The Knot. Jane Borodale

      Chapter IV.

      Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.

      IT HAD BEEN SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF ANYS that he’d begun planning his Knot garden in earnest. On paper at first, endless sketches and discarded ideas that he would pore over by candlelight in the evening when it was too dark to see anything outside. He made occasional visits to costly gardens in London, and drew on recollections of aromatic, unattainable gardens in Europe that he’d seen as a youth. The ground itself here needed preparation. There was a lot of dross to get rid of on the site, including a defunct fallen-down building where his father had reared pigs before the new sties were built. This was removed, piece by crumbling, splintery piece. It is always surprising how small the footprint of a demolished building appears. How could so little space have enclosed so much?

      ‘Much faster to take down a building than to put one up,’ one of the labourers had informed him, as though Henry had no sense of practical matters. It took little more than an afternoon to do. There was a lot of other debris to clear away, an old trough, piles of inexplicable rotting logs and branches, crawling beneath with worms and woodlice.

      ‘Look at that. A garden is teeming, isn’t it,’ Henry had said, brimming with cheerful purpose in the fresh air, as he squatted to examine a yellow centipede, rippling in kinks against the damp earth. ‘The very stuff of life itself.’

      ‘If you’re lucky,’ his gardener Tobias Mote remarked, straining to lift something into the barrow to take to the bonfire. Henry looked at him to check he was joking. ‘Seeing as the job of nature is to feed on death.’

      Sometimes Henry wishes that Mote’s voice wasn’t so dry, so opposite to what he hopes for.

      The pegging-out of the borders and the Knot, however, had been one of the most exciting moments so far in this process. The simplicity of unwinding each ball of twine in the hand and walking backwards, squinting, squaring up and measuring sideways with the feet, pushing in the stake like a New World explorer with his claim. Mote worked alongside him, scratching his head, making unhelpful, tardy suggestions where none was wanted, because everything was decided now in terms of form and symmetry. The garden was like a grid for days from the upper windows before they took the twine away, making last-minute adjustments to the guidelines they’d whitewashed. It was a sheer delight to see it stretched out down there. What had existed previously only on a small piece of paper as the final meticulous inked plan for the structure has now been unravelled from inside his head, squared up and made manifest.

      Now he has the shape out there, but what he will plant is still to be decided upon. Roses, definitely roses. He also has a master plan for content, and marks in his choice of plants and herbs as they occur to him. This plan by contrast is chaotic, filled with crossing-out and scribbled re-inking. He paces about outside making mental lists to write up later, checking up on the bricklayers putting up the new walls course by course which will shelter his tender specimens from the winter harshnesses that they will have to suffer, looking over the work of the men he has hired in for the week because there is more digging than he and Mote can manage if they are to get it over with in time for planting. Today the four of them work steadily across the earmarked areas; Thom Pearson from over at Tuck’s Cary Manor just a stone’s throw from the stables here, William the oldest son of Hunt of Podimore who leases the windmill, Ralph Let, and some other man from Devon who was passing through and had asked for work.

      ‘Lucky to get Ralph,’ Tobias Mote says with a wink. ‘He’s good at that, being parish gravedigger he’s had a lot of practice, brings his own spade, just never mind what that spade iron’s gone through; very full that graveyard is, a lot of folk dead these days, begging your pardon. Just don’t turn your back on him – he’d nimble you in.’ Mote laughs with his face like a weasel’s, his eyes closed to slits.

      The diggers have broken the persistent turf all down what will be the raised border. It’s coming along. To anyone else the scene looks like chaos, but Henry Lyte is beginning to have it all mapped out in his mind’s eye, the raised square beds, the enclosing walls, the espaliers, the roses, the medicinal herber. And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect Knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses.

      Henry is not in favour of the kind of closed Knot currently fashionable that he has seen so many times in London, laid out to weedless, barren segments of coloured sand in red and yellow and other garish hues, intersected by rigid, close-clipped hedges, the whole intended to be amusing from inside the house, or along the gallery or walk, like a dead kind of outdoor carpet. He has no wish to go about decorating his land like that, but hopes to coax from it an exquisite, flourishing entity; something wholly alive and changeable, a place where man and nature can meet and within which he and others will be able to study the riddles of botany. He knows his ambitions for it are high, that it will be hard work.

      He goes on considering. Espaliers there against the warmth of the bricks, he decides, and perhaps a further row of espaliered trees at right-angles to the wall itself – offering glimpses through the layers of branches, as into green and fruited chambers.

      But what kinds of fruit? He would like very much to be bold enough to try to grow apricots. He has eaten them abroad straight from the tree, the warm, furred skin of them bursting under his bite, the juice running in his mouth. He has eaten them in this country at other men’s tables, both the tender yellow kind and the tougher sort, flavourless, the green of raw turnip. He has enjoyed dried apricots too, shrunken to a brown leather of sticky molasses sweetness. His mother used to call them St John peaches, ripe only in June. Of course she would remember when monks once sold them from the Abbey, when their walled enclosures were secure. He can just remember the day that the Abbot of Glastonbury was hanged on the Tor. He remembers particularly because his father owed the Abbot money, and there was uncertainty afterwards with what to do about the bonds. Don’t worry, the Crown will be hounding me for it soon enough, Henry recalls him soothing his mother. The King’s agents had moved in and taken the Abbey and all the contents. Henry had ridden past Glastonbury a few days later with his brother Bartholomew on an errand, and seen the distant sight of the Abbot’s misshapen figure up there, swinging by his broken neck. At the time it had felt like the world was ending. It was hard to know which God to turn to, He seemed to differ according to who one spoke to about Him. Henry had dreamt constantly of brimstone, smouldering deadly, choking fumes, all the terrible punishments his grandmother had warned him about if he strayed from the good path laid down by God. He must have been about eight years old, sat between his parents at the hearth, his mother’s anxious face rosy on one side from the heat of the fire. His mother loved all fruit, of course.

      And what else should he grow here? Perhaps there could be an entirely separate plum orchard. Imagine the tiny stellar blossoms appearing in early spring, before the apples and pears. One fruit that can be simultaneously green and sweet is the greengage; perfect greeny globules of juice, almost gelatinous with being ripe, melting to fibres that lodge between the teeth. He too loves all fruit, but thinks perhaps the greengage is his favourite prunus. A plum orchard should be near the house, because the blossoms, coming early in the spring would be so cheering. For the other orchards, there are sixty new apple trees of sundry sorts on order, mostly whips and maidens because they will take to the soil better than if their roots were already more developed.

      For the far end of the walled gardens, he thinks a vine. Sweet grapes gladden a man’s heart. And a peach tree. Voluptuous, fat-bottomed velvet fruit of heaven. A fig, fibrous juicy threads, cool seeds cracking delicately between the teeth, at their very best when they are oozing resinous juice. He would like to eat every one of them, a fig pig, he thinks, but they will be laid in the sun to darken and dry. Walnuts, for pickled walnuts of course. There are walnuts in the woods nearby but the squirrels always strip them bare. Nut trees are lucky, perhaps he will have two or three.

      But what he knows best and what will do best on this difficult clay ground of theirs are pears. The orchard is already filled with almost forty varieties of pear but there are many more to choose from that he has not tried. Perhaps having one here against the lea of the sunny-sided wall might bring