Garden – The Cambridge Placebook

December 5, 2021January 4, 2022

Autumn Again

I was taking a retrospective look at my blog recently, and was stunned by how much I wrote last autumn. I kept a treasure trove of field notes on everything the season was giving me during a time of quiet and isolation. This season, the hustle of community is back, along with the haze of attempting to write up my thesis, and I’ve found it hard to get into the headspace of word-crafting my surroundings. Despite this, the season has given richly and I’ve been fed by warm earthy palettes, frosty mornings, flame and lemon leaves, full moons, mushrooms and chestnuts, sunbeams and sunsets. In lieu of words I’ve captured as much as I can on my often inadequate camera. I’m going to attempt to decorate the images with some remembered notes, because this autumn deserves all the attention I can give it, even in memory.

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.

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.

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.

December 23, 2020July 5, 2021

Newnham College Garden

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 150^th 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.

December 5, 2020July 5, 2021

Field Notes: Newnham in Autumn

Yesterday brought the first early-morning snow of winter to Cambridge. Having been tipped off by the forecast the day before, I knew what the muffled calls and screams of children meant when they woke me up, even with the curtains closed and my brain still groggy. Within a few hours of sunrise, the half-inch of snow was latticed into slush on the lawns and rooftops, and soon after that, was gone. (Having spent nine Decembers in Idaho, I’m not impressed.)

Today brought near-frozen sunshine, which I’m now watching gather into sunset just after 3 pm. The walnut tree outside my window is all a-crag with empty branches; I can only see a single leaf clinging and waving.

All this is to say that winter is here. So my post today is a tribute to the memory of the glorious autumn I was so unusually intimate with here in Newnham, working at my south-facing window in my college room, taking strolls for breaks. Here are some of my field notes.

October 10, 2020July 5, 2021

Newnham College: A Tour

Newnham College and its surrounding lush, peaceful neighborhood was one of the reasons I wanted to end my 6-month pandemic hiatus and return to Cambridge for the fall. In a time when mobility is limited, this is a good place to be.

September 26, 2020July 5, 2021

South Island, NZ

Dec 1-5, 2019 catchup, Christchurch

I went to the New Zealand Ecological Society conference, held on the campus of an agricultural college just outside of Christchurch in Lincoln, largely because my supervisor was going and it was him I was coming to the South Island to see. I wasn’t giving a talk or going for a particular session; instead I saw it as a chance to sample different foci and ecosystems—eg the Braided River ecosystem, which had a whole session. I didn’t mind missing an entire afternoon of the conference to explore Christchurch one day.