His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands

"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It is suited to the grandest, and may with propriety be introduced into the most pastoral. It adds new dignity to the ruined tower, and Gothic arch; it throws its arms with propriety over the mantling pool, and may be happily introduced even in the lowest scene."

From Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets (1825) by Elizabeth Kent

This quote about landscape by William Gilpin, influential eighteenth century writer on the Picturesque, is an excuse to mention two books by Elizabeth Kent. This one, Sylvan Sketches, is a guide to trees and it was her follow-up to Flora domestica, or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets (1823). I've always loved the idea of plant dictionaries based on quotes from poetry and years ago tried to compile one myself, in a vain attempt to lodge in my brain botanical knowledge that would enliven family walks and impress my wife when we visited garden centres. Sadly it failed, as I was always more interested in the poets than the plants. You would be hard pressed to beat Kent's two books though - they are delightful. And what makes them especially interesting is that she was part of the Cockney School, fully conversant with contemporary poets like Keats, Shelley and John Clare, whose work she quotes extensively. Kent was the sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and worked very closely with him, leading to some contemporary gossip (see Daisy Hay's Young Romantics).      

Sir Philip Sidney's Oak, Patrick Nasmyth, c. 1820s (V&A) 

There is of course plenty to say about the oak tree, for example

• She refers to the way poets celebrated an oak planted at Penshurst on the day of Sir Philip Sidney's birth. 'That taller tree which of a nut was set, / At his great birth where all the muses met' (Ben Jonson). Kent says that the Sidney oak 'has since been felled, it is said by mistake : would it be impossible to make a similar mistake with regard to the mistaker?' In fact the oak was older than Sidney and was still going strong when Kent was writing her book. Thomas Packenham included it in his enjoyable survey Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), but it died twenty years later. Also on the subject of Sidney and trees, see Rebecca Solnit's negative take which I discussed in a post back in 2011. 

• Another thing I once discussed on this blog, was the references to trees, including oaks, in Virgil's Eclogues. Elizabeth Kent quotes his other poems, The Aeneid and The Georgics, in Sylvan sketches. 'Stretching his brawny arms, and leafy hands; / His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands' (John Dryden's translation).

• She also includes some lovely lines from 'The Floure and the Leafe', then thought to be by Chaucer: 'And to a pleasant grove I gan passe, Long er the bright sunne uprisen was : / In which were okes great, streight as a line, / Under the which the grasse so freshe of hew, / Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine / Every tree well fro his fellow grew, / With branches brode, laden with leves new, / That sprongen out agen the sunne-shene, / Some very red, and some a glad light green.

You can read the text of Sylvan Sketches (an 1831 edition) on the Internet Archive).

In a shower of shadowing roses

We went for a walk in Richmond last week and I photographed this memorial to James Thomson on Henry's Mound. In an earlier post I listed all the reasons why Thomson is unpopular today, but The Seasons, as Jonathan Bate points out in his biography of John Clare, went through over 250 editions between 1790 and 1830. In the summer of 1806 a Helpston weaver showed the thirteen-year old Clare a fragment of the book. 

Clare read as much of the poem as he could before giving it back to its owner. The book was falling apart and most of Winter had gone missing. He was amazed that a work of such beauty could have been handled so carelessly. But the weaver only laughed at him and said that "t'was reckoned nothing of by himself or his friends" ... 

The very next Sunday, he walked to Stamford. The bookshop was shut. He contrived a plan to return on a weekday when it would be open. His job that week was tending horses, so he paid one of the other boys a penny to mind his and another penny to keep the secret. As soon as the horses had been taken outdoors, he headed off. He arrived in Stamford so early that the town was almost deserted. At last, though, the bookseller opened his doors. A copy of The Seasons was Clare's for the bargain price of a shilling (the weaver had paid half as much again for his). 

The sun was now up and it was a beautiful morning. He couldn't wait to delve into his book, but didn't want to be seen reading in public on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall that ran beside the road home. This took him into Burghley Park. He nestled on a lawn beside the wall: 'and what with reading the book, and beholding the beauties of artful nature in the park, I got into a strain of descriptive rhyming on my journey home.'

