Last time I deliberately visited this map-square,* I had a mind to go into the Garden but had come out without change in my pocket. It is a public garden but there is a small entrance fee, and an honesty box in the form of an old GPO post box into which to deposit your funds.
I’m sure there are also more technological ways in which one could make payment, but I like the idea of dropping coins into a box. I like the noise they make. I like the idea that someone will come along at closing time and empty the box and count up the coinage, and bag it, and write it in a ledger. There is something suitably Victorian about all of that, and this is a Victorian garden.
Sometimes we pass the entrance to somewhere for many a day before it occurs to us to pause, turn, and step through that gateway. Sometimes it can be decades, most of a lifetime spent in a place, before we make that turn. This is one of those places. It isn’t a place that I didn’t know about. It is simply one that until quite recently I had not bothered to find out about. I started to discover it only about a year or two ago.
Now I know I will go back, time and again, in different seasons, for different reasons. I wish I had got to know it sooner.
But maybe we both had to get to where we are now - both the garden and me - before we were ripe enough to know each other.
From what I've since discovered, when I first came to know of its existence it was still a relic, and I was still possibly not much different. Not old and forgotten, but too young and not yet formed. We both had a lot of (re)growing to do before we could meet on equal terms, I think.
The Plantation Garden is in another of those chalk-pit hollows near the Roman Catholic cathedral that I have mentioned in other posts, but it is as distinct from The Dell as it is possible to be. This is a formal garden. Italianate in style, with hints of gothic romanticism, and in so many ways not quite what it seems.
This visit is at the beginning of October in a year that has not been the most clement, so I am surprised to find the place still full of flowers.
Japanese anemones, with their delicate white handkerchief petals and crowns of golden anthers, put me in mind of demure ladies in long summer frocks and wide-brimmed hats, what passed for casual clothing a century or so ago.
Close-trimmed lawns surrounding formal beds remind me of my parents’ aspiration for the frontage of their council house, ordered planting for colour and form. A place to be 'looked at' rather than sat upon on played in. There are no ‘keep off the grass’ signs, but some-how those lawns don't necessarily invite you to walk upon them. I do so, anyway.
The first fallen leaves and overnight puddles on the paths speak of the changing season but it is unseasonably warm. Visitors in shirt-sleeves sit on benches and talk about their lives. Who said what, and why so-and-so’s decision is all wrong, whether a father-in-law could be forced to have treatment he does not want, why they're not happy with the latest decisions in workplaces and volunteer placements.
I acknowledge all the things I no longer have to worry about.
I wonder what the plants talk about.
The fountain rains down into the weedy pond, unhappy grotesques poke their tongues at passers-by from behind the ivy, ferns festoon walls and trees grow strong and tall, blanketing the pathways that lead up and around the higher reaches of the quarry. For quarry it once was.
The whole place delights in its air of reclamation and re-use. Walls are built out of the ruins of old castles and churches…except…they aren’t.
This is Victorian romance at its most extravagant. And thank the gods for people who had such visions! But, as I say, it is not what it seems.
In 1832 the area was mapped to show the city gaol where the St John the Baptist Cathedral now stands and here, where this garden is, there was a chalk pit and two lime kilns. Beautiful and peaceful it would not have been.
I'm not a lover of noticeboards, but sometimes I have to admit they do inform and send me off in search of other information, history, stories. I need to remind myself that information is just a doorway into stories.
On this day I find talk of the land having been owned by “the Preachers’ Charity” since 1613, but subsequent researches produce no further information of who they were, or why they would have an interest in this particular piece of land. It was outside the city walls, and was presumably a flint quarry before chalk became the more profitable commodity.
I’m also intrigued as to how much more of the land this mysterious organisation might have held. Modern road layouts can confuse our eye as to where ancient boundaries may have been. I wonder about the land on which the RC Cathedral now sits – was it in the same ownership? Are the quarry boundaries geographically determined, or was there some other limit to expansion in that direction, an ownership boundary perhaps? Or maybe the availability of capital and labour determined how far the works could extend and one or other ran out.
I have no answers. Only questions. Possibilites.
Back in the moment, I stand on a high path, looking down onto lawns and flowerbeds, and across to the house built by Henry Trevor, who then went on to create this pleasure ground. Then I think further back…what was it like as a hive of industry? What was it before that? When did people first start digging here? Knapping flint, slaking lime. I try to imagine the noise, and the smells, and wonder where the workers lived, what kind of lives they lived.
I wonder how much thought Henry Trevor gave to that as he set about creating his gothic revival garden. Maybe more than I credit him with. He was a member of the Baptist Church, providing candles, coal and maintenance to a chapel in Pottergate. Perhaps he had a sense of history too.
There is so much history in this little corner, that I spend more time wandering around internet pages than I did the garden pathways. I am not sure whether that is a bad thing. I don’t know how much I will remember of what I’ve found, but the most astonishing (to me) will continue to amuse me on all my future visits. The “reclaimed” stonework, the relics of village churches and mediaeval castles of my imagination, are nothing of the sort.
They were all bought, off catalogue, probably from Gunton Bros brickmakers. Moulded brick was the coming thing, and the white brick had the beautiful quality of aging to look like stone, weathering to grey. The whole thing is an exuberant delightful fraud. I love it.
Then again, isn’t that what all gardens are? A kind of fraud, a pretence. A painting that one can step into and make-believe is real for a while. This particular one was lucky to survive. A preservation trust was set up in 1980, at which time the garden was an overgrown and neglected patch, its structures of uncertain robustness. As yet, I know only fragments of its story and that of its creator, but there are two things of which I am certain: Henry Trevor would be thrilled to know that not only does his garden survive but that it is open to anyone who wants to wander among the beds and the trees and fantasise about fallen churches; and secondly, that this unexpected place will be treasured for decades to come.
Please check out the Preservation Trust website – for a fabulous archive of photos showing the history of this magical place. And if you can visit or not, maybe think about throwing a few coins in the real (or metaphorical) post box.
* When I talk about a map square, I mean one of the one kilometre squares on the OS map centred on my home. It draws on Alistair Humphreys' book "Local" and the idea of truly exploring the area in which we live, treating that exploration the way we would if we'd travelled hundreds of miles to a different place. I bend & twist Humphreys' approach, but I trust he'd be ok with that because 'living adventurously' isn't the same has going out to have massive adventures...exploring is about discovering, and whether that is new to the world or simply new to us actually doesn't matter a jot.
