My first memories are green memories. When did my fingers turn green? In the paradisiacal wilderness of the gardens at Villa Zuassa on the banks of Lago Maggiore? The April Gift of A Hundred and One Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them confirmed that at four my parents knew I was lost to green, as I walked down deep green avenues of camellias spotted with waxy carmine and white flowers. February flowers that seemed more in keeping with the hottest of midsummers.
Archaic green colours time. Passing centuries are evergreen. To mauve belongs a decade. Red explodes and consumes itself. Blue is infinite. Green clothes the earth in tranquillity, ebbs and flows with the seasons. In it is the hope of Resurrection. We feel green has more shades than any other colour, as the buds break the winter dun in the hedges. Hallucinatory sunny days.
Were Adam’s eyes the green of paradise? Did they open on the vivid green of the Garden of Eden? God’s green mantle. Was green the first colour of perception? After Adam bathed his eyes in green did he look at the blue sky? Or dive into the sapphire waters of the rivers of paradise? Did he fall asleep under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Spangled with emerald dew. Love was green then. When ancient Venus, old enough to be God’s granny, furious that she had been shut out of this garden, materialised and touched Eve on the shoulder, causing her to pick the apple-green fruit that led to her downfall. Though, some have said, it was not an apple but an orange, shining like the sun at hand’s reach.
She took of the fruits and ate. Then the eyes of both were open, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons.
Turfed out of the Garden of Eden for a snack by the unpleasant new God, they found themselves in a colourless world. Remember them as you buy a dozen Granny Smiths. There were few colours in the wilderness. At that time God hadn’t even sent a rainbow begging for forgiveness. If he had, Adam would have returned it to the sender, for he missed the colours of Eden … violet and mallow (mauve), buttercup, lavender and lime.
Adam bit the fruit, and paradise, like all abandoned gardens, returned to the wild.
The hawthorn is in flower. The first elder blossoms are out; the wild pear has set fruit (my cuttings are thriving); the gorse is fading and the broom is coming into its own, the bushes skirted with gold.
The sheep’s sorrel, no more than a couple of inches high, has turned the shingle a deep rust red as far as the eye can see, leaving the islands of dead brambles looking like mounds of bleached bones.
In this burnished landscape whites and greys are thrown into sharp relief. The sun beats down, though the wind has kept the butterflies in hiding; apart from the coppers I only saw a solitary white. In nooks and crannies the bird’s foot trefoil, bacon-and-eggs, is beginning to flower; also the yellow rattle and treacle mustard.
On warm nights the drunken scent of the May caresses lovers under the sighing trees of Hampstead Heath. This is how I would remember it. Though others say its scent is cloying, the smell of the great plague of London.
My grandmother said it was unlucky, and should never be brought into the home. Her gardener, Moore, was married to May – which puzzled me as a child. Why should anyone have such an unlucky name? But the May could bring good luck: Wasn’t the crown of England found in a thorn thicket? Here on the marsh, it was precious for building sea defences and protected by severe laws. You could lose a hand for cutting a bush. The blossom reminds me of clotted cream and the heady visions of Samuel Palmer: White in full power from the first – deadly dark browns laid on at once.
HB’s mam says May is unlucky because the crown of thorns was made from it.
The thunderstorms we were promised never materialised though I was kept awake most of the night by my cough and temperature sweats.
Half an hour before the sun rose, in the first white light of dawn, the shingles are a ghostly bleached bone, grisaille silhouetting the grey of the shrubs and black the broom, a silent light unshattered by colour.
Dungeness bathes in a pool of clear sunlight ringed by dark purple thunder clouds. Heat shimmers off the stones – there is no wind today. Breathless the bees’ lazy flight through the foxglove spires.
My blue columbine is in flower, and last year’s seedlings are thriving. The columbine – aquilegia, the eagle’s foot – a wild flower, has crept into my garden, one of the herbs used against the Black Death in the 14th century.
The thunder clouds move closer – a hawk hovers so high it is almost invisible. Down here on the stones blue damselflies and butterflies mate. Gold cinquefoil and bacon-and-eggs catch the last rays.
The sun is overtaken by clouds; distant boom of thunder.
Cinquefoil boiled with the fat of children made the witches’ ointment, spell flower for love potions.
It’s twelve – my noon flower closes shop, Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon: It shutteth itself at twelve of the clocke and showeth not his face open until the next dayes sun doth make it flower anew.
The wind got up and within minutes it was raining so hard it dripped through the roof. Soon the drive was awash.
