Daffodils
Near where I live in Dulwich, at the Lordship Lane end of Friern road is a memorial to some civilians including children, who were killed by the infamous doodlebug bombs, whilst waiting for a bus during World War 2.
It’s a forgotten spot with a few small trees and scruffy grass where the buses wait before they return to central London. But in spring, at the time of greatest hope as life renews again in its cycle, it erupts with a beautiful display of golden miniature daffs. A fitting tribute to those innocent people that died there.
Despite daffodils being the national symbol of Wales, albeit a relatively new one it is Cornwall that is synonomous with daffodils in my mind, at least. They are still widely grown there commercially because the mild climate allows them to flower early for shipment to other parts of the UK. Indeed, the biggest daffodil farm in the world is opposite St Michael’s Mount near Penzance (4000 acres). The industry did take a bit of a battering during the 2nd World War when food production took centre stage and many different varieties of daffodil were thrown out into the hedgerows. Famously, in the Tamar valley near Plymouth the daffodil went the same way as mining and disappeared from the region with the wilding daffodils on the sides of the road the only reminder.
Further west in Cornwall, near Penzance whilst walking the coastal path between Mousehole and Lamorna Cove I was pleasantly surprised, in early March, to see many daffodils in the hedgerows flowering in the early spring sunshine with the more petite purple violets (with their faint old lady scent) skulking below. As Ted Hughes put it
‘ What a fleeting glance of the everlasting daffodils are…’
The sea is azure blue in Cornwall and the smash and grab of the raw Atlantic Ocean against the toothed cliffs is arresting. I’m sure John Le Carre thought so as he wrote in his cottage above the cliffs in Lamorna Cove. This pilgrimage of sorts to the place where some of the most profound dialogue I have read about human nature, love and the sad reality of life was something I had always wanted to do. And there were some stunning plants such as camellias in the steep sided valley leading to the cove but sadly the locals in the pub The Lamorna Wink were tight lipped about the real David Cornwell.
Anyway, Daffodils or Narcissi are named after the Greek god Narcissus because they seem to peer downwards, like Narcissus in his pool, and are so gay and bright that they probably would fall in love with themselves if they saw their own reflection like Narcissus. Perhaps that is why in the Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (after Sebastien is sick in Charles Ryder’s rooms) as an apology he fills his room with many different types of daffodils. Probably an appropriate symbol of homosexual love.
As Charles Ryder said he had been warned of the dangers of these rooms by his Cousin Jasper but said-
‘there were gillyflowers by his window that on warm summer evenings filled the room with scent…..‘
By gillyflower he means a scented flower but I’d always imagined he meant wallflowers which have their own connotations in courtship where it is used as a title for a number books in a type of whimsical romantic book of which there is a whole shelf at Dulwich library with names such ‘How to woo a wallflower.’
I have glanced through these books and given the content I can still flatter myself that if such dross gets published I may yet be a successful author even if my books are only read (as George Orwell put it) by desperate spinsters and the wives of fat tobacconists.
Madchester in the Spring Sunshine
When I told a friend that I was going on holiday to Manchester he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’ He said ‘To pay £100 a night for a B and B to watch the rain fall?’
Not to sound like Andy Burnham in a pitch to Michael Gove in order to get a few more quid for the levelling up fund but Manchester really is a great place now. Cosmopolitan, tolerant and even beautiful. So that rain cloud that brought the satanic mills to Manchester has now turned into an amazing rainbow of community although Im not sure Mancunians would put it quite like that.
Anyway when I arrived in Manchester in April the sun was shining and I could see the cherry blossom in bloom round the compact but beautiful cathedral in the centre of Old Manchester from my hotel window.
The hotel is quite famous because the IRA have tried to blow it up twice. The bar downstairs is certainly not the sort of place I would linger although in the morning they did a damn good Eggs Benedict.
Obviously the hotel does not attract the most salubrious characters either as they asked for a picture of my credit card to secure my stay and were really disappointed when they discovered that my bank, also for security do not display my credit number on the card.
The room looked good in the pictures but they had only wallpapered one bit of the wall…conveniently the bit in the photo and the windows and bathroom were not in good condition at all. At least if I had done a Liam Gallagher and thrown the TV out the window and used the wallpaper as toilet paper it wouldn’t have been very expensive to replace them.
There was also a surreal moment when I was locked out of the hotel because they lock the front door to the hotel rooms as a security measure. What they failed to consider was that the stairs to the hotel were accessible from the bar area so all you had to was walk round from there. So I was let in by a roguish, pumped man who had nothing to do with the hotel and was just drinking in the bar. It was a bit like the scene from the film Snatch (2000) when the two black men in it hold up a bookies, shoot themselves and then get trapped behind a security door until the larger than life Tyrone comes to see what they are doing because he is their getaway driver and finds the door easily pushed open.
