The Physic Garden (11 page)

I love spring best of all the seasons, but who does not? Even now, when I am in the winter of my years, spring brings a lifting of the heart, a return of the sense that anything is possible. Fluffy willow catkins and hazel lambstails appear as if out of nowhere, even in the town gardens. Back then, when I was working at the college, I would give my brother James and the other under-gardeners enough work to last the day and take myself off with my collecting bag on my back. Without the encumbrance of the apothecary business to worry about, my mother was much more cheerful. With my worries about her eased, I thought that I would be able to organise my gardening and my collecting duties more efficiently.

As soon as I had gathered what I thought was a fair number of specimens, I would contrive to drop by Jenny's door, preferably at those times when Sandy Caddas would be away from home. She used to wait for me at the side window from which she had a pretty good view of the path to the house. I'm sure she took pleasure from my visits. She would feed me freshly baked cakes or oaties and soft cheese, and mugs of her father's ale, and sometimes she would let me steal a kiss or two when there was nobody to see. One week slid into another and I was blissfully happy. I must have been, because time passed so quickly and the blue, white and pale lemon of spring flowers imperceptibly gave way to the more
vibrant colours of summer. Then I would find her gathering bundles of the lavender she grew in the cottage garden, and hanging them up to dry.

‘I'll take some of them into the town and sell them just as they are,' she said. ‘But some of them will have to be rubbed and the flower heads stored. So you can make yourself useful!'

I helped her to do it and it was a pleasant, highly scented task. Then, Jenny and her sister would take the lavender and stitch it into muslin bags which could be placed among linens to keep the moths away. Some of these she would use at home and some would be taken into town with the bunches of lavender to be sold there. Lavender has many useful properties and she said that deterring moths was the least of them. Some of it she would make into lavender water.

‘It's a very good remedy for a headache and if you sprinkle a few drops on your pillow you'll sleep soundly and your dreams will be pleasant. Take some for your mother!' she would urge me. She was a generous lass, wanting to share all that she had in the way of remedies and knowledge.

‘How come you know these things?' I asked her, a little indignant that a lass should have a head so stuffed with things of which I was quite ignorant.

‘I had them from my mother,' she said.

‘But you said she died while you were young.'

‘Aye, but I was a quick learner! Besides, she would make it all into a kind of game, so it was a pleasure, even though I was but a child. And she wrote some of it down for me.'

We have them still, those receipts. I could lay hands on them if I wanted to, hardly a book at all really, but a sheaf of papers for this and that remedy, most of them scrawled on precious scraps of paper, covering every surface, the spelling erratic, the directions cryptic.

Besides lavender, Jenny would grow pot marigolds in her garden, like so many miniature suns, shining among the other flowers. These have always been a favourite with me and she shared my affection for them. They have a lovely, peppery scent but she told
me they had other valuable properties. She would make an ointment out of the petals and it was said to be very good for cuts and grazes and suchlike injuries. She gave me a pot of it to take home with me, and I used it whenever I cut my fingers in the garden, which was pretty often, and she was right. It was wonderfully effective for preventing infection.

Thomas saw me using it one day, after I had torn my hand on a rose bush. I am very fond of roses and always have been, most particularly the little wild rose of Scotland that scrambles among the walls and hedges of this country, deceptively delicate but resilient where other plants will fail. They always remind me of Jenny, with her light hair. They are lovely but, quite unlike Jenny who would not willingly have harmed anyone, they are malicious plants. They seem to wait until you turn your back on them and then they pounce on you, no matter how hard you try to avoid them. I was more cut about with roses than with anything else, even nettles, in my whole career as a gardener.

‘What's that?' Thomas asked when he saw me applying Jenny's marigold ointment to the latest crop of punctures and grazes. I explained that it was something my friend had made for me, and he asked if I might procure a pot or two for him, since I obviously thought it efficacious, and he would try it as an experiment on his patients. He offered to pay for it, so I got Jenny to make a few pots for him. He came back to me for more, as much as she could supply, because he said it was extremely effective. Jenny and I joked that in due course, we might be able to resurrect the apothecary idea, with a little help from Thomas. Because this was a real skill she had and, as Thomas said, there was always a call for simple remedies that worked, especially for sailors and the like who might have no recourse to more complicated medicines during their long voyages.

‘One day,' she told me, ‘One day we'll maybe go into business for ourselves.'

‘Do you think so?' I would have been reluctant, all the same, having tried and failed so comprehensively.

‘Well, I think I would have the skills, especially with you to help me. But we would have to find another, better garden than your physic garden to supply us with plants. We'd have to grow things ourselves. Have a ready supply of the right herbs.'

I remembered my father's predecessor, and how successful he and his wife had been in similar circumstances, and it didn't seem too fanciful to think that one day Jenny and I might manage it. The unspoken assumption in all this, of course, was that we would always be together. We skirted around the idea all the time, cautiously, both aware of what a momentous commitment that might be, aware too that neither of us had the necessary resources. But I was young and strong and full of hope for the future.