It was on this walk that Clare composed the first poem he ever wrote down, 'The Morning Walk'. He kept going, writing in secret and used a hole in a wall to store his manuscripts. He borrowed books and tried to teach himself grammar but decided it was better to try to write as he spoke. Later he would say that his chief inspirations had been The Seasons and Paradise Lost, although he drew too on the nature writing in William Cowper's The Task and Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. He also read the self-educated labourer-poet Robert Bloomfield, whose last volume Wild Flowers, or Pastoral and Local Poetry appeared in 1805. Bate notes that each of Bloomfield's books 'was less successful than the last, and he died in poverty in 1823. By that time, Clare's own poetic career was well under way.'  

John Clare in 1820, by William Hilton

Gathering Grounds

I have been reading Harriet Tarlo’s Gathering Grounds (2019), described by publishers Shearsman as a ‘collection of place-based work emerging from three collaborative projects that took place between 2011-2019 in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.’ Her collaborator was artist Judith Tucker, who tragically died last year in a car accident. An obituary by Griselda Pollack explains that she was returning from Lincolnshire, where the couple had worked together for many years, painting, drawing and writing poems. They also learned 'from the people living on the climate-threatened plotlands of the North-East Lincolnshire coast where working-class communities of the North have long built fragile holidays chalets, locally named Fitties, around the originally Viking village of Humberston.' Judith Tucker co-founded the LAND2, 'a national network of artist/lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape/place-oriented art practice.' She talked about her 'Night Fitties' work in a 2023 interview and drawings used in Gathering Grounds can be seen on her website. 

I have never been to the Humberston Fitties, or indeed to Lincolnshire (I've a feeling it's the only English county I've not been to). How much of the local landscape can be conveyed by these sequences of poems to someone who has never walked along Humberston Beach and Creek? As you can see from the image above, Judith Tucker's drawings are very detailed, like stills taken with grainy black and white film. Harriet Tarlo's poems, in contrast, isolate individual words and short phrases, set within white space which the imagination can fill in. Her texts create the visual effect of following the course of a walk, or they suggest the pattern of a beach, the shape of a valley, the fall of water or the flight of a swallow. I suppose you could try to get a feel for the place by focusing on references to specific birds and plants: an egret, a skylark, an oystercatcher, geese, sandpipers, curlews, purslane and samphire, thrift, lavender and cow parsley. Maybe with this kind of data a naturalist could narrow down the location and picture an environment, but they don't seem particularly distinctive to me. What lingers instead is an impression of mud and sand, shaped and eroded by local conditions into a series of scenes lit by the changing sky, reflections in the creek and silver left by waves on the beach. Here is a brief extract from 'July PM':

                        dark trees above                      silvery marram                           wind-drift

                                 grasses dune- making                straggling over

                                             fence stake|reflections   downbank

                                                                                                shadows  

The Gathering Grounds projects were supported by Sheffield Hallam and at the end of the book three academic articles are cited which describe the couple's practice-based research. In one of these, 'Poetry, Painting and Change on the Edge of England', they explain that their fieldwork in the Fitties drew on Iain Biggs' notion of deep mapping 'as a hybrid activity in which artistic, geographical and ethnographic practices interweave', with 'poetic ambiguity in dialogue with academic discourse.' They cite various writers of the edgelands and note that England's ad hoc coastal settlements^* have particularly interested artists recently, e.g. 'Clio Barnard’s performance work Plotlands, 2008, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope's documentary, Jaywick Escapes, 2012 and Julia Winckler‘s community engagement exhibition Lureland: Peacehaven Project.' 

The interviews Tarlo and and Tucker carried out with residents of the Fitties included recollections of a landscape now radically changed, with the sea now much closer inland. "Years ago it was way out, the dunes were 8 or 10 foot deep. Yep, we’ve lost a lot." 