The effect on the colours in the landscape was immediate, as if someone had brushed varnish across a dull painting. This is the first rain for over a month; the grasses sigh with relief. When the rain cleared, ravenous slugs appear in their juicy hundreds to feast on the poppies and fennel.
Who has not gazed in wonder at the snaky shimmer of petrol patterns on a puddle, thrown a stone into them and watched the colours emerge out of the ripples, or marvelled at the bright rainbow arcing momentarily in a burst of sunlight against the dark storm clouds?
The rainbow that was the covenant to Noah after the great deluge.
The strutting peacock with its acid cry, opening its tail. Shot silver and velvet, changing colour before our eyes.
The iridescent opal and moonstone, cool and mysterious, and the mother of pearl shell. Lustrous with colours, we all blew soap bubbles with rainbows into a sunny sky, which burst and disappeared as they sailed away.
Iridescence brings back childhood, shifting like a kaleidoscope.
The sad eyed chameleon
volcano grey
sits on his rock
on a thundery day
grey is his coat
and grey is his heart
grey-eyed chameleon
in deep grey thought.
A rainbow appeared
in a sudden squall
and big fat rain drops
started to fall.
‘Oh rainbow colour
please wash away
the grey in my life
the grey of the day.’
Squall heard this wish
and there and then
blew him away
to the rainbow’s end
where on the ground
lay a lustrous shell
rainbow bright
Mother of Pearl.
Opaline pearl
moonstone bright
petrol on puddles
and shimmering bubbles
Mother of Pearl is my delight.
Drove with Julian and Joyce across the marshes to Fairlight in the evening. It is impossible to describe the strange beauty of the landscape, particularly the Ridge and Winchelsea Beach. A great silence had descended, only broken by the twittering of swallows. Light on every blade of grass, flowers, bushes, lakes. Such contentment. The wind rushed past as Julian drove recklessly along empty roads.
For minutes on end we sat in complete silence. Little rabbits, quite unafraid, looked at us curiously as we passed by; poppies and bugloss iridescent scarlets and blues. The world like a medieval miniature or one of the unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters; the gravel path – the road to an earthly paradise, above us a wild sky with a flaming sun in bands of violet, pink, and blue.
Silvery willows, reeds like purple smoke fringing the water, splashed with orange light, cascades of wild roses, honeysuckle and pink valerian. Walls of wild sweet pea and red-hot pokers.
At moments in the deep lanes the car was swallowed in banks of lacy cowparsley – and elder.
June is the time of the garden, it is overwhelmed by sunlight and drought. I go back and forth with my watering can in garden clothes that have faded and frayed – washed-out blues and ochres. The wind grew in intensity and blew all the flowers out and the clothes line down.
At the sea’s edge waves crashed, sending salty spray in veils across the Ness – not good growing weather this. Mrs Sinkins has browned off, the geranium leaves are bronzed, my loveage leans like Pisa and the wind whistles on, sending me to sleep in a storm-tossed siesta – sleeping in the afternoon is a bad sign.
In the first white light of dawn I turn white as a sheet, as I swallow the white pills to keep me alive … attacking the virus which is destroying my white blood cells.
The wind has blown without end for five days now, a cold north wind in June. The sea, whipped into a thousand white horses, attacks the shore. Plumes of salt blow in veils coating the windows with brine and burning the flowers. Leaves are blackened and the red poppies too, the roses are wilting, here today and gone tomorrow; but the white perennial pea is untouched. In the distance the white cliffs appear briefly before they are swallowed in the haze. I am shut in, to walk in the garden hurts my tired lungs.
The white seahorses have brought a madness here, irritable, straining at the bit. I hate white.
Then standing in the garden I notice a white flower among the blue viper’s bugloss. On closer inspection it turns out to be a single albino sport. No one has ever seen one before. Is it an omen?
It seems strange that many of the flowers on the Ness grow in a small patch, sometimes singly. Maybe they were brought here in the earth and rubble used to build tracks out to the boats. There is one ivy-leaved toadflax, a square yard of scabious at the roadside, a patch of golden samphire by the Long Pits. I’ve found one broom rape and a small group of St. John’s wort.
Other plants are much more plentiful: hawkweed, hempnettle, lesser knapweed and sheepbit; also, white clover, and haresfoot, which grows on the verge.
The range of colours in the poppies is astonishing. On the shingle at Lydd-on-Sea there is a plant that is such a deep red it might be called ‘black poppy’. I’m keeping an eye on it for seed.
The groundsel is infested with the orange and black caterpillars of the burnet moth. Some plants have been devoured to skeletal remains.
