Plant Journeys
The Tulip tree in the Inner Temple Garden
I’m reading The Thousand Year Old Garden by Nick Stewart Smith, whilst sitting on the London Underground. I don’t notice as we whizz through Kings Cross or Russell Square because I have been transported to Jamestown in America. It’s Autumn 1637 and John Tradescant the Younger has just arrived in Virginia. He has spent £5 (I will spend about that much on my travelcard today!) to make what sounds like a pretty hellish journey with the slightly strange recommendation that each traveller brings a gallon of brandy!
His mission is to “gather up all kinds of rarities - whatever can be found - flowers, seeds, plants and shells as well as artifacts from the indigenous people. Beads and weapons, rugs and shawls - anything strange would be good. These were the curiosities he wanted to take back with him to London to augment the family collection of extraordinary things they were keeping and displaying at Lambeth…..but over and above everything it should be remembered that both father and son were highly skilled gardeners with the most prized items in their collection being the living plants that could be found growing in their garden beside their Lambeth house.”
Just as we pull into Holborn station, I read in Nick’s book that the most significant of the living treasures that John Tradescant the Younger brings back are the cuttings of the Tulip tree and its seeds. This resonates because I am on my way to the Inner Temple gardens where I volunteer and where there is a huge Tulip tree - witness the photograph. Now as I enter the gardens I look at it anew, knowing that the settlers in the New World called it ‘canoewood’ because indigenous people favoured the wood to make boats, knowing it was ‘especially buoyant’. I wonder when it was planted here. I”m also curious to find out more about the collector so feel another visit coming onto the Garden Museum just by Lambeth Palace, he and his father are buried in the cemetery of the Church of St Mary which is now part of the museum.
What I have loved about making this podcast is the journeys on which these plant stories can take us, it could be Fig trees travelling to America or Camellias en route to Australia or Tulip trees landing here in the UK. Travelling in the footsteps of generations of gardeners somehow puts our own endeavours into a different perspective. It can be easy to focus on the here and now - what to plant this season! But somehow these stories are about people caring and nurturing a plant; learning how to grow it, to share it, to give it onto the next generation. I love seeing and sensing those connections to gardeners past, I hope you do too.