The dunes referred to here have long lost their glory, being replaced by sand banks and gabions, the stones in these probably imported from Norway. The creek, saline lagoons and “pioneer saltmarsh” is spreading beyond Tetney marshes and onto Humberston Beach. The spaces humans value most highly and invented groynes to protect, sandy beaches, are being “colonised” by muddy marshland and an increasingly dangerous creek. Is the saltmarsh returning, re-establishing itself and how far will it go? Perhaps over time, regardless of the decisions human beings make about the Fitties plotland, the original saltmarsh fitties will indeed return... 

^*These places were the subject of a classic study Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward. The centenary of Ward's birth this year was marked by a new collection of essays.  

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities for an 'ochre afternoon tea' with Sunflower Chocolate Pot, a 'healing plants of Provence' creative workshop and a 5-minute meditation session based on Van Gogh's Wheatfield, with Cypresses). As Rachel Cooke says in her review, 'on the walls you’ll find only titles and dates (to know more, you must look up each painting in a booklet): a minimalism designed to allow one’s thoughts and feelings to flow freely, unimpeded by talk of bloody ears and gunshot wounds.' 

Jonathan Jones enthused about the show and observed that 

In a conventional telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally split, as his first ecstatic months ended in self-harm and hospitalisation. Here, the translation to Saint-Rémy is not a tragedy at all. You see how his style got ever more free there. A later room is filled with landscapes he painted around Saint-Rémy that teeter on total abstraction: in The Olive Trees, the earth erupts in waves like the sea, trees dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from rules it could be by Picasso.

The 1889 drawing of olive trees above that I photographed in the exhibition shows just how abstract and decorative his work was becoming. 

There is a whole room dedicated to one landscape series: drawings made in the vicinity of the ruined 12th-century Montmajour Abbey. The curators note that its 'terrain put the artist strongly in mind of the abandoned garden 'Le Paradou' (a Provençal word for 'Paradise'), which featured in Emile Zola's novel The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875).' The sketch below is The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888) and it 'includes an obscured glimpse of Arles on the far left. In Zola's novel, the Abbé, who has forgotten his vows of chastity due to amnesia, occupies the wild paradise of Le Paradou with his lover, distanced from the realities of everyday life.' After reading this I thought I would make an effort to read the novel and then do some more in depth comments here, but online reviews of it are not encouraging. A film adaptation by Georges Franju doesn't sound that enticing either. If I ever do get round to either of these I may add a postscript to this blog post. 

Ash Dome

Here is a photo I took this morning of the David Nash: 45 Years of Drawing exhibition at London's Annely Juda gallery. This room is dedicated to Ash Dome, the living tree sculpture he planted in 1977. Over the years he has returned to tend the trees and make drawings, using charcoal, raw pigment and earth from the ground they circle. The drawing below shows how the trees were fletched over and grafted. In the catalogue he explains: 

I planted 22 ash saplings in a circle with the intention of forming a dome like space for the 21st century, a 30-year project. In 1981 I grafted on branches to take up the lead growth when the tree was fetched and 1983 I started fetching in an anti-clockwise direction around the circle. Over the years each tree has formed its own individual shape, all spiralling towards the centre. (This is achieved by pruning).

The exhibition has film footage showing Nash as a young man planting the saplings and as an older man seeing how they have evolved. In a 2016 post on this blog I described a BBC documentary about British land artists that included Ash Dome: 'David Nash tells James Fox that clips of him working on it over the years show the sculpture gradually growing while he just gets older (Fox tells us he wasn't even born when Nash planted the saplings in 1977).' Sadly this hasn't happened: Ash Dome was not destined to keep on growing.

In a 2019 interview with Martin Gayford, Nash mentions the arrival of ash dieback disease, although the sculpture was still being referred to as Ash Dome (1977–ongoing). Now it is called Ash Dome (1977-2019). The first drawing above is Ash Dome with ash dieback, the second Ash Dome with oaks. After some deliberation Nash decided to plant a new dome of 22 oak trees surrounding the dying ash trees, this time to be fetched in a clockwise direction. So there is hope here for a new 22nd century dome that will outlast us all. But it is a sad moment in the film (see below) when, earlier this year, Nash returns to his sculpture and picks up one of the original trees which lay broken on the ground. 

