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.
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.
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.
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.
A few days ago in a window of benevolent weather, my flatmate and I went to see the sunrise over Cambridge from the highest ground in the city: Castle Mound. Not being habitual early risers, we underestimated how early the colors actually begin to paint the sky before the sun is scheduled to show itself. At 7:30 a.m. at the end of January in Cambridge, 20 minutes before sunrise, the day has already eased itself in, and the pink has fanned out through the clouds. We cycled hastily under the luminous sky, sneaking glances at the risk of swerving. At this time of day during a pandemic, there were only a few other cyclists and small accumulations of cars at stoplights. We could ease through the awkward roundabout at Madingley Road and Northampton Street with no problem, chug up Castle Street, lock our bikes and cross traffic-free to the small green hill tucked behind city buildings. I left my winded flatmate behind to hurry up the curving steps and catch the sun.
When the English poet and Cambridge alumnus Rupert Brooke was homesick and depressed in Germany in 1912, he wrote a nostalgic, light-hearted poem about one of Cambridge’s gems:
. . . would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester! — Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. …I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
(from “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”)
Brooke proceeds to comically badmouth every other village in the vicinity of Cambridge based entirely on what insults rhyme with their names.[1] It makes an interesting timepiece, to recognize the names of villages that have now been subsumed as neighborhoods of the City of Cambridge (Madingley, Cherry Hinton, Ditton…). Grantchester, however, is one village that has kept its geographical identity, still tiny and discrete on the banks of the River Cam amidst fields and college sports greens. Nevertheless, it is very closely linked with Cambridge, not least by the steady flow of joggers and dog-walkers along the two-mile footpath that runs beside the River Cam from Cambridge to Grantchester. Much more could be said about Grantchester, the village— its medieval church, its pubs, its tearoom, its namesake detective show I got my family hooked on after witnessing its fourth season being filmed in town—but it’s the path to Grantchester I want to write about for now. The path ambles through the idyllic chain of green where Brooke wanted to lie “flower-lulled in sleepy grass”: Grantchester Meadows.
Waterways have an inherent sense of story—they bring elsewhere to you, following a path with a volition beyond your own, and tacitly invite you to find out where from and where to. Here’s one: Hobson’s Conduit, a stream dug in 1610 from chalk springs out in the fields to the heart of Cambridge, still flowing and steeped in city lore. When a retired Cambridge professor told me about the walk along the Conduit’s length from city center to source at Nine Wells Nature Reserve, I tucked the captivating idea away in my to-walk list. Although I inadvertently walked partway on the inviting public footpath once, it took me a while to pick up the trail again.
Boxing Day 2020: gray and brisk but not raining or freezing; paths still muddy and fields flooded after the storm two days before Christmas. Looking for a way to pass an afternoon with a friend on the first day of renewed Covid lockdown, I suggested the walk to Nine Wells.
A common misconception I encounter when I tell people that I study plant ecology is that I must know all about gardening. In fact, I have to reply, I don’t have much of a green thumb. Ecology isn’t horticulture, and although I love observing plants in their natural habitats and other people’s gardens, I haven’t yet had the space or patience to work out what keeps plants happy in my own plot of soil. I feel vaguely guilty about this—it seems I should have more interest in the real-time lives of plants. And yet my intentions to get into gardening have yet to become more.
So it was both par for the course (albeit in a backwards way) and perhaps a sign when, a few weeks ago, I was stopped in the Newnham Porters Lodge by a passing staff member with a question. She had heard my flatmate and me talking and asked tentatively if we were American, and this may be a strange question but did we know anything about plants? (We had not been talking about plants.) She went on to say that the Development Team were making a video for North American alumnae and they needed American students to help interview the head gardener, ask about American plants, etc; might we be interested? My flatmate was bemused by the fragmented request, but I, although still not entirely sure what she was asking for, said, “Actually, yes, I study plant ecology, and sure, why not?” Followed by the usual caveat about horticulture.
A few days later I got an email from an enthusiastic project director, Beth, who explained the video was a virtual college tour for US and Canada-based alumnae for the 150th College anniversary, and that this was the first project she was directing herself and she was so excited, but wanted to give me an opportunity to say no—but I assured her I was happy to help. Hobnobbing with the head gardener sounded like fun, and in any case, it should make a good story.
Near the edge of Cambridge, in Cherry Hinton, is a stealthy nature reserve. The only hint of the place from the street is the fence threaded with green. That’s not such an uncommon sight in Cambridge, where hedges and trees screen a lot of things from view. These particular barriers don’t seem to hide much—there’s a narrow tangle of trees but no sense of deepening beyond them as you might expect in a nature reserve. Many people, I suspect, zoom past without an inkling that anything is there, as I would have despite attending church less than a block away every week.
But I’ve been tipped off. After church one Sunday I go looking for an entrance, a place to stash my bike, a wooden gate and descending steps into the green. I enter another dimension—one of several tucked into Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits.
A graveyard in England is rife with life. Even in October the graveyard is green. Soil rarely shows, shrouded by a tangle of grass in all stages of growth and senescence, leaves of so many different shapes they lose definition to human eyes, tough stems and new stems, shocks of roots, crowds of brambles, clumps of moss, and even now, flowers, little white clusters of yarrow. In the spring there are snowdrops and daffodils. Under the plants are crawling things, and in the trees are flying things. Footpaths are worn over grass or blanketed in rust-colored yew needles (death-dealing if you eat them); headstones are skew like Jack-o’-lantern teeth with a green patina of age and the steady crawl of ivy. If the Friends of the Ascension Parish Burial Ground didn’t have their monthly work parties to keep the life at bay, within months, perhaps, you wouldn’t know there were any dead kept and remembered here on All Souls’ Lane.
