The Physic Garden (9 page)

I am staring at it now, that book, and the scent of the years is on it, that magical, musky scent of old books, as familiar to me as the scent of the beeswax polish my wife used on our furniture, the polish my daughter-in-law still makes and uses.
The Scots Gard’ner
it is called. By John Reid. ‘Published for the Climate of Scotland.’ I turned the leaves then, just as I am turning them now. ‘Gardens, Orchards, Avenues, Groves,’ it says, ‘with new and profitable ways of Levelling and how to Measure and Divide Land.’ It was printed in Edinburgh, by David Lindsay and his partners, at the foot of Heriot’s Bridge, in 1683.

I tried to hand it back to him. ‘You cannot give me such a thing!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s too precious. I’m only a gardener, Thomas.’

‘And who else but a gardener could best benefit from a book on gardening? Have you any better suggestions?’

‘No. But it’s so old. And so beautiful.’

‘Then treasure it and enjoy it. Besides, I have my own copy. I took mine from my cousin’s library in Ayrshire. He had no use for it, and I wanted to read it. When I saw this, I thought it would be fitting that you should have a copy too. You can read it, and we can compare notes if you like.’

‘I suppose we could do that.’

‘It is written with such love. There is poetry in every line of it, and I think that you will like it as much as I do. I have not given it lightly, and you deprive me of nothing by accepting it. In fact, you will give me nothing but pleasure. Men who love plants as you love plants, men who also like books as you like books, they are few and far between and must always be treasured when found.’

So I took it. I took it home and put it on the top of the dresser and warned the younger children, under pain of a beating, that they must not touch it under any circumstances. Whenever I had time and light, I would take it down and read it and reread it until I had it almost by heart. Thomas was right. There was poetry between those pages. My brothers and sisters would watch me reading, but none of them would go near it or even ask me about it. Only Rab, as he grew older, would come creeping up beside me and run his fingers over the letters, but I never minded him. He was a gentle lad and I thought that one day, if he survived,
he might love books as much as I did. Nobody else touched it. Not even my poor mother, who viewed it as one might a magical talisman. She was afraid to touch it but would sometimes say to me, ‘only move the book, William’ when she wished to polish the dresser.

That afternoon, Jenny had told me, as I did not tell Thomas, not then anyway, that she also took in sewing. It was not the plain
sewing
that my poor plain sisters struggled to do. No. This was fine stuff and sometimes it was embroidery in white thread on muslin so that it looked just like costly lace: flowers, ferns and sprigs, in stitches so fine that you could barely distinguish them one from another with the naked eye.

‘It was my good friend and neighbour, Nancy Mackenzie, who taught me to do it,’ she told me. ‘And Nancy was taught the skill in Edinburgh by Mr Ruffini who was an Italian incomer. That was more than twenty years ago.’

‘So Nancy is not a girl like yourself?’

‘No, no. She is a widow lady. But back then she was one of Ruffini’s girls or at least that is how she describes herself!’

Nancy had been an orphan who was taken in by the young Italian, taken off the streets when she was a child of ten. She had been taught to do fine whitework, along with a number of other girls he had decided to train up.

Later, Nancy had met and married a travelling weaver and they had come down to the west because the Glasgow weavers were beginning to make the very fine muslin which was needed for this work, using cotton carried up the long hard road from Manchester. The couple
had settled near Glasgow town, but when Nancy’s husband died, she had no recourse but to support herself with her needlework and with spinning for Sandy Caddas. She and Jenny had become firm friends, although there was such a difference in their ages.

‘But then,’ said Jenny, a little sadly, ‘I was in want of a mother. My mother died not long after Anna was weaned.’

The care of the child had fallen to Jenny, but this kindly
neighbour
had taken some of the work off her shoulders and had, besides, taught her all that she knew of needlecraft. Now, as well as keeping house for her father and drying plants from the garden to make what remedies she could, Jenny would spend hours doing this embroidery, whitework on fine cotton or coloured sprigs, tiny flowers neatly worked on silk for ladies’ dresses and men’s waistcoats and the like.

