The Green Woman

We went to Bristol for The Boy's 26th birthday yesterday. For some reason, Bristol seems much further away from Bath than the 12 miles it actually is. It may be to do with the atmosphere of the place. Bristol equals commerce, creativity and enterprise. Bath equals inactivity, rest and recuperation. It has done for a couple of thousand years.

On the way there, I was once again amazed at how green and  ostentatiously verdant this country is as Spring turns into Summer. Outside the pub where we had lunch, there was a bush or tree by the edge of a town garden which you could not have found space for one more leaf, so dense was the foliage. No bark to be seen.

On Friday I blitzed the outside of my rural workshop with a sickle and strimmer in advance of a more thorough clearing on Thursday, when a little man will come to replace the roof tiles smashed down by people who quite rightly assumed that the place was uncared for  and deserving of attention. Like I said, it is a difficult balance between keeping it pristine and keeping it casual.

I had already shifted a valuable sculpture to a safer place (teeming with security guards behind automatic gates fringed with CCTV cameras) in case they finally managed to break-in using something like the bolt-cutters they left behind last time. For the time being, all they can take are my tools, accumulated in 40 years of working with stone and marble. If they found the unrestored sculpture, they would probably smash it up using my own hammers, and that - in the long-run - would be worse.

In a way, it is encouraging to see how nature takes over in such a short period of time. Disused rail-tracks have to be regularly tended to maintain them as the cycle paths they have become. There is a small forest in the open quarry from where the stone came to build the Royal Crescent, and - like buddleia on a bomb site - it thrives on a diet of thin soil sprinkled over impenetrable stone. Where did this soil come from? Maybe it began with birds and was then supplemented by the leaves falling from the newly arrived trees which drew nourishment from air and sunlight?

Just before the Great War, there was a large garden in Cornwall tended by a small army of gardeners who made use of the temperate climate of the area by growing primeval tree-ferns alongside later epoch trees and plants. Water features were created from a sweet spring and hothouses were maintained to grow tropical fruit like pineapples for the owner's table. There had been a garden here since 1200 AD.

Then the Great War came and all the gardeners were sent to fight and die in France. The house was converted into a hospital for survivors of the war, then in the 1970s the house was sold off as flats, and the gardens continued to fall into disrepair through neglect.

In 1990, Tim Smit began hearing rumours that - buried somewhere in what appeared to be impenetrable jungle - there was a magnificent garden, so he set-to with machetes to rediscover it.

Because of the First World War, Heligan was lost to the world, even within living memory.