Last night a walk at sundown along the beach: opium poppy, scabious, sea pea, white clover, restharrow, wild carrot, woody nightshade, evening primrose, mustard, mayweed, camomile, mallow, alkanet, daisy, larkspur, wild pansy, snapdragon, sowthistle, tufted vetch, hare’s-foot, herb Robert, hop trefoil, sun spurge – all in flower.
The wind blows over the lavender and santolina which wave about like sea anemones on a coral reef, yellow and purple. The cornflowers are the most perfect blue, more iridescent than the bugloss or sage. On the kerbside red clover and dead nettle.
Breathless in the wind, picked white stones.
In the silent evening Edward, the red-haired boy next door, shoots at the flaming sun with his air rifle. The dying light turns the poppies deep scarlet, the bugloss spires a burning iridaceous purple, my sky-blue T-shirt cool against the glowing timbers of Prospect. A gentle breeze rocks the grasses silhouetted against the angry clouds. Edward fires one last shot as the sun sinks slowly behind Lydd church and disappears into the ‘Bungalow for Sale’.
The coming dark smells of the sea.
Lazy high summer. The drowsy bees fall over each other in the scarlet poppies, which shed their petals by noon. Meadow browns and gatekeepers flutter wearily across the shell-pink brambles disputing the nectar with a fast bright tortoiseshell. The bees clamber hungrily up the sour green woodsage. Drifts of mauve rosebay and deep yellow ragwort studded with orange and black burnet caterpillars.
Blue damsels dart here and there, a great brown dragonfly hovers. I pick dead heads off the poppies and scatter the seeds.
Walking home I stumble across a wild fig, more bush than tree, hugging the ground. I take a slip from it, and two cuttings from the sea buckthorn. The lone fruit on the wild pear is already the size of a hen’s egg.
At three I water the roses, then fall asleep in the heat, waiting for the telephone to ring me awake.
There is the suspicion of rain in the air, but a dry wind blows. The downy seeds of the willow herb float by. The black seed pods of the broom split with a crackling sound.
At the end of the garden the sloes are turning purple, and the blackberries are ripe. My wild pear tree wilts in the drought, and the nettles are dead and rattle in the wind.
By the lake a large grass snake curves silently across our path through the withered grass. Swans stand forlorn on barren stony islands that have emerged from the water.
Everything is waiting for rain: the great burdock, purple with bloom, flags like a thirsty dog; the grey moss crumbles like ash under my feet. Only the yellow ragwort, bright with tortoiseshell butterflies, is happy with this long summer; while an angry cloud of smoke from the burning fields hangs in the bare blue sky.
I never saw the verdigris green charioteer of Delphi, a statue I imagined to be the most beautiful in the world. When I was eighteen I hitch-hiked there with some friends and was left a mile or two down the mountain road. Walking in the dark, we heard a small stream gurgling under a bridge and decided to stop and set up camp. We had been hiking since early morning, tired and dusty, with no money for a hotel or a youth hostel. We fell into a deep sleep a few yards from the road.
At dawn, we discovered ourselves in a cleft in the mountain. A chasm in which fig trees grew, watered by a crystal spring that sprang from the rock. We took off our clothes and washed them, hanging them to dry on the branches. Then bathed and shaved in the icy water, and sat in the warming sunlight waiting for our clothes to dry. At about seven, a rather angry visitor appeared, said something we couldn’t understand and left scowling. Half an hour later, the silence was shattered by two police vans, from which a dozen or so policemen piled out, shouting. Confusion reigned as we couldn’t understand a word they were saying. They furiously kicked our rucksacks, and threw our clothes in the dust, trampling on them. In our swimming pants we were very vulnerable.
David, who had climbed a rock face to get a clearer view of two eagles that circled in the updraft high above us, fell from his perch on the cliff face, and was saved from severe injury or even death by some rusty barbed wire at the bottom of the cliff which broke his fall. He lay bleeding and unconscious in a tangle of wire. The atmosphere changed, and we were bundled into the van, with the police siren blaring down to the hospital in Amphissa. There we were told never to return to Delphi.
We stayed in Amphissa several days while David recovered, his wounds painted scarlet with iodine. We learned that we had committed sacrilege. We had swum in the sacred well of Apollo, where the Pythian Priestess spoke her oracle.
I have always believed that this was my real baptism for the well brought the gift of dreams, prophecy. The ancients believed it was the fount of poetry. It was here they came for inspiration.
What has happened to me under these awesome skies? Here the preoccupations of a film world bounded by Soho seem ridiculous. Walking into Working Tide or Basilisk, the offices seem so cramped, so steeped in gloom all this glorious summer.
