Cambridge and environs – Page 2 – The Cambridge Placebook

July 17, 2021July 18, 2021

Cambridge Botanic Garden at 175 Years

Last week I volunteered as a “Science Explainer” for the 175^th Anniversary celebration of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. I wore a bright (bright) orange T-shirt and lanyard and smiled at people as they walked by the chalk grassland and fen displays, trying to judge if they would be open to a chat about native Cambridgeshire ecology. I pointed out the pale brown newts wriggling between lily pads in the fen pond to children scampering over the fen boardwalk, explained how alkaline chalk determines what can grow in chalk soil and chalk-drained fens, apologized for not knowing where to get the next stamp on the Mystery History trail, and chatted about pasqueflowers and orchids. When there was no one around I watched bees on the meadowsweet and listened to the live music filtering through the trees and clashing with the one-man band (the “Pramdemonium”) wheeling around the Garden with bubbles coming out the horns. Festive, to say the least.

Whether or not passersby fully caught on to the reasons for the festivity, the celebration is justified—the Garden has been a dynamic center of botanical science, beauty, and public engagement for a good long while now, thanks to visionary and determined botanists and teachers. And how happy that people can gather here with music, food, kids, and curiosity again after last year’s hiatus!

June 30, 2021July 5, 2021

Newnham Permaculture Garden

The way to the secret garden is through a pale blue gate in the brick garden wall of an imposing Victorian house (dubbed the Pightle); through a passageway of forsythia and lilac and across the big back lawn (watch out for badger worm dig-holes) occupied only by a garden shed and some scattered lawn furniture and banks of tall, dark trees full of birdsong; through a stand of brush and hedge under which badgers have dug their elaborate sett and are sleeping somewhere underfoot[1]; and beyond this hedge are the plots of once-fallow ground claimed for now by enterprising, green-hearted Newnhamites, who have built and sprouted a community of gardens. First labor of love: the allotment beds for Fellows and students, and on the neighboring square, the subject of this post: the Newnham Garden Club’s new permaculture garden.

June 14, 2021July 5, 2021

Botanizing at Devil’s Dyke

botanize (or botanise): v., to study plants in their natural habitat (akin to birdwatching)

When I heard that Ed Tanner, retired plant ecology professor from my department who still sits in on ecology group meetings, was taking a few other students out on Saturdays to nature reserves around Cambridge to botanize, I didn’t waste time in inviting myself along. I was delighted by the chance to explore new places and absorb some of the decades of plant and place knowledge that Ed has to offer (not to mention being one of the most Cambridge-y ways I could possibly spend an afternoon). The next trip planned was to Devil’s Dyke. All I really knew about Devil’s Dyke was that it was a very old landmark somewhere out in the countryside—near Newmarket, of horse racing fame—and, Ed told us via email, is habitat to rare orchids.

May 11, 2021July 5, 2021

Gog Magog Hills ~ Wandlebury and Magog Down

In the flatlands, hills draw history to them. Where the layers of chalk bulge up south of Cambridge, giving a green roll to the fields and beech groves and feeding flowers in chalk meadows, history crowns the 75-meter hilltops at Wandlebury and Magog Down. Legends call the Gog Magog hills a sleeping giant (see my post on Beechwoods), but there are plenty of other stories still observable on the chalk here: Iron Age ring hillfort, Roman road, 17^th-century thoroughbred stables, country estate, and rescue from bulldozing as nature reserve. Portals, paths, layers.

May 2, 2021July 5, 2021

The Cam Towpath to Bottisham Lock

My favorite way to explore:

Look at Google Maps on satellite mode
Find the green patches
Think about where I haven’t been recently (or ever)
Click around for general cycling directions
Get on my bike
Deviate from that route as much as I like.

On Easter Sunday, a month ago now, my afternoon was wide open after Easter observances and the weather was perfect. So I opened Google Maps and consulted my map feelers—where I felt like being and where I could extend my exploration coverage—and decided on the direction of Jesus Green and Fen Ditton. No endpoint in mind, just a place to be and see where I ended up.

Well, I ended up seven miles down along the River Cam. The pull of the path was irresistible, and only a sense of daylight waning turned me back.

April 11, 2021December 12, 2021

Madingley and Coton: A Country Ramble

So much of Britain is countryside. It still boggles my mind that after millennia of habitation, such a relatively small place could be mostly rural, with a few major urban centers and the rest a network of tiny villages in a sea of fields. Cambridge is balanced rather precariously on the boundary between these worlds. You don’t have to go far in any direction to plunge straight into rural green. It’s also growing fast, destabilizing the long history of tight containment within that green matrix, and unsurprisingly stirring up anxiety among countryside lovers and dwellers. I’m only an observer—but I do number myself among the countryside lovers.

March 28, 2021July 5, 2021

Field Notes: Spring’s Progress

In Cambridge now, we’re teetering at the peak of daffodils and cherry blossoms. But the colors started with the crocuses, with layer on layer of new faces emerging since then. Was this the beginning of spring, over a month before the equinox? Less tidy than the succession of flowers, many species of wind and cloud and sun flow through these early months, hybridizing winter and spring. But petals and their colors and birds with their eloquence won’t be ignored as they talk of the changing seasons. I’ve been taking notes.

March 14, 2021July 5, 2021

Parker’s Piece and Christ’s Pieces

Parker’s Piece

Almost exactly a year ago, the world as we know it fell to pieces. I was in a cozy flat on a lane just off of Parker’s Piece, gathering with my church friends for what turned out to be the last time under normal circumstances, when the global response to the looming pandemic began to accelerate at whiplash speed. Earlier that morning President Trump had announced the closure of the US border to Europe and my sister had been called home from her internship in Spain. I was still imagining a modified version of the life I was used to: staying in Cambridge, probably working from home for a little while, still going to church on Sundays, gathering in some form in this small flat every week with our young adult church group. But when I got there on March 12, I learned that the older missionary couple who had just arrived a few days earlier to fill the role of young adult support in the congregation, living in the church-rented flat and hosting our gatherings, had been called home. They had 24 hours to pack and fly out. Later that night, all church gatherings were cancelled for the foreseeable future. So we ate our last weekly dinner and Jenny played the banjo and we said goodbye to our friends, bracing ourselves for the changed world.

February 28, 2021July 5, 2021

Here Comes the Sun: Jesus Green, Midsummer Common, and the Lower Cam

When the sun comes out in Cambridge, so, of course, do the people. When I wandered out to Jesus Green today to catch some sun myself, I knew it would be busy, but I didn’t realize I was going to soak up people as much as sun. Pandemic lockdown is to human presence as winter is to vitamin D, and sitting at my desk for months has starved me of both. The warmth, the colors, the spread of people in all their shapes, sizes, accents, and energies; people out in the world doing things, talking, relaxing in shared space—is it possible I had started to forget what this is like? Jesus Green began to give this bounty back to me today.

Jesus Green (St John’s College Chapel in skyline)

February 14, 2021July 5, 2021

Cambridge Botanic Garden in Winter

The Cambridge University Botanic Garden should be by all rights one of my most frequented places as a plant lover. However, thanks to the pandemic and my skepticism about the weather’s suitability for going somewhere specifically to look at plants, I hadn’t set foot in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden in over a year, until last week when I finally took up the garden’s invitation to come stroll with a friend (only one allowed, per lockdown law). It was crystalline cold, but sunny, and we found some vivid highlights despite winter dormancy.