As golden afternoon transmutes into silver evening and then into velvet darkness fretted by stars I sit to read and think and dream. It is a place of peace and beauty and therefore truths are very likely to be revealed. Where I am is the garden which my wife has created. God bless her and those who have helped her – Alston, Kenneth, Andy – for what she has quietly achieved over these many years. It is as much a work of art as a painting by a master spirit or a piece of perfect music by a composer connected to the spheres behind the radiant sun and the serenely floating moon. How fortunate I am to step from days of hurly-burly living and the often fractious tedium of coping with ordinary chores and life’s sudden sink-holes into this haven of green peace and flowers in the wind. It is but a step indeed and life is transformed. How many possess such benefit for a life-long time? If you are a believer make a holy sign, if you do not believe then bow in gratitude for the favour great Nature has been pleased to bestow.
Sometimes, before I go to read, when the light from the sky is especially beautiful, I walk, book in hand, in the many spaces of the garden. I look up – a hawk soars from branch to branch sun flashing on its wings. I treasure everything I see. At certain times of the year the rush of blood in the flamboyants and at Christmas the fire-coal of poinsettias flame and glow. There are the sumptuous capes of purple orchids thrown across the arbour by the kitchen garden and fans of golden orchids blow along grey-mottled boughs. All about is hibiscus, the garden’s glory, flowering anew every day. A vine of sky-blue blossoms half-cover a white wall, a curtain of heart-shaped leaves incomparably woven. Bougainvilleas sway and blaze in high hedges planted long ago. Everywhere repeating and repeating the signature of beauty. Once after rain in a sun-shimmering pool in a corner of the garden I saw two golden-eyed egrets motionless side by side ancient as Egyptian centuries. Give thanks for all that you are given to admire and to love.
The setting where I read is full of calm and grace. Near the white wooden chair in which I sit and which has come to fit my back so well a fountain plays in a pool circled by green ferns with banks of red ixora surmounted by frangipani of purest white. The sound of water falling into water ceaseless as a far sea is a background I have grown to love and when the sea-wind rises in the trees the sigh of branch and rustle of the leaves supplement and meld with the quiet conversation of the water in an extraordinary serenade of murmuring and restful sound. Late afternoon there is birdsong everywhere – the birds settling on the telephone wires like notation on a sheet of music. And as night comes on the small frogs begin their ricocheting ringing.
More raucous sounds at times obtrude. I sit beneath tall trees older than the garden and sometimes parrots come to screech and chatter in the branches overhead and, I swear, bombard me for fun with bits of bark and chewed almond seeds until I stand up and pelt them back and chase them squawking to another perch. When the sea-wind rises stronger the tree-boughs creak and branches crack. And at springtides increasingly these days in fierce wind you can hear the wave-crash and the roar of the sea hovering ominously over the town.
But mostly the sounds of peace prevail. These sounds I have grown to love. So many years gone by. The sift and sigh of garden wind falling on the ear. My wife calling from the Orchid House, “Come see this, love, come see this beauty!” The sounds of the garden over these more than score of years have forever entered the cells of memory and I can lie awake in cold winters in cities far away and I can hear them still.
The three parts of my life in the garden – reading, thinking, dreaming. Distinct and inseparable – the mind giving rise to wonders without limit. As I settle into my reading the mind, as Andrew Marvell in his celebrated poem says,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Books – how they have made it so good to be alive. I cannot count the number of books I have read sitting in the white chair by the fern-wreathed fountain. Let the one I have been reading the past few days stand for them all: Sarah Bakewell’s marvellous biography of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. It has led me back to reading Montaigne’s great essays. These in themselves are an entire education. In them Montaigne invented the art of reflecting humanity at large by writing about himself. If you want to judge for yourself get this book, subtitled How to Live, and also read Montaigne’s Of Experience, How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing, Of Friendship, How Our Mind Hinders Itself, to mention just four. Life freshens and is renewed and means more as you read his work. Montaigne believed that every moment has a purpose unto itself. As I read and think and dream and the garden surrounds me with a beauty which is different every day I can believe that. Every moment has a purpose unto itself. I should live like that.
On evenings when I sit in Mary’s garden just as it is getting dark a humming-bird comes to hover and suck the honey-dew from the myriad flowers all around. It is never more than one humming-bird, I can’t understand why. It cannot be the same humming-bird for more than twenty years but I have come to think it is. Under skies of darkening red or deepening silver-blue or the last golden light of a perfect day it darts and shivers among the flowers as I watch. It has entranced me all these years. A very few times it has not come and I have been bereft and I have researched my day to see what harm or hurt I might have done. Nothing so beautiful as its brightness in the evening air – an incandescent blessing, incomparable intricacies of flight, a shimmering amid the green leaves. I am completely silent in wonder. It is the Spirit of the Garden. Long after I have gone I like to think it will be coming to gleam and hover among the flowers in the evening light. And perhaps our grandchildren, should they be so blessed, will in their turn gaze in wonder at its shimmering beauty.
