you noodle, the Eucryphia, not the Euphorbia…’ I didn’t discover plants even had English names until my mid-twenties. As academics of the pre-spin school, my parents never seemed to feel the need to make their subjects interesting or accessible, to supply context or simplify.
My father had now moved on to explaining his principles for choosing plants, his preference for foliage over flowers, but it was hard to separate the information from the associations. ‘This is Rhus cotinus. Another shrub you grow only for its leaves…’
‘What are these, again?’
‘Stachys lanata.’
‘Do they have an English name?’
‘I think some people call them Lamb’s Ears.’
It struck me that going round a garden with its owner is not unlike looking at someone else’s holiday snaps at their pace. (‘That’s Jackie, the person I was telling you about. She was so funny.’) Yet, having specifically requested the tour, I could hardly ask to speed things up.
We walked back up the lawn, past the kitchen, and up the steep path towards the open fields behind the house. The garden wasn’t large, perhaps a quarter of an acre, but it was much divided around the house because of the way the site had been bitten out of the hill-side.
‘Did Ma help much with the garden?’
‘Did she actually do anything, d’you mean? Heavens no. She was far too busy with her horses. Full of advice, of course. Sometimes she used to “pop things in”, as she called her cuttings. She was extremely tiresome in that regard.’
As we returned to the front door, we encountered something I could confidently identify. ‘Purple sage,’ I said.
‘Mmm…herbs.’ The word was invested with a scorn it’s hard to convey in print.
‘Why, don’t you like herbs?’ I knew perfectly well what his views were on herbs, and the reasons he’d give for them, but I couldn’t stop myself.
‘They’re a nuisance.’
‘A nuisance? How can herbs be a nuisance?’
‘You have food that tastes of nothing but herbs, rather than what it’s supposed to taste of.’ For my father, cooking was a chemical experiment: instructions were followed, tasting was unnecessary and final temperature (piping hot) was the key indicator of the success of the meal.
We had to go back into the house to reach the patio. The house was my father’s Great Modernist Experiment, the product of his love of architecture in general and Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion in particular. In time for my arrival in 1963, they needed to add onto my mother’s cottage, which had only one bedroom and a wide landing where Jonny slept. My father devised a contemporary solution. Modules precision-machined off-site by Vic Hallam, the Nottinghamshire company made famous by its pre-fabricated classrooms, were bolted to a pre-formed, cantilevered concrete deck. Twenty-eight polished Ilminster stone steps led up from the poky cottage’s front door to an airy, light-filled, flat-roofed glass box, containing sitting room and bedrooms. These were furnished accordingly: razor-edged steel-and-glass coffee table, brick-hard, angle-iron and foam-rubber Hille sofas, Ercol bentwood table and chairs. Comfort took a holiday. And so Modernism made its brazen progress from Bauhaus Germany, via New York, to our ancient Mendip lane. Nothing like it had been seen before in rural Somerset.
The patio arrived in Phase Two of the Great Modernist Experiment, an extension forced upon us by my mother’s riding accident almost a decade later. It was my father’s most successful garden space, enclosed on three sides by the house, and on the fourth by the rising ground of the hill. It was, as he’d intended it, an astonishing suntrap. In raised dry-stone beds he’d planted acers, a green one with broad leaves and a couple with more dissected leaves in red and bright green. I ran my hand along one of the smooth, shapely branches. After thirty years the trees were sculptural, contributing a calming, vaguely Japanese air to the space that set off the severity of the square brutalist concrete pond and the glass and cedar of the house.
During the Modernist years, my father had maintained the pond, with its floor of raked pea shingle, in a state of stark clinical perfection, washing it clean of algae several times a summer so the water never clouded. But in later years he’d given up, planted lilies in the corners, stuck a round stone bowl in place of the water jets and even, the final capitulation, added goldfish. It was softer now, but less dramatic or coherent.
I wanted another drink and for the trip to conclude. We took the path round to the back of the house, north-facing and enclosed by a conifer plantation. Towering into the sky, straight as a missile launcher, was the tree with my favourite name.
‘There you are: Metasequoia glyptostroboides.’ My father pronounced it perfectly, slowly, with just the right amount of ironic inflexion to wring out its full, polysyllabic absurdity. ‘It’s a remarkable tree,’ he said. ‘One of the few in the country when we planted it. Your mother got hold of it through some botanical thing she was doing. Looks ludicrous now, of course, it’s got so big.’
It wasn’t the only giant. Blocking the view in or out from the lane was a stand of three vast leylandii.
‘What possessed you to plant those?’
‘It’s all very well for you to be sniffy about them now, but at the time they were the wonder tree. We’d never come across anything like them. Fast-growing. Dense. Evergreen.’ He sighed. ‘But they do grow like triffids. I’ll have to take them out.’
Was any of this remotely useful or relevant for Tair-Ffynnon, I wondered? We went in for lunch. Midday sunshine streamed through the south-facing floor-to-ceiling glass, the same glass that on winter nights used to seem so cold and black and endless (and still makes me yell at wide-eyed couples on Channel 4’s Grand Designs as they order their steel and glass boxes: ‘Don’t do it! You’ll feel cold and vulnerable and watched! You’ll spend a fortune on curtains and ruin the look!’). Four candles on wall sconces in the dining room, comically drooped and corkscrewed, testified to the opposite extreme. But today, with the doors open, the house was perfect: warm and light and airy.
After lunch, while Vez, pregnant with our second child, lay snoozing on the sofa, and my father played songs on the piano for Maya, I ransacked my mother’s bookshelves, as Uncle William had advised. Here were floras and herbals, catalogues and regional guides. Many of the names were familiar: Hillier’s Manual of Trees and Shrubs and H. J. Bean’s doorstop volumes of Plants and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles (a title which for some reason always conjured images of plants swathed in brightly coloured cagoules and scarves battling up a hill), though I’d never opened them before. And I now saw, as I pulled a few out, what a wise course this had been. It would be hard to devise books more calculated to repel a potential plant lover. All appeared to share the same striking characteristic: not a picture to be seen. I was puzzled because these volumes, I knew, were mere holiday-reading, lightweight warm-up acts, alongside the vade mecum of my mother’s day-to-day existence: the much-thumbed Flora of the British Isles, which I now pulled out. Its cheerful yellow jacket, with a picture of a flower, was at iniquitous odds with the 1,591 pages of closely written print within. This was the immortal ‘Clapham,
