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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Up the road over the edge of Cherry Hinton, onto the gentle rise of the Gog Magog Hills and their furrowed hide of fields, and I pull off the shoulder where a quiet leaf-screened path is bisected by the motorway. I’m partway between Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits and Wandlebury Country Park (which will one day have its own blog post), and I’m walking on a fallen giant—by one account, the Gawr Madoc of the Gog Magog Hills, slain by the Trojans, crashing and settling and growing over to create what little relief there is in the flat fenlands of Cambridgeshire. The walk is a long-cut through yellow leaves and autumn-ripened berries to another slice of nature reserve, this one copper-colored and called Beechwoods.
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.
