Gardening
"Take down, it is beginning"
Denis Wood
At the Conspirator's Club the other day, Ulrich Brunner said, -Do you remember a book called If Winter Comes, by A. S. M. Hutchinson, who died at a great age not long ago?" It was all the rage when it came out, even thought rather risqu6 by middle-class subscribers to circulating libraries, and kept away from children. I remember catching my parents reading it once. Anyway, in it, Hutchinson makes his hero, Mark Sabre, say to himself, "Nature in October. ... was enormously busy; but she was serenely busy . . . He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She stored. She was not discarding, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She was storing, which is resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again: and burst again — in stout affairs of outposts of sheltered banks and secret nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and primrose . . . that was
October's voice to him It was not 'Take down. It is done.' It was 'Take down. It is beginning'." "Really, Ulrich," said Fisher Holmes,"you horrify me. What extraordinary writing." "Yes, I know," said Ulrich, "Hutchinson was a very repetitive and emphatic writer, but in spite of his terrible style, there is something which shines out of it — and it is quite a good story." "But of course," said Mrs John
Laing, " is beginning' is absolutely true. October is supremely the beginning of a gardener's year, a kind of Advent, a time for repentance and preparation."
"It might be good for us to think a little of repentance this afternoon," said General Jacqueminot. "what have you all on your, consciences?"
Mrs Laing said, "The sins which I chiefly have to confess are of omission. Now in October when want to plant out Canterbury Bells to flower next summer,. I can onlY get plants of the Cup and Saucer kind, and those only mixed, whereas if I had remembered in time, last May,..in fact, I could have got seeds of the much nicer single ones, in separate colours, and sowed them myself. And Sweet Rochet, too, and Honesty. And it is too late now for some of the special daffodils, sorne raised at Trewithen, the pinkish Ann Abbot and Chelsea China for example, and Green Howard, mysterious yellowy-green."
' Fisher Holmes said, "What I chiefly regret, are vulgarities which I perpetrated years ago, and ,which are now beginning to show in their true horror, I mean those glaring Japanese Azaleas in the lichened woods of Cornwall, and the syrupY Japanese Cherries I was persuaded to put in by the drive, where the native wild cherry would have been gloriously fitting, and those awful leyland cypresses I planted as a
hedge, heaven knows why." ,
"The sins which I have to confess, said Ulrich in turn, "are chieflY sins of omission too, not planting or replanting trees for my descendants, as our ancestors did for us. Beeches and oaks and ashes whenever there is room in the sky for their branches, and notwithstanding the present fashionable fear of Dutch Elm disease, a cure will he found one day, or an immune variety bred, so let us plant elms by the hundred. They are by far our most beautiful native landscape trees, and let us inject some courage into landscape architects, borough surveyors and the like. Of course the odd elm may drop an occasional limb on a bearded town-planner, but that would be a better death than he deserves." Fisher looked at Ulrich and said, "Any minute now I 'suppose you will start singing `Only God can make a tree'."
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