer, gardener, writer and plant collector.

 

That subtitle doesn’t designate him as a walker per se, however as a young man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century he and his friends walked and occasionally climbed in the mountains of Italy, France and Switzerland, as men of a certain type and class did. On July 22 1908, he sent a letter to his mother from Rosenlaui in Switzerland, in which he wrote,

'It is extraordinarily pleasant to be in the mountains again, and I find that vigour has so increased upon me that toilsome expeditions of three years ago are now strolls as easy as our favourite walk to the kitchen garden.’

This was worth noting because Farrer had been a sickly child, born with a cleft palate, a hare-lip and what he himself described as ‘a pygmy body.’

 

After a patchy, short career as a novelist (I think 99% of novelists have patchy careers, though not necessarily short ones) he dedicated himself to gardening, horticultural writing, and expeditions on which he collected plants and seeds that could be brought back and grown in English rock and alpine gardens.  This was a commercial enterprise.

Later he writes, ‘It may come as a shock and a heresy to my fellow Ramblers when I make the confession that, to me, the mountains … exist simply as homes and backgrounds to their population of infinitesimal plants.  My enthusiasm halts ... with my feet, at the precise point where the climber’s energies are first called upon.’  So he was definitely a walker, not a climber, though he certainly found himself in some lofty places.

His travels took him to Ceylon (where he became a Buddhist), Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, China and ultimately Upper Burma, where he died of diphtheria aged 40.  EMH Cox, who was with Farrer on that last expedition, and didn’t get on especially well with him, wrote ‘His stocky form was clad in khaki shorts and shirt, tieless and collarless, a faded toupee on his head, old boots and stockings that gradually slipped down and clung about his ankles as the day wore on.’

 

You know, I’ve read a certain amount about those men, colonial adventurers I suppose we might call them, who ‘walked across Africa.’ And it’s surprising how often this ‘walking’ involved being carried or stretchered after they’d come down with some strange and devastating illness.  So they didn’t walk all the way, though their bearers did.  Some of Farrer’s travels involved variations on this.

 

Sometimes he traveled in a sedan chair, which enabled him to read as he travelled: he was a great fan of Jane Austen.  But this was problematic. The sedan carriers, walking on wildly uneven terrain, kept dropping the chair.  In his diary Farrer wrote; ‘Crash went the chair again and again, and out flew Northanger Abbey into the mud.’

      Such are the trails of the long distance reader, to say nothing of the walker.