‘Really, I should be spinning for my father,’ she said, with a smile. ‘But he says that my work fetches more money, which is true, so he would rather I do the fancy stitching. He pays a couple of women in the village to do the spinning for him. Sometimes Nancy takes it off his hands as well because her eyesight is not what it was, not for the fine work she used to do.’

She had shown me some of her embroidery, just a small panel of a waistcoat that she was working on for one of the local gentry, and I thought it very marvellous. Perhaps because she knew so much about the flowers themselves, she seemed to have a talent for painting pictures with her needle. The stitched flowers were as real as any I have ever seen. I thought about my sisters, about Jean and Susanna, but I couldn’t ever see them being able to do more than hem a petticoat and even that with difficulty.

It has sometimes struck me, watching my wife or my
daughter
-in-law working away with a needle – although my wife was certainly the more skilled of the two – that there is some strange and elusive connection between these things, embroidery and weaving and the flowers that gardeners grow. The big shawls that the weavers of Paisley make nowadays, with their curving ferns and masses of flowers, sometimes seem to me to be like gardens
woven in cloth. They have the appearance of a flower border in high summer, the same jumble of dazzling colours. Then there are the delicate floral sprays on the lace that prosperous brides wear, or the white sprigs and flowers of Dresden or Ayrshire
needlework
on fine muslin. It strikes me that all these things, whether the province of men or women, have much in common with the work that some gardeners do. Or do I mean the results of that work? And if it seems over fanciful to say as much, perhaps I mean that we are nurturers only and they echo what we do, weaving it or stitching it into their world, pinning it down and passing it on for others to cherish, for those who come after, like Jenny Caddas, who had the skill of fashioning flowers with her needle as well as in her garden.

A world without flowers would be a poor world indeed, although I know, or perhaps I should say I used to know, many gardeners for whom the growing of fruit and vegetables was
paramount
. I think my father was one of their number. They cared little for flowers and grew them only to please their mistresses, considering them an inconvenience. It was the same with trees for some of them. They hated to let trees and shrubs grow tall, because they fancied that such things would overshadow their
carrots
, their skirrets and their scorzonera. They were men, I think, who were more comfortable wielding an axe or a pair of sharp shears. Too high, too untidy, too intrusive. That was their
judgement
. But it was never mine.

During those few years of my friendship with Thomas Brown, I was torn between the pleasure I took from his company and my growing affection for Jenny, both of which were tempered by my almost constant worry about lack of funds and what that might mean for my family. There were too few hours in the day and too many jobs, far too many jobs, to fill them. It made me tetchy and ill tempered. With Thomas, I felt I could relax and speak as I saw
fit, not bothering to curb my tongue, conscious that he would always make allowances for me. With Jenny, though, I had no inclination to be anything but gentle. The more time I spent in her company, the more enchanted I became by the sunny mind that seemed to illuminate her smiling face. Her cup was always half full, never half empty. More often than not, it was full to the brim with life and the pleasure she took from small things. Oh I do not mean that she was never cross or tired or irritable, for she could be all of these things when her sister was a trial to her, or her father’s demands on her time exceeded her capacity to
fulfil
them. She could be wilful when she chose and she was never afraid to challenge me, much as my sisters were never afraid to put me firmly in my place.

I think she regretted the loss of her mother deeply, the older she grew. There was always too much to be done about the house, in the garden, with the plants she harvested, with her needle. I understood that well enough, for I suffered from the same
problem
myself. She did what she could and sang about her work and was marvellously contented with her lot for most of the time. The best way I can describe it is to say that she filled the cottage where she lived with as much good nature as it was possible to find in a poorly educated country lassie – which was, after all, exactly what she was.

Later, I found myself regretting that I had not made the most of my time with her. I was very much absorbed in my own
troubles
and did not have the wit or the imagination to see that she could not always be as cheerful as she seemed. I would go to her for solace, and she would listen to my complaints, patiently
offering
what suggestions she could.

‘We just have to make the best of things, William!’ she would tell me. ‘After all, look at what we have. We’re doing work that we enjoy, most of the time anyway. We’re earning enough to keep body and soul together. What more could we ask for?’

