The Physic Garden Read online

  ‘Why praise a lad for what should come naturally to him?’ was his habitual refrain.

  Doctor Brown, as I had to call him then, for he was much my superior in station, if not in years, had just been appointed as a substitute lecturer in botany at the behest of Professor James Jeffray, a clever man whose interests, notoriously enough, all lay with dissections and surgery. Jeffray had no patience with plants and their uses, but he was engaged to deliver botanical lectures to the young gentlemen and it was a sore trial to him. Thomas Brown had been recommended to him as a suitable replacement. It was commonplace enough, in those days, for one professor to ask another to stand in for him. The college was canny with its money. Any salary was to be met only from fees paid by students, so the success or otherwise of the venture depended very much on Thomas Brown’s popularity. And Jeffray, of course, would not be out of pocket, whatever the outcome.

  On that particular day – and dear God, it could have been yesterday – Doctor Brown came into the garden where I was working, held out his hand to me and shook mine, although it was grimed with soil, but it was aye grimed with soil and I was soon to discover that he never minded. He was not a man to mind things like that.

  ‘You must be Robert Lang’s son,’ he said, smiling at me with what I later learned was characteristic warmth. Even then, I thought him a charming man, although in Scotland that particular virtue will earn you the suspicion of your fellows rather than any more positive judgement.

  ‘Aye. My name’s William. William Lang.’

  He was one of the gentry, he was one of the teachers, and I was shy of him. I think I must have seemed a wee thing surly, because of my diffidence, but he was never a man to let things like that influence him either. He had a habit of speaking to you face to face, of looking directly into your eyes, and you could see that you had his full attention.

  ‘Your father tells me that you know everything there is to know about plants.’ He said it with a twinkle, knowing it was a great exaggeration. And I was very surprised to hear that my father had been in any way fulsome in his praise of me. But that was always his way and the way of many a Scotsman, I think. He will brag about his son to a stranger but would die sooner than give him a word of praise to his face.

  It would be true to say that I loved trees and plants, but more, I was interested in them. Right from the time when I was a lad, running at my father’s heels and getting under his feet, I would ask him about this or that flower, this or that herb, a hundred times a day. And patiently, he would tell me whatever he knew about how things grew and where best to plant them. He knew how to propagate things, how to treat growing things as individuals, how to tend those that were delicate and needed extra care. He would tell me what kind of soil this or that plant liked best, speaking as though they were people.

  ‘He will thrive in sunlight. He likes best to grow in shade. He loves to be damp, but he will die if you keep his roots wet.’

  This is the kind of thing my father would tell me, characterising all that grew and, like a good son and a good gardener, I would store the advice away for future use.

  So when Thomas came to me and shook my hand, I agreed with him that I had a certain amount of knowledge, more perhaps than most of the young men who toiled about the garden, doing only as they were told, season after season, without enquiring too closely why they were doing their work in this way rather than any other.

  ‘But I could learn more, much more.’

  ‘Then I think you may be able to help me. You know that I’ll be lecturing in botany in Professor Jeffray’s stead?’

  I nodded. I had already heard as much. ‘Will you be needing specimens, sir?’

  ‘Yes indeed. I had thought to take them from the physic garden but …’ He trailed off, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘The poor physic garden …’

  ‘Is in a parlous state. The smoke from the type foundry, I take it?’

  ‘Aye. It blights all that is planted there.’

  The stench of the fumes from the type foundry, which the university had permitted to be built next to the old physic garden, covered all the leaves and flowers in a foul-smelling, oily deposit that few plants were robust enough to resist. We knew just how destructive the foundry was, my father and I, for we had experimented in all kinds of ways in an effort to improve matters. Nothing worked for very long. The fumes were just too virulent.

  He sighed. ‘It is a shame the foundry was ever sited there, a damned shame that permission was ever given, but I suppose one cannot expect Faculty to understand about trees and plants, eh? Can we, my friend?’

