Genevieve Lacey

GENEVIEVE LACEY My childhood was spent in stories and gardens. My mother’s garden held our games and discoveries, adventures real and imagined. We navigated our botanical world by touch and smell, as well as by sight. We came to understand in tangible ways how the rhythms of the seasons, changes in light and temperature, drought, frost and wind, all shaped our landscape, and our lives within it. Everything born in the garden went back into its earth, and we learnt that things die, as well as flourish. The garden taught us to be patient, to wait and observe. How to be still and silent. How it is to be small amid something wildly alive and impersonal. When I was eight, a gifted teacher plants. Visiting their earthly paradise introduced me to Jacob van Eyck. some years ago, I found myself thinking She told me the story of him playing of Jacob and his Pleasure Garden, and his recorder while wandering through the way history and emotions can speak a place called a Pleasure Garden. to each other across time and place. The poetry of that lodged deep, Suddenly, stories began to converge. and I felt a strong affinity with Jacob. The fact that he was born in the Our Pleasure Garden sets Jacob’s sixteenth century, on the other side exquisite blooms in a new environment. of the world, was of no consequence. We collected material from Melbourne His music was real to me, as was he. to Bermagui, Utrecht to Kristiansand, back and forth to Lambley – improvised We’ve been companions ever since, melodies and textures, birdsong from Jacob and I. He comes with me to the places in which we worked, and weddings and funerals, nursing homes Jacob’s own carillon, still joyously and prisons, impromptu sessions on played today. verandas, and into concert halls too. His melodies fall happily under We planted our music in bird the pads of my fingers; his phrases boxes and flowerpots, nested in trees measure the span of my breath. and dug into the soil at Lambley. Then, we invited visitors. Sweet, spring Some of his creations have become days of people gently ebbing and flowing dear, trusted friends – Daphne, Amarilli, through a magical place, listening Marie. I have poured countless versions intently to very soft, delicate sounds. of myself into them, and they have held Something in the combined spirit of me, giving me substance and form. music and place seemed to encourage people to be quiet, move slowly, Not far from my childhood garden look deeply, and then to leave with a is a place I revere: Lambley Garden. little glow of contemplative beauty. Its two inhabitants have moulded their lives around a pursuit of beauty – one through paint, the other through Genevieve Lacey Some weeks ago now, I walked back in time. It wasn’t far, as such journeys go, two miles perhaps, perhaps three — the road crosses at the end of ours and it wasn’t much further than that — then down a long avenue lined with cherry trees, and through a gate into a sort of formal hall, green and private with hedges and espaliered trees, carpeted with grass. Half hidden, behind a bench at the far end, was another gate, leading to a huge walled garden of flowers and fruit trees and vegetables, stark and bleak just a few weeks earlier, now lush, abundant with colour, with sound. Sound all about me, but that only we who were then riding on the air, coming up through in the garden, would ever hear it in the earth beneath my feet. quite this way, Sometimes it seemed with random birds and insects I might be imagining it. winding themselves through melody Sometimes it seemed and rhythm. to happen only because I was there. Hesitant, fragile, tantalising, I thought about a book I once read, insistent; half heard, half seen in which was discussed the ways in glimpses of melody: which music might be measured: that a wherever I walked, music, sound. physicist might describe sound moving through air, measuring pitch, time, Sound was in everything, frequency, while a critic might comment and walking through arches – on melody, nuance, down long paths edged with emotion, intention; tidy rows of planting, and that both were true. where order had been imposed, That music was not separate yet everywhere small rebellions of shape from its sound, that it was the sound, and colour overflowed – and that it showed us the I thought about time, ‘soul of the world’. and how I had no sense of it here. And I thought about how this garden I thought about how the music, had always been a thing of beauty, the unpredictable music, hanging but that the sound confirmed it as a like light on the air, heightened every timeless place, a place of wonder. moment, and drew on every sense. I thought about how music was Fiona Blair everywhere if one could only hear it, catch