But there are plenty of other diversions in Manchester aside from the gay quarter which is ironically on Canal Street with a memorial to the brilliant (and incidentally gay) code breaker Alan Turing who was shamefully treated by the British government and was forced into committing suicide because of his sexuality.
There are also a number of beautiful Victorian buildings such as the University and Victorian baths near Oxford road, Bury Market and its black pudding, Salford and Coronation street with Morrissey’s Salford Lads club, Chorlton( posh Manchester) where more Guardian newspapers are sold than anywhere else. Finally there is Cheetham’s library where Karl Marx and Frederich Engels met and discussed the plight of the working man in Manchester when it was the centre of the industrial world. At that time in the golden age of empire it was run by the ironic collaboration of Jews and Germans, centred around the Cheetham Hill area of central Manchester, just behind Victoria station.
Cheetham’s library itself looks so old and creepy that the BBC adaption of The Tractath Middoth was set here in the 2013 which is the story of a cursed book that two relatives seek to obtain or retain their inheritance.
The most impressive feature of Manchester is the new garden near the cathedral which remembers those martyrs, mostly young people, who were tragically murdered by a suicide bomber in the 02 arena just outside Manchester in 2017.
I did shed a tear or two at the immaculately tended and tastefully planted 0 shaped memorial there for the pity of human existence because we never seem to stop hating and killing each other for so little reason.
Tulipmania
Mike Dash has written a fantastic book about the craze for tulips that gripped the Netherlands in the 17th century called Tulipmania which made some people fabulously wealthy and ruined others. He tells the story of the auction at Alkmaar in the North of the Netherlands where an orphanage auctioned off its collection of tulip bulbs for a fortune at the height of the boom. It is considered the first financial bubble of modern times and is thus still part of the syllabus for junior members of staff in the financial services industry.
But Dash also talks about the origins of the tulip bulbs in central Asia and how the Turks took it from Tienshan mountains in that region and how it became one of the most important flowers in Islam because of its tolerance of heat and cold and its beauty. Dash claims its virus streaked flowers were more beautiful than any modern hybrid.
The reason it is revered in the East is because it bows its head to the sky, seemingly in humility to God, which is a particularly evocative image. The original flowers were red and thus a symbol of undying love as it was said they sprung up from where a man killed himself after hearing his lover was dead.
And so it is natural that it would be in the gardens of heaven where faithful Muslims would live in the most beautiful gardens drinking the wine they were forbidden on earth passed to them by their own personal harem. As tulips have to be tended by gardeners it was stated in the oral tradition of the prophet Muhammed that all gardeners would go to heaven, which I am naturally delighted to hear.
But we also have our holy plants in Christendom. One particularly unusual one is the particular hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’) which grows on the hills at Glastonbury and flowers at Christmas as well as in the spring. It is said that it sprung from Joseph of Arimathea’s staff when he was passing through Glastonbury and that the Puritans tried to cut it down in a fit of fanaticism during the Reformation but the tree was saved by cuttings taken by local people.
Anyway, a sprig is always sent by the vicar of Glastonbury to the Monarch at Christmas like the tiny pineapples of The Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall which were sent to Queen Victoria because they were so unusual.
Ofcourse this was a time when a pineapple didn’t cost £1 at the supermarket and were such an expensive luxury that some aristocrats included it in their coat and arms. Most amusingly, the Landmark Trust rent a property on a country estate in Scotland today that was built in the shape of a pineapple. A true folly!
But perhaps a certain kind of Tree of Knowledge can be found in the Botanical gardens at Cambridge. I don’t mean the apple tree apparently descended from the one that apparently dropped its fruit on Isaac Newton’s head but a semi-evergreen oak that keeps its leaves through winter…superficially a symbol of immortality but in fact probably a hybrid between an evergreen American oak and our own champion the English oak.
I can imagine in the pandemic someone like the writer Robert Macfarlane, the nature writer and Don at Cambridge holding lectures under this great tree but I don’t know this for sure except that he did lecture outside. Certainly much knowledge has been imparted under this tree. I hope this doesn’t inspire some nihilist to cut it down because it is so symbolic; like the sycamore on The Sycamore Gap in Hadrian’s wall. Although, it was heartening to hear the outpouring of grief over a tree that is essentially a weed in the South East of England, most obviously on railway sidings much to the irritation of the accountants at British rail. Bring back Agent Orange, chimed the administrators!
A gardener out of this world 