  I shook my head, pleased with the sense of complicity his words gave me. The professors of the Faculty were vastly ignorant of some things, for all that they were supposed to be men of learning.

  ‘Ah weel, we must just mak’ the best of it that we can, William.’ He clapped me on the shoulders, like a friend, a habitual gesture with him, a man who liked to make contact. ‘And you’re right. The physic garden is dying. But I still have need of specimens for my lectures. And I wondered if you …’

  ‘You want me to gather them for you?’

  ‘You would be doing me a great favour. But you’ll have to go farther afield. Out into the countryside. I could give you a list.’ He hesitated and I saw the colour rise to his cheek.

  ‘Oh, I can read, sir,’ I hastened to reassure him. ‘My father taught me well.’

  ‘I would have expected no less. They are common enough plants, most of them, although there are a few rarities which I would be pleased to have as well. A young man of your knowledge will have very little trouble in finding what’s needed.’

  ‘But it will depend upon the time of year surely?’

  ‘Aye, of course. But I’ll plan my lectures accordingly and tell you what I need well in advance.’

  The idea attracted me. Whenever I had free time – which was not often, admittedly – I loved to roam the country. A fine spring or summer’s day would see me taking bread and cheese and heading west over the Glasgow Bridge to where the air had the salty tang of the sea in it, as well as the sweet, green perfume of the hills. Moreover, I already knew where all kinds of plants grew. It was the trees and flowers that, I suppose, defined the landscape, as much as any more permanent features such as hills, rocks, even villages. There were not so very many trees either; many more have been planted over the past fifty years. The countryside was much more open and bare to the elements than it is now. The great men who own the land were even then becoming fascinated by trees, especially specimen trees from far afield. Now, if ever I have occasion to travel outside the city, I see wonderful changes in the appearance, in the very pattern of that landscape which I traversed on foot all those years ago.

  But back then, even if you had small interest in such things, you could not help noticing that on this bank, each spring, the blackthorn always grew in profusion, with its froth of blossom that would yield a fine harvest of sloes in the autumn. This glen might be a festival of primroses and violets in early May or that one a particular haunt of cowslips, which could be made into a fine wine by those who had the skill. Later in the summer, you would be well aware that alongside this or that ditch you would always find an army of tall foxgloves marching past. You would see that this copse in particular was fringed by delicate woodruff, which women would dry and use to keep the moths away from their linen. That damp ditch was always colonised by butterbur, in whose large pliable leaves dairymaids would wrap their butter. The pattern of the landscape was the pattern of whatever grew there. A mere fool could have noticed that. How much more then did I, who was fascinated by such things, see and smell as I walked, simply for the pleasure of stretching my legs?

  ‘Will you think about it?’ Thomas asked. ‘Will you do this for me?’

  I thought it was a privilege to be asked a favour like this by such a man and I nodded.

  ‘Aye. I will. I’ll think about it.’

  But I already knew that I would do it, so plea
sed was I to be singled out like this, pleased and flattered too. He smiled at me and went on his way, walking briskly through the gardens without a backward glance.

  It is easier, far easier to tell you about Jenny than it is to tell you about Thomas, which seems strange. But Jenny, or at least her likeness, has been before my eyes constantly in one way or another over the years. But not Thomas. After everything that happened, I put him from my mind and my heart, ruthlessly excising him, as one cuts out dead wood, so that the healthy tree may survive. Every remembrance was stifled. I would hardly allow myself to say his name aloud and, as time passed, it was not hard to forget him, because there were few occasions for calling him to mind.

  He was … but you see, my pen itself halts on the page, just as my mind hesitates to remember. What am I afraid of? That a million thoughts, feelings, memories, will come rushing back to overwhelm me? I cannot begin to describe to you the terror – there is no other word for it – engendered by the thought of him, even now, and yet he was as kindly a man as you could wish to meet, one who inspired trust and friendship in equal measure, a man who inspired great love in all those who knew him. I used to think it an unmitigated blessing, used to envy him. I wished that I had been born with such a gift. But now, with the wisdom of my years, I realise that it can be a peculiar curse and a burden, to be a man whom people love. Better by far to be a man who loves unconditionally, for all that such affection may bring sorrow in its wake.

