The Physic Garden Read online

  ‘Well, maybe love is the answer, William.’

  ‘You can tell where they’ve been,’ I ventured. ‘The bees. That’s what she tell’t me and she’s right. I have seen it myself without being aware of what I was looking at.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What flowers they’ve been at. You can see it on them, whether they’ve been at the meadowsweet, or the heather, which is much darker, or the balsam that makes them look like wee white ghosts, flittin’ about.’

  He was staring at me in the twilight, and I had the strangest sense that he was holding his breath. Then I heard him give a little sigh.

  ‘I didn’t know that. Or at least I never thought about it until today.’

  ‘Me neither. Whiles it just needs a body to point something out to you and then it all falls into place!’

  ‘Aye, William. It does.’

  Even in the gathering dusk, I could see that he was looking at me with affection and an intermingling of pride. It was the way my mother sometimes used to look at me. Or my father, when he thought I couldn’t see him watching me.

  ‘She said if you’re feart of them, they sense it. Maybe they can smell it on you. You have to tell them, ken? You have to tell them a’ things. Births, weddings, deaths, you have to let the bees know about them. And she’s right for I tell’t them when my father died. My mother said I had to. I felt like a great gowk daein’ it, for the hives were all silent, but I tell’t them all the same.’

  Unexpectedly, he slipped his arm around my shoulders. It was as strong, as muscular as my own, not like the arm of a gentleman, but more like the arm of a man who works hard for his living.

  ‘You miss your father, don’t you?’

  ‘Aye, I miss him. Why would I no’? It’s been a hard row to hoe for us since he died.’

  For answer, he steered me back to the more pleasant topic of Jenny Caddas and her beehives. ‘So you took the swarm?’

  ‘Aye and we took it back to the bee bole in the wall and when it was set there, she took me indoors and put this remedy on my sting and gave me an oatie bannock with honey on it. She’s a bonny lass.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘We were talking for a long time. But her wee sister was there. It was alright. There was naethin’ wrang in it.’

  ‘I never thought there would be. I’d trust you anywhere, William. And with anybody. What about her parents?’

  ‘Her mother’s deid. Her faither’s a weaver and he was away on business. She’s Jenny Caddas, and you should have seen her hair. It’s that bonny. As pale as flax.’

  ‘She seems to have made a deep impression on you, Will!’

  ‘She has.’

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘And will you be seeing her again?’

  ‘Aye well, I thought I might pay her a visit. Now and again. If I have plants to find.’

  ‘Then I’d best send you off hunting for more specimens!’

  ‘Aye, maybe you should.’

  I had the inclination to talk about her and go on talking about her. You’ll know the feeling yourself. When you find somebody that takes your fancy, you want to spread the word. It’s like something inside you that aye wants to come bursting out and there’s a strange comfort in saying their name aloud. Jenny, I wanted to say. Jenny Caddas. Oh it was not that she was any great beauty, in spite of the lint-white hair, but she had the right face, the right face for me. I think Thomas understood me well enough.

  ‘So what does she do, this Jenny Caddas,’ he asked me. ‘Beyond keeping house for her father and minding her wee sister? Or is that work enough for a lass?’

  ‘The cottage was full of bundles of herbs, drying. She knew what was what. She kent the names as well as myself. Not the Latin names, though she had a few of those. But the good old Scots names. She kent them all.’

  ‘Not mutchwort and dog’s bedstraw then?’

  ‘No!’ I started to laugh.

  What Thomas did not know of the old Scots names he would ask me or, occasionally when he was lecturing, make up on the spot. He had confessed to this when I expressed my complete ignorance of a ‘wee white flower called mutchwort’ and another named ‘dog’s bedstraw’.

  ‘I invented them on the spur of the moment,’ he said. ‘I just could not help myself. Sheer devilment. Did you see how laboriously they copied the names out? Not a single one of them, although they all have a fine conceit of themselves as scholars, not one has thought to question me. Only you, my friend. Only you!’

  When I had seen Jenny’s herbs and heard her speak about them, the thought had crossed my mind that she might be able to help with the apothecary shop. It seemed a wild idea when I hardly knew her and, on reflection, I was sure that her father would never permit such a thing, but all the same, I added it to the heap of dreams and daydreams with which I beguiled my days and leavened my nights. Always a dreamer, you see, and at least some of those dreams have become a reality for me, even if others have been dashed under my feet.

  ‘She sounds like a clever lass. Intelligence is a rare thing in any woman, let alone a lassie with flaxen hair!’

  ‘You’re mocking me. And her.’

  ‘Only in the kindest way, Will.’

  ‘Well, I’ll allow I was smitten with her.’

  ‘So it seems!’

  I knew that I should be getting home to my mother. She would be fretting about me. She did not like me going on these excursions to the countryside. She had not set foot out of Glasgow for many years. I think she had some idea that I was going off to strange foreign parts and that I might be set upon by footpads and robbers. Well, it was a possibility, though God knows what she thought they might rob me of, since I never carried anything with me save a piece of bread and cheese, my leather bag of specimens, my pieces of linen and the knife that I used for cutting them. They were doomed to disappointment if they thought they were going to get rich by robbing me. But my mother confessed that she worried about me until I was safe back home again, as though I had been a child, like my brothers. I was more in danger from the auld wives with their besoms, who seemed to want to sweep me away from their doorsteps, than I ever was from thieves and highwaymen.

  Thomas stood up to go but then clapped his hand to his pocket and said, ‘I almost forgot. I have a gift for you!’

  ‘A gift? For me?’ I could not hide my surprise.

  ‘Aye. A man of my acquaintance had this for sale, and since it made me think of you, I thought I would buy it for you.’

  He handed it to me. I was so astonished that he should think of giving me something that I almost dropped it. The parcel was loosely done up in cloth and I unwrapped it. It was an old book. Even then I could see that it was very old. I found out later that it was written more than a hundred years earlier. If I have an embarrassment of books about me now, I am still something of a rarity in that respect and back then, the only book which was ever to be found in the houses of the poor was the Holy Bible, with sometimes a separate New Testament for taking to the kirk on a Sunday.

  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.’
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  ‘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.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Needlework

  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 h
er. 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.