Drunkard's Rock

Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016). Arriving now at these historic sites could involve encountering coachloads of people at a vast newly-built tourist site or finding nothing at all, just assurances from elderly locals or descendants that an old poet had indeed once lived in the vicinity. To take just one day and four Tang Dynasty poets as an example: leaving Xi’an to visit Wang Wei’s famous estate, Red Pine discovered it is now being used to make nuclear warheads. He then asked his taxi driver to make for the village where Liu Zongyuan had lived, but was met there with shrugs. A shrine to Du Fu was easy to find but Du Mu’s grave in a nearby village was removed by officials in the seventies and is now a pit full of trash.

Given the dense literary history of Mount Lu (which I briefly covered in a 2010 post here) you might think Red Pine would have had no difficulty seeing everything associated with its famous poets. And in Chaisang (Mulberry-Bramble) he did find a grandiose memorial and museum devoted to Tao Yuanming (T'ao Yüan-ming, 365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition. But when he attempted to see the poet’s grave he was told it was off limits, located now inside a military base, and the soldiers on guard would not let him in. 

Tao Yuanming was born at Chaisang and returned to the area ‘to dwell in gardens and fields’, as his famous poem of retreat put it. However, as Burton Watson wrote in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Tao’s poetry is ambiguous – ‘exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life sit uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death. He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for “the thing in the cup,” though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

Tao Yuanming in a painting by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Leaving Chaisang, Red Pine's taxi drove south past the giant Donglin Buddha, heading for Wenchuan village at the foot of Lushan. On a previous visit back in 1991 he discovered Tao Yuanming’s last lineal male descendant had still been living here until his death just a few weeks before Red Pine’s arrival. Returning now, twenty-five years later, he found the village had been bulldozed and replaced with hot spring hotels. But fortunately it was still possible to see Drunkard’s Rock, where Tao met his friends and was inspired to write his wonderful account of the Peach Blossom Spring. The great eighteenth century poet Yuan Mei (1716-97) came here in 1784 and reflected on the fact that a mere ‘scrubby piece of stone / has been cherished and admired for more than a thousand years.’ Red Pine showed his taxi driver the rock and the faded signature carved into it by Confucian scholar (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). His taxi driver, amazed, wondered why it wasn't in a museum but Red Pine was glad it wasn't and 'given its size, I didn't think it was going anywhere anytime soon.'

The Willows

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. 

This is from Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' (1907), 'foremost of all' his tales according to H. P. Lovecraft. In it, 'the nameless presences on a desolate Danube are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.' Blackwood was a great explorer of the outdoors and 'The Willows' was based on his own experiences camping 'on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg.' This area on the modern border of Slovakia and Hungary looks like it would be pleasant to visit these days - there is an attractive-looking nature reserve at Dunajské luhy which I am sure is a lot less menacing than Blackwood's 'waste of wild waters'.

Another Blackwood story that deals directly with landscape is 'The Face of the Earth', in which a German professor obsessed with the idea that the Earth is a living Being discerns the semblance of a face in the Dorsetshire Hills. He tries to entice a young student to sacrifice himself in a mouth-like chalk pit ("Come quick. It is the feeding-time.") This and 'The Willows' can be found in a new OUP anthology of Blackwood stories The Wendigo and Other Stories. Editor Aaron Worth points to Blackwood's continuing relevance in 'his pioneering exploration of such topics as plant consciousness and agency, ecological catastrophe ... and monstrous entanglements within natural systems.' A story beginning to attract renewed critical attention for its relevance to colonialism and environmentalism is 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' (1912). This is set on the edge of the New Forest and concerns a former employee of the Imperial Forest Service in India whose love for the forest outside his English home takes over his life and estranges him from his wife. The way these trees form a single communicating entity anticipates recent debates about the wood wide web.  

'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' may be interesting material for ecocritics but as a story it is, I'm afraid to say, pretty tedious and long-winded. 'The Willows', by contrast, is perfectly paced and compelling. Initially the two canoeists feel menaced by the landscape, but what begins with disquiet at the way the trees move becomes something much bigger, the kind of cosmic horror Lovecraft would specialise in. 

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.