  * * *

  My grand-daughter has come into the room where I sit in front of this upstairs window, writing. The sunlight filters in here, shining down between the buildings. My sight is not what it was and the light helps. She leans over to look at the page and says, ‘See, grandfather, you’ve made a big blot, in the middle of the leaf.’ She’s right, the pen has dug into the surface and there is an ugly stain of black ink spreading out from the nib.

  She throws her arms around me, kisses me on the cheek and pulls a face, because she says my skin is always prickly. She smells clean and sweet, of fresh linen and new bread. That would be about right, because she is always baking, my grand-daughter. She pins up her hair and thrusts her fists into the dough, doing as her mother tells her, punching and pulling and stretching it with tolerably clean fingers. I can see my wife in her every movement, which is strange, because it is not my late wife she really resembles, not with that fair hair and luminous skin.

  ‘Well,’ she says, when she has finished her task, showing me her hands, ‘if they were not clean at the start, they are very clean now, grandfather. Look!’

  She is learning her letters, but she finds it very hard to read my scrawl. She runs her floury fingers along the page and says, ‘He was as kindly and …’, but she cannot manage ‘charming’, although she makes a stab at the word.

  ‘Canny?’ she says, which is a word her father is in the habit of using. A canny man, he says of this or that colleague. ‘He’s a canny man with the siller.’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘A canny man.’ And that also seems as good a word as any to describe Thomas.

  I look up at her, hesitating to read it out to her, but it doesn’t matter because she’s soon bored and off dancing around the room, jumping through dusty sunbeams, holding out her skirts, showing me how to do a jig. She is never still. She is the light of my life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Books

  My dear, late wife used to tell me that love was the answer. My habitual and, no doubt, irritating response was always that I was not even sure of the question. But the older I grow, the more convinced I become that love, whatever it may be, is not the answer at all, or only part of it, and maybe friendship, enduring, unconditional and undemanding, is a better alternative.

  Thomas.

  There, I’ve written his name once more. And without flinching at all this time. Practice will no doubt make perfect. Doctor Thomas Brown was already married to Marion Jeffrey from Edinburgh when he began teaching at the college. I thought at first that she might be some relation of our Professor Jeffray, that the marriage might have been an astute step on the academic ladder. But when I knew him better, he pointed out that the names were spelled differently, that Marion Jeffrey came from an old Edinburgh family and there was no kinship between them.

  I remember Marion – long departed this life – as a handsome and forthright young woman of decided opinions, and a good match for Thomas, or so I thought, although one can never really know what goes on between husband and wife. The most unlikely and mismatched couples can be blissfully happy, while those who seem made for one another can suddenly confide their misery in the marriage, or so I have learned over the years.

  At some point in our acquaintance, Thomas invited me to make use of his library, to read whenever and whatever I wished. At first I was very reluctant to avail myself of this privilege and later, although I grew accustomed to visiting his house, I was always diffident about being there. Marion did her best to put me at my ease, but I was neither flesh nor fowl nor guid red herrin’ as my father would have put it, especially when there were visitors in the house. I felt as though I did not belong in that company, but only a few years earlier, the great poet Robert Burns had had something of the same problem. The Edinburgh nabbery, the gentry, found him to be a man of intellect, but were surprised and entertained by it, astonished that he had the accomplishment at all.

  I often think Mr Burns and myself might have had a great deal in common if we had had the good fortune to meet and talk about our respective experiences. Burns wrote convincingly and lovingly about the flowers of his native heath. I cannot even now read the lines, oft hae I rov’d by bonny Doon, to see the rose and woodbine twine; and ilka bird sang o’ its luve, and fondly sae did I o’ mine, without it bringing a lump to my throat, which is a very daft notion after all this time.