Well, I could think of plenty more, but I had to acknowledge that there was some truth in what she said. Still, the students were
a sore trial to me. The gardens were meant to be for the benefit of the professors and lecturers. But the young scholars would often gain access to them. There were times when all manner of rascals, much the worse for strong drink, would maraud about, creating mayhem. I caught one of them, a young gentleman who should have known better, setting a fire under my newly planted
wayfaring
tree, a delicate shrub that had cost a very great deal of money. I shouted at him in no uncertain terms and in language that would have brought a blush to my mother’s cheek. It didn’t go down very well. He threatened to report me to Doctor Brown and when I stared him out, he said he would tell his family.

‘I’ll have my father horsewhip you!’ he said, but his threats cut no ice with me.

‘You’re very welcome to try it,’ I shouted and advanced on him, but he ran off before I could exact retribution. The ground was damp (when is it ever not damp, here?), and I stamped the fire out and restored order. He was a spotty wee lad with a shifty look, which could have described any one of a dozen or more, and I doubt if I would have known him again among so many. Some rich man’s son, no doubt. They cared nothing for my gardens, not one of them.

I think I equated them in my mind with the professor whom Thomas had replaced, the sawbones who loved to pull things apart to see what lay beneath, what made it all work. It reminded me of the time I had once dismantled my mother’s cherished kitchen clock, an object which was very much prized and which, as a young lad, I had thought to take apart to ‘see how it worked’. To my horror I had not managed to put it together again at all, and my outraged father had had to pay a watchmender to fix it.

‘But once your professor has done that, once he has destroyed a body to see how it functions,’ I observed to Thomas during one of our all-too-frequent debates on the subject of surgery, ‘can he put it back together once more?’

‘In working order?’ he said.

‘Aye. Like a clockmaker.’

‘After a fashion. I think that is what he aims to do, eventually. As long as there is a little life in it still. It is one thing to mend a broken body and quite another to raise the dead!’

‘Well, you can pull a plant apart and it’ll whiles grow again. But if you pull the blood and bones and sinews apart, you cannot reassemble them any more than you can reassemble the swallow’s nest when you have howked it down from a barn wall. Or the laverock once you have taken her breath away. She will never sing again.’

‘Will, I think you’re a poet. And I can’t disagree with such passion,’ said Thomas, his hand on my shoulder. ‘And you may be right, of course. But all the same, I believe somebody might do it some day. The swallow’s nest is just that – a thing of clay, a shelter for a small time.’

‘And is that not what our bodies are?’

‘Aye they are that and more. But who knows better than you that when you cut yourself in the garden, the skin will generally knit together? Our bodies have that about them that allows them to heal. And so perhaps we can find a use for those properties to repair them inside as well as out.’

‘And do you believe he might do it, your professor?’

‘Well, it is his passion. But no, I think he just wants to see how it all works. And there’s a greatness about that, you must admit. A greatness about him. It’s just that people can’t see it yet.’

‘I can see that he’d no’ be above a wee bit of raising the dead from their last resting places at any rate.’

‘I don’t think he would go so far,’ said Thomas.

‘Do you not?’

‘He’s been a good friend to me and mine.’

‘Only because you’re saving him from what he most dislikes.’

‘That’s true enough.’

We were walking in the gardens, looking at the newly planted trees and wondering whether they would thrive, in spite of the depredations of spotty wee scholars with bonfires. They were growing, after a fashion, those that were far enough away from the
malign influence of the type foundry, but I sometimes felt that the whole college was becoming an island amid a sea of filth. The filth emanated from the manufactories and the rank jumble of houses that was creeping ever closer to the old buildings, like malignant weeds clustering around the base of some venerable tree.

The trees and shrubs were one more thing that brought us together. I had little interest in growing vegetables myself – a strange confession for a gardener, I know – but I think Thomas felt the same. He was interested in the many different varieties of apples and pears which could be grown, especially since pears were said to have many medicinal uses, but the practicalities of supplying the college tables with the likes of seakale and spinach held no interest for him or for me either. There were hothouses in the physic garden where we attempted to grow vines, and I would set Johnnie to tend a plot for ourselves, to provide curly kale and so on for our own use at home. A great handful of curly kale and a loaf of bread will make a little meat go a very long way. But that, I think, was the sum of my interest in such things.