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.

The filming day dawned pale and crisp after several days of rain and fog. Waiting by the sunken rose garden to meet the gardener, I was envisioning Professor Sprout, the squat herbology teacher in Harry Potter (and incidentally that actress, Miriam Margolyes, is a Newnham alumna). But Lottie, the real head gardener, turned out to be a lean, rugged woman with a dark braid threaded with silver, dressed today in waterproof gardening gear. Beth had gone off to find the film crew so Lottie and I had a few minutes standing in the soft, cold early morning light to get acquainted. (I actually had met her once before, I realized, during a tour in my early zeal to get involved in gardening when I arrived, but I had never followed up.)

We immediately found common ground: Lottie also studied plant ecology in university, and in fact never studied horticulture formally. She got into gardening for the plants and the outdoors—since ecology research involved too much desk time. But surveying quadrats out on the sand dunes were some of the best days of her life, she said wistfully. I told her that the “wild corners” were my favorite parts of the garden, and she wholeheartedly agreed: all the habitat, all the ecology that can happen there. She didn’t mind telling me, though she muttered it out the side of her mouth, that the pressure to keep the more formal parts of the garden neat and controlled is chafing her. All those gravel paths can’t be done without the weedkiller she otherwise eschews.

Beth had told me multiple times that Lottie is camera-shy and wanted to avoid being interviewed on camera, so the two-man, just-out-of-uni film crew followed us around at a distance with a camera on a gimbal frame while we chatted informally about the garden—a personal garden tour, it turned out. It was an easy conversation, one that could have gone on much longer. I fed Lottie my curiosity about the plants that she knew so well, and with down-to-earth readiness she began to populate my mental map with a species here and a species there, overlapping layers of ecological and aesthetic plans, and the vigorous labor of love that is the Newnham Garden.

There are several sections to the sprawling gardens. The original Victorian garden leading out from Old Hall has curving paths and meadow that haven’t changed since Anne Jemima Clough first laid them out in the 1870s. The gardens then were a rare space for women to be themselves outdoors; the vegetable gardens were meant for self-sufficiency. This area is planted with daffodil and wildflower bulbs and meadow grass that bursts with color in the spring, and the oldest apples trees from the original orchard. The meadows—including several others throughout the garden—are mosaic-cut according to advice from the Cambridge Natural History Society to create varied habitat for flora and fauna.

This leads into the true wild corner, where bark-lined paths are hidden between hazel trees, where I did my first birdwatching in Cambridge. It has a name, I learned: the “nut walk.” Lottie is besotted with it; she says most people don’t notice it’s there. I was proud to be one who has. On the other hand, when she told me there are foxes living nearby, one in the garden of the graduate house I pass by every time I come to the college, and that they’re hard not to see if you spend enough time out here, it felt like a rebuke. How have I missed them? I have, at least, seen or rather sensed bats, nearly transparent shadows in the dark, on my way to and from dinner at the buttery.

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Then there’s the Arts-and-Crafts section in the quadrangle between Kennedy and Peile Halls, laid in the early 20^th century with an eye to right angles, form following function, straight paths and long flower beds borders that were recently cleared after a summer as a successful self-pick vegetable garden. Students could walk the path from their rooms and carry away tomatoes and peppers and beans and edible flowers. The gardeners do their hardest work during the winter, clearing beds to make way for spring. I could hear the delight in Lottie’s voice when she told me about the thousands of bulbs waiting underneath that garden, where now the first little green shoots are starting to come up through the dark mulch. There are bulbs to come out in succession through every part of the spring and into summer, from snowdrops to tulips to irises. The mulch comes from college-made compost, which Lottie said saves on watering, fertilizer, and weeding while also looking very nice.

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Around the corner the beds are full of Salvia (Lottie’s favorite) and dahlias (also stunning—flaming orange and yellow and maroon in the summer). She also pointed out multiple species of lime tree, and a home oak—I never would have guessed it was oak with its smooth-edged leaves—Irish yew, and lovely low-sloping Cercis tree with its bark half-peeled off by squirrels, darn them. And a California buckeye, one of the few American species.

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Circling back past the College Hall into the heart of the college brought us to the true formal garden, with the sunken rose garden at the center surrounded by yew topiaries, which Lottie loves because they’re slow-growing and so easy to shape. The roses are multiple-flowering varieties, so they still have a scattering of peach and pink petals even now. There are ivy bees living in the rose garden; they thrive on the ivy flowers—which is one reason why she doesn’t want to cut the ivy as often as the college wishes she would. The whole garden, in fact, is primed for forage, and they do pollinator surveys and moth trapping to track the biodiversity. I told her how delighted I’ve been by my discovery of ivy flowers this autumn and the busy bunch of pollinators they attract even as other plants hunker down. We commiserated about how people have the wrong idea about ivy, thinking it’s a parasite or weighing down trees when in fact it provides extra structure and habitat for wildlife besides—bats, insects, birds. Even if a tree does die, deadwood is good for gardens, she said, providing diversions for honey fungus that would otherwise cause root rot, keeping some actual ecology going on. Clearing everything out just isn’t the way most plants are meant to live.

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When I asked about other college gardeners’ feelings about ecology, she said there’s a university-wide movement toward more ecologically informed gardens, and Newnham is one of leaders of the trend. King’s College, however, is the true bellwether: they planted a third of their formal lawn on the Backs with a wildflower meadow last year, which I missed blooming thanks to the pandemic, but it was apparently a huge success. This next spring will be even better, she says, as they’re doing a traditional hay field that will be hand scythed and mowed and grazed by Shire horses, including her own.

The newest part of the garden is the “mathematical courtyard” outside the new Dorothy Garrod building, which is arranged with square beds of mostly evergreen shrubs, including some hebes, my study plant (which it turns out Lottie doesn’t like much, because in England it’s hackneyed Tesco carpark material, thanks to its hardiness) and some cheeky Salvia that she says she shouldn’t plant because it’s not very hardy but she loves the purple, and a tall swaying Rudbeckia maxima, the giant coneflower which finches will feed on in the winter if you leave the seed heads on (which she has). That’s one of her favorites in the garden. To put together this courtyard from scratch, they gathered cuttings and seeds from other colleges and had hundreds of thousands of starts that had to wait through last summer’s drought in the college yard—it was like a prairie, she said, and she was sad to see them go when it was time to plant.

In the new year, Lottie will be coaching the college gardening club through the creation of a permaculture garden around the college allotments. I told her I was in. She also mentioned students volunteering alongside the gardeners in the main garden, and I wanted in on that too. “Sure, just find me any day, I’ll put you to work,” she said with a wave of her hand and a smile. I could feel my hunger growing for more time with this place, for the kind of intimate knowledge Lottie has of its soil and its seasons, for seeing foxes, for watching things grow. Lottie’s organic enthusiasm for this work, arising out of the same earth-love that I have, gave a nice hard knock to my compartmentalization of ecology and horticulture. Perhaps I can finally pull down the barrier in my own practice.

Beth gave me a giant chocolate bear as a thank you, but really, the edifying conversation with Lottie and promise of future collaboration was exactly what I had been looking for: a new foothold in knowing where I live and the people so deeply part of it.