  But then, I believe the poet’s father was a gardener too, and it was that work which first took him to Ayrshire where Rab was born. How very like me, as my wife would have said, to notice this one fact about him, that he was the son of a gardener. But it would be true to say that whenever he wrote about enduring affection as opposed to the heartbreak of unrequited love, it was friendship, male and female, that he valued more than all else, and so – I think – do I.

  Gardens and books. I cannot write without mentioning them. But of the two, books have played by far the larger part in my life. Books have, in some sense, been my life. But they have been my sorrow as well as my joy. It has taken me long enough to get to it, but here it is. On my writing table. This precious book, The Scots Gard’ner by John Reid, has come home to me at the end of my life, as was the intention of the sender. I hardly need to open it, for I find that I still have much of it by heart. The words come rushing back to me, as when we would recite the names of trees from it, or quote passages, turn and turn about, making a daft game of it.

  ‘Laburnum, horse chestnut and the bonny rowan,’ he would say and I would reply with, ‘dogwood and guilderose, sweet briar and turkey oak.’

  Sometimes it would be the names just, because we both took pleasure in saying them aloud, but sometimes it would be whole passages.

  ‘Choose your seeds from the high, straight, young and well thriving,’ he would begin.

  ‘Choose the fairest, the weightiest and the brightest, for it is observed that the seeds of hollow trees whose pith is consumed, do not fill well,’ I would quote back at him.

  ‘Or come to perfection,’ he would continue. ‘Go on, William!’

  ‘It’s a mischief in many people that … that …’ and then I would hesitate, and he would finish for me, ‘that accompts all ridiculous that they have not been bred up with or accustomed unto.’

  ‘So it is with trees in some respects and so it is with men who think themselves superior,’ I would finish, triumphantly, and we would laugh, as though at the accomplishment of something quite wonderful, although what that could be, other than the foolish indulgence of our own high spirits, I do not know.

/>   It is this same book, The Scots Gard’ner, that lies on my table now, alongside another volume, a manuscript book with yellowing pages covered in the neat handwriting that I still recognise as Thomas’s own. This was his commonplace book, the book in which he copied his correspondence, drafting out the letters he wished to send and sometimes copying down the letters that came to him in return, although often enough, to save time, he would simply slip the original letter between the pages. Besides that, he would make notes of important purchases or simply of things that interested him. It is a fat book, covering many years, because I think that there were long periods when he neglected it and others when he was at pains to record many things there. So I know what I will find. But also, I do not know what else I will discover there. And I feel my skin flutter in apprehension.

  I half wish he had not sent me either of these books, but it must have been on his express instructions, else how would such personal documents have been included in the parcel? It was once a bonny book too, this commonplace book, but time has made a moger of it; there are many loose leaves and stains where some liquid has been spilled on it, and I can hardly bear to tease the pages apart because I know that the words will bring back yet more memories, perhaps more than I can bear.

  There is, of course, yet one more book that I should mention. But I am not ready to write about that one yet. Do you know, when the parcel first came, when I guessed that he must be gone from this life, I commenced wondering which book it contained, what manner of book he had sent me? It was like standing in the teeth of a strong gale. I could not catch my breath for a moment or two and found myself trembling, my teeth chattering, even as I opened the wrapping. I cannot tell you how vastly relieved I was to find that it was not what I had feared. I should have known, for the parcel was not large enough to contain that book. All these years, and I have never seen another copy, thank God. But if I had, if it had come into my shop, in all its terrible beauty, I think I should have cast it into the flames, and I can never bring myself to destroy any book willingly, which explains why there is so little free space in the shop or this house. But it did not come. So here I sit with this unexpected gift from my one-time friend. Here I sit in the last sunlight of the day and run my fingers over the cover of first one volume and then the other, and wonder if I can bear to remember him.