Behind the facade my life is at sixes and sevens. I water the roses and wonder whether I will see them bloom. I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains that plants will cure – and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopoeia has failed.
Yet there is a thrill in watching the plants spring up that gives me hope.
Even so, I find myself unable to record the disaster that has befallen some of my friends, particularly dear Howard, who I miss more than imagination.
He wanders into my mind – as he wandered out of a stormy night eighteen months ago.
The foghorn boomed through the night in a dense mist, which left the garden sparkling with dewy spiders’ webs. As the sun came up the mist glowed an iridescent white. For an hour you could see only a few yards, though it quickly cleared, leaving the garden with a myriad diamond drops, the poppies with their hairy leaves were strings of pearls. At seven one of the washed mauve opium poppies opened.
I sat by the front door wafted by the clove-scented pinks, it is an idyll: et in Arcadia ego. I am so in love with the place please God I see another year.
Cloudy, with a warm dry wind. It had hardly rained here, which surprised me, as the deluge in London felt as if it must have covered the whole country. More damaging than the drought is the strong wind, as it dries out the plants.
With the hosepipe ban the view has become a desert, everything left to chance and the isobars. The sloe bushes are heavy with purple fruit a full six weeks in advance of last year – we picked them in early October. The rosemary bushes are dying, and most of the flowers are over – the geraniums and marigolds, scarlets and reds. The brave bugloss is at a finish. Picked up the dead flower heads of the sempervivum and night scented stock, trimmed lavender flowers. Reponed seedlings of foxglove and great mullein; also sea buckthorn and the wild fig.
To prove there was a life after
A man had himself buried six feet under
In a lead-lined coffin, holding a fig.
He said, ‘If a life after exists, the fig will grow.’
The fig grew. That’s quite certain.
As a child I ate the figs of eternal life;
They were unripe and gave me colic.
Dungeness might seem the least hospitable environment for a fig tree to take root. Cut back by biting winter easterlies it is a mere couple of feet high, dwarfed but thriving. Sycamore and oak have established themselves in the same way.
A band of rain blew over at dawn. Warm sunny day which clouded over.
Before the sun disappeared we filmed David out on the shore amongst the fishing boats, lying in huge coils of rope. Then, as film was running low, we made a trip to Rye; but by the time we returned the sun was lost.
A sullen evening: parched flowers dying, menacing clouds mounting above burning stubble, ploughed fields drained of life – the only movement, the silvery grey leaves of the willows along the drainage canals.
Julian swung the car along the empty roads like a rally driver, in silence.
Dark by 8:30. Evenings drawing in.
I sat and wrote this poem, the bright sunlight through the window hurting my eyes.
No dragons will spring from these circles.
These stones will not dance or clap hands at the solstice.
Beached on the shingle,
They lock up their memories,
Upright as sentinels
In the dry grass.
Rolled by the sea down the centuries
They wait the great Tide
That shall come a second time
Recalling them to the depths
Where the salt sea will unlock their silence.
Then they’ll talk of their time here
To strange creatures,
Telling them how the postman came up
The path with your letter,
How I couldn’t conceal my happiness,
And walked backwards and forwards in the garden, skipping.
How, when you came, we set off under a full moon,
To watch the patient fishermen,
And then turned home,
Throwing handfuls of pebbles
In showers of sparks
Under the starlit sky.
Of your face, lit by the beam from the lighthouse,
Every ten seconds,
A smile,
A little frown,
Green eyes,
A wink.
Planted out santolinas and fig tree cuttings.
Sat in the deck chair and watched the sun set and a full moon climb over the lighthouse through bands of iridescent cloud.
The stones reflect the great circle of the moon. They can hear me singing in the kitchen.
Brought in seeds of alexanders, burdock, hawkbit and yellow horned poppy. Replanted seedlings of the poppy and ivy-leaved toadflax; also the periwinkle from Phoenix House.
Everything dry as a bone. White groundsel seeds like pearls in a desert. Teasel, thistles, and the burdocks scorched and dying – nothing left for the rain to save. Even the willows rattle with drought.
A cool northerly brought the skies back. Fast-moving low cloud over bright silver with shafts of light. The sea running high, white capped; shimmering dead grasses. The summer’s back broken.
The sun has picked out the white cliffs, like a vast iceberg in a dark blue-grey sea. The crow followed me out to the Long Pits and saw off the small dog of a couple of surprised hikers. Took cuttings of the dog roses, slips of yarrow; scattered seed of the white poppy from the seashore at Greatstone. Built windchimes from metal rods and two baulks of timber from the beach.
Just before sunset a rainbow glowed across a dark sea offset by violet pink cumulonimbus clouds.