Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes

1. As the Twig Is Bent

CHAPTER ONE As the Twig Is Bent The following ofsuch thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose ofautobiography. VLADIMIR NABOKOV Speak,A1emory,1966 0 NE DAY NEAR THE END of my first summer in Britain, while visiting Magdalen College, Oxford, the cumulative experience of recent walks, sights, senses, and ideas, the layering of efforts and disciplines that have made the landscape of southern Britain, became overwhelming. Many thousands ofpeople before me have passed through this college and its environs and have been moved by its tranquil cloister, commenting on the charm of the river and bridge, the shady waterside path known as Addison 's walk, and the harmony between Sir Christopher Wren's classical building and the earlier Gothic arcades and tower. On this particular occasion I happened to find myself at a corner of its little park beside the Wren building. It was a beautiful warm afternoon, and a small herd of fallow deer was browsing near the railing, their mottled tawny backs moving in and out ofshadows cast by centuries-old oaks. It was calm and quiet. Birds chattered and cooed somewhere above. A bell chimed the hour. I studied Wren's graceful facade, the tall window frames and buttery-gray stone of the wall, their cornices, the central arcade, and the vines growing upon it. I turned and found the massive hulk of an ancient tree. Beneath it was a plaque. The text explained that this plant had been one ofthe first London plane trees to be grown in the seventeenth century in the botanical garden across the road from the college. They had been started from cuttings brought from the very first such plant in London, where specimens of Oriental planes and American sycamores had accidentally (naturally?) cross-pollinated in the nursery of a leading horticulturist who had been actively importing plants from around.the world. The tree and Wren's building were the same age. I thought about the effort and vision of the people who created this ensemble, the optimism and care with which they had attempted to combine the latest science of their day, in this case botany, and the exploration of distant continents with the accident that had produced this hybrid, which has been such a blessing for the great cities of the world ever since, and of architecture and planning - again in this case the use by Wren of the very latest and modern architectural style and technology to produce a bold and handsome building, one that holds its own with the equally strong (and contemporary in their own day) late Gothic buildings it faces, forming a court without rejecting them - and of the deer, themselves a remnant of medieval landholdings and hunting privileges, not to say culinary habits. The trees, the animals, the buildings, the steady and serious scholarship taking place inside, the lighthearted recreation on the river outside, together presented a clear attempt by the men of the seventeenth century who created this ensemble to produce a harmonious world through the combination of art and science, nature and culture. It isn't Utopia, but it is humane in the deepest sense of the word. Also it is beautiful. As I finished reading the plaque the intelligence and combined efforts that produced this ensemble struck me, and I burst into tears. 2 AS THE TWIG IS BENT Not many other physical environments have had such an effect on me. On another occasion several years later, however, I had a similar reaction late in the afternoon at the Villa Lante. I was sitting alone on the edge ofthe basin ofits water parterre, looking at one of the little stone dwarfs with his flower-shaped blunderbuss standing in one of the stone boats that appear to float on the water and are derived from an ancient Roman votive navicella recently discovered at the time ofthe garden's creation, with Cardinal Gambara's delicate pavilions and unsurpassed series of fountains and terraces hanging above in the golden light. I have thought about my reaction to these particular environments and such moments on more than one occasion since. The source of my reaction and the strength of my emotion probably lay in recognition that certain values and aspirations I hold dear were given particularly clear and potent physical form in these cumulative environments. Additionally, aside from their physical endurance (no small feat for a landscape), and therefore the craft and materials employed, there was also an overarching grace...