On reading on a wet Bank Holiday weekend
It really has been one of the most miserable August Bank Holidays I can remember. And it has capped a summer that has for the most part been cold and often gloomy. The only consolation of this from a gardeners point of view has been the opportunity to spend time with a book. And the book has been wonderful. It is The Gardener by Jan Brykczynski (Dewi Lewis Publishing, £25). I was first alerted to its existence by an article in the New Statesman in July by the poet John Burnside. It is a photo essay about urban gardening taken in four cities, Warsaw, New York, Nairobi and Yerevan. in a way it is quite unassuming, because the photos are of people and activities that are quite unassuming.But enormously revealing and touching too. The photos are introduced by a couple of short essays; one by Malu Halasa catches the struggle and the success of these urban gardeners perfectly. ‘Quaintly human touches emerge in simple but poetic acts of recycling. Old glass jars hang from trees, plastic catering buckets are fixed to fences and disused tyres become miniature herb gardens. An empty garden chair or chaise longue sits alone under a tree or in a field.It is the absence of a person that gives such scenes their poignancy and hints at the inner life of those who frequent this place and commune with nature.’
Anyone who has spent time on an allotment will immediately relate to that and to the photos themselves: beehives weighed with pudding stones tilt amongst the sunflowers on a rooftop, a grey haired Armenian woman poses in a orchard clutching her scythe, while thousands of miles away a man in his fifties sports a ‘Bronx chicks rule’ rubber apron and relaxes in a plastic chair beneath a leafy bower. Brykcznski himself lives on the third floor of an apartment block in Warsaw and as he puts it; ‘My feet get to touch real earth just once a year during a two week holiday. I have a deep feeling that there is something wrong about this and that I’ve been cut off from my roots…’ From this came the idea of this book watching planes come into land above the allotments near his apartment and realising that through them people were fulfilling the same need that he had for contact with the earth.
Burnside was drawn to the book – as indeed I have been, not just by a marvellous collection of images – something I aspire to emulate both as gardener and as photographer, but also because of its prophetic nature. As he puts it: ‘How we live with the natural world, the green world, the animal, the weather, the elemental is surely destined to change as the soi disant developed world collapses around its own greed and arrogance.’ It might sound a depressing subject for an abjectly rainy summer weekend, but the spirit that comes from this book warmed me, and as I looked out of the rain-spattered window made me realise that the rain is only doing those green spaces we cherish, good.
