This feels like summer. The summer of 68/69? It was never about the music for me. Corsham, art college, was all about the environment, down to spending a night sleeping up a tree in the grounds of the Court after a row with Geoff Turpin, who’d given up sleeping in tent in the garden to sleeping on my floor, somewhat cramping my style, as the euphemism has it. The moment that started with ‘for Gods sake Geoff, find a bloody room’ ended ‘well sleep up a bloody tree then’. So there we both were waking in time for a college breakfast in a tree adjacent to the Court. I don’t think my back ever really recovered although the friendship did.
Colour of leaves
Now I sit in the garden wearing my Monet style silly straw gardeners’ hat, like him poncing around digging up a few dandelions knowing the professional gardeners will do the heavy work. Unlike him I use the camera all the time, not having hand-maidens to hoick canvases around for me to daub on (not that Monet ever daubed, no, that’s more my style) but like him it is the fractured colour contrasts I love, sucking dry the garden colour, occasionally scooting out to the villages up the Cuckmere like Piddinghoe, where lunchtime brings a flood of local people to swim in the river if the tide is right – yes those are not buoys in the river , they are high tide girls…
I pretend I’m weeding and ramble around the garden, to give credibility I fill a bucket with dandelions and convolvulus, using the fork to lift the baby trees that seem to appear every year hiding amongst the roses and other shrubs, What I’m really doing is indulging in the marijuana tuned Tim Leary vision of colour – the difference being the 60’s experience taught me that Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ doesn’t need drugs to turn it on but only the right mental programming, learning to look and see, to feed ones soul.
Rose leaves
The first colours of spring are fading now, but the colours of summer are coming through. The apocalyptic weathermen were obviously not brought up in the country or they would not be so intemperate about our temperate climate, or maybe they court Nostradamus publicity and paint the country red warning of summers sun burning heat, ignoring the fact that average ice coverage at the North Pole hasn’t changed significantly in 20 years, and water levels on the beaches remain pretty well the same over the last two decades.
First rose of summer
I wait for the garden roses to do the job, happily contrasting the colour of leaves, their emerging pale greens deepening to darker tones as the roses and tulips gradually produce the reds the weathermen are so determined to frighten us with. See a red rose and recoil in horror? No more like seeing a loony weatherman and recoil in shock at the lack of common sense, the desire to achieve renown – ‘shock and awe’ someone once called it – a little bit like a struggling art student in the late 60’s sucking on the wrong kind of fag end.
Geodesics have arrived
I sit in the garden seeing parallels with my youthful self, loving the colour contrasts present in leaves, enjoying the surprising impact of the golden forsythia fading into an infinity of greens and the violet blue of ceanothus introducing another green of leaves too. Today the first of those reds appeared, the first rose blooming. The first rose, what a moment to savour. Will incomers to this country ever feel the special joy that brings to an Englishman? Watching blooms form on the chestnut – being teased that red flowers marked the female chestnuts, white flowers the boys – and you know that it is the Spanish form with its different leaves are the ones that you can roast in the autumn – the conkers are to be strung for championship fights and bashed knuckles.
Ceanothus
My garden reminds me of my bucolic youth. How lucky we were at Corsham, an Inigo Jones house and Capability Brown landscaped grounds, a lake to skate on when frozen in the Winter (lovely story to be told about how it was checked as safe, for another story time). I slip into a contemplative 79th orbit around the sun, still painting, as are several of my contemporaries, so the education must have provided a solid creative base, giving me this bucolic (not alcoholic) old age with a deep joy in the English garden. The row of gardens behind suburban houses is like a small urban forest. The dope Miliband gets it completely wrong – he should be paying us to plant trees and bushes – it would do more for the environment than his silly kowtowing to fashionable causes and would reinforce the real value of England – its countryside and natural beauty.
Best enjoyed by sitting quiet, breathing in the scents, listening to robin haranguing the cat and delighting in colour.
Now available from the Gallery as a limited edition giclée print
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