it, frame it, Fiona Blair makes landscape theatre for and how the blur between The Old Van theatre company. She lives, in an composed and organic sound was, old school house, down the road and around in this place, complete, the corner from a beautiful garden. “ A melody unfurls its fronds and I understand why the violin’s neck is curled.” Luke Fischer, ‘Gardening’, Paths of Flight The Keukenhof in Holland is high kitsch: acre upon acre of hyacinths, jonquils, daffodils and, most of all, tulips. Tourists bus in, try to avoid photographing one another photographing the flowers, then soon bus away. It is easy to mock gardens like this, as somehow fake or superficial—something for breezy out-of-towners, not serious garden-lovers. But they are delightful. The shock of timber or plastic, but the garden is an fluorescent corollas and sky, the play of exhibition of natural textures, forms, stems in breezes, the meditative waltz scents and hues. We give new harmonies of bees on tepals—these are sensory to quartz, Agapanthus and Echium— pleasures, pure and simple. They can be yet they are still visibly rocks, flowers enjoyed for their own sake, with neither and shrubs. At the same time, we also reflection nor justification. Like the reveal ourselves: the very human ideals, trills and glissandi of van Eyck’s ‘English values and impressions that push us to Nightingale’, they offer experiences that intervene. For every eighteenth-century demand nothing beyond themselves. French estate showing off geometry and autarchy, there is an English This does not mean every garden one celebrating the serpentine and must be delightful. They can be sublime, democratic. Some gardens suggest hardy ascetic, brooding or menacing, and austerity, others cartwheeling caprice. still be excellent landscapes. Delightful gardens simply offer pointless joy, in Because of this to-and-fro between which we can revel without blame. nature and humanity, gardens encourage As the German poet and philosopher philosophy and art. They prompt Friedrich Schiller noted in On the speculation and creation because they are Aesthetic Education of Man, it is the a unity of two riddles. Nature is an enigma virtue of a civilised mind to savour of sorts—we can never get to the bottom semblance without mistaking it for of what it is. It is always just beyond anything more. And gardens are an comprehension, if only because things apex of semblance: a show, a display, like ‘comprehension’ are themselves a spectacle. uniquely human. Yet we are also mysteries to ourselves. There is no one humanity, As pageants of sensation, gardens are fixed and forever—we shift with era and also invitations—to thought and reverie. geography. And our own minds can be Every garden is literally and figuratively opaque or just baffling to us. In short, what we make of nature. Normally the the garden combines two suggestive world’s raw materials are hidden in glass, questions, nature and humanity. Importantly, this unity is not achieved subtlety. Perhaps the tang of a tomato with numb abstraction. Instead, the vine, or its furry leanings on stakes. garden offers sensory richness: bark to Perhaps the burgundy peaks and touch, perfume to smell, leaves to hear, capillaries of an Amaranthus. Perhaps and so on. To cross the threshold into a just the sudden encounter with shades garden is to enter a new space, marked of green after a day’s indoor grey. by goading or seductive puzzles, each The point is that the garden is a space offered in a tangible form. for gratifying attentiveness. History records many artists and The second is the opportunity to reflect: thinkers beguiled by these virtues. on nature and its habits, on oneself and Novelist Jane Austen with her Chawton one’s era, and on the ties between these. Cottage syringa, finding consolation in Put simply, the garden inspires and the flowers’ eternal cycles. Philosopher rewards thought. And this need and playwright Voltaire at his estate not be academic philosophy, or the Les Délices (‘The Delights’), seeing the grand speculation of Plato and Aristotle. garden as an opportunity for civilised Poets like Emily Dickinson think in progress. The painter Eugène Delacroix language, just as painters like Delacroix in his garden studio, revelling in the think in pigment and oil. botanical intricacy and dynamism. ‘I caught him in an ecstasy of delight,’ Gardens can be status symbols, wrote novelist George Sand of her labours and larders. But they are also friend, ‘in front of a yellow lily whose hallowed spaces, which nudge us to beautiful architecture...had just look and think again. revealed itself to him.’ Philosophy Damon Young itself had horticultural beginnings.

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