She had not met Thomas at that time, but she had heard about him, because I spoke about him often. In fact, I think I spoke about him rather too much for her liking.

‘Thomas, Thomas,' she said. ‘I hear this Doctor Thomas Brown mentioned on all sides! Is he the fount of all knowledge? Can he truly be right about everything, William?'

She was laughing as she said it, but there was a germ of truth at the heart of her complaint. I did defer to Thomas on most occasions and about most things. Over the years, I have noticed that this is a fault of men more than women. We think our heroes can do no wrong, while clear-eyed women seem able to love theirs in spite of their faults. If he told me something, I believed him. If he advised me to do something, I usually found myself obeying. And yet it was not in my nature to conform. But at that time, I think if he had told me black was really white, I would have agreed.

When my Jenny wasn't working with her plants or in the garden, she was usually to be found stitching away at her silk or her muslin. She had it in a circular wooden tambour to keep it straight and whenever one of these broke I would contrive to make another for her out of a hazel wand. The needles she used were
very fine and the thread too was so fine that it was a tricky task to thread the needles. She would give Anna, her wee sister, a penny to rub beeswax on it, and coax it through the eyes, keeping several needles threaded at once to save time. When the weather and the season allowed, she would sit outside the door on a boulder, deliberately rolled there for the purpose, and she would stitch away in the sunlight. She said it was hard on the eyes otherwise, and in any case it was hard on her neck and shoulders, always bending over like that, staring at the tiny flowers and sprigs she was creating, like an artist with his brush.

I can bring her before my eyes yet, the curve of her neck, the fragility of it as she bent over, and the curls where she caught up her hair, coiling it onto her head to keep it out of her eyes. She had shapely arms and surprisingly sturdy hands with stubby nails, hands which could achieve miracles. The work was exquisite. I have never seen anything like it before or since. You would have sworn it was fine lace, but it wasn't; it was embroidery. And at the centre of the flowers were even smaller centres, each with its own design, a minute cobweb of threads as though some tiny spider had been hard at work there. Some of the work would be made up into lappets for ladies. Sometimes it might go for baby gowns, for the infants of the rich, who liked their children to appear as fashionable as themselves.

This was not, you must understand, the Ayrshire needlework currently very much in vogue and advertised in all our newspapers, especially here in Glasgow, but an older design, albeit very similar, the same that was brought by Mr Ruffini to Edinburgh from his native Italy. For that reason alone, I think Jenny could command a high price for her work. There was so little of it to be found here in the west at that time. This explained why she devoted so much of her time to it, and her father encouraged her. He liked to see her working out in the garden, taking the fresh air and sunlight as well. His philosophy was that, ‘folk aye need claithes', by which he meant that the work of the weavers would never disappear. I don't think he foresaw the advent of
the enormous weaving machines that would supersede his cottage industry within a generation, driving the weavers from their own homes where they were kings, controlling their work as they chose, and into the hands of the factory owners who regulated the lives of their workers in every particular. Or if he did foresee it, he dismissed it as an impossibility. Nobody, he thought, would be able to reproduce the quality of the work done by a weaver, labouring diligently under his own instructions. And perhaps he was right. But that is, I'll allow, quite another story.

Once or twice, Jenny would rush out and intercept me and tell me that her father was in the weaving shop from which he might emerge at any moment, and we had better not be seen together in the house. Then we would walk a little way away and sit among the trees, just talking, just passing the time of day with daffing and laughing the way lads and lassies do and have done since time began. Once or twice she let me take her hand. When I kissed her, it was very cautiously because it was such a new thing for me to kiss a lassie. Her lips were dry and warm. The touch of them made me feel strange. I had the clean scent of her breath in my nostrils, honey, which I think she had been eating, and something else that made my heart pound and my ears sing. Then I looked up and saw her sister standing watching us, with her doll clutched in one hand and her thumb in her mouth. She had grown somewhat since that first day when Jenny had taken the swarm and she had looked on. She was watching, aye watching us, her eyes large and dark, hazel eyes, nothing like her sister's bright blue. Jenny looked around and saw her too. She rose up swiftly and flew over to her.

‘You don't say aethin' aboot this! D'you hear me now? If you say aethin' at a” – she cast about her for a sufficiently horrible threat – ‘I'll tak' Maisie,' (for that was the name of the wee rag doll) ‘I'll tak' Maisie and put her at the back of the fire. There now!'

I thought the child would greet but she did nothing of the sort. She tucked Maisie safely under her arm, stuck out her tongue at her sister, turned around and flounced off down the path. I don't think she believed a word of the threat but the gravity of the situation must have struck her forcibly, for as far as I know, she didn't tell.

Gilbert was a different matter. Gilbert was the boy who worked for Sandy Caddas and I think right from the start he disliked me. I don't know whether it was because, young as he was, he was over-fond of Jenny or because he sensed my dislike of him. He was twelve, a scrawny, undersized lad who lived nearby with his mother and came to work for Sandy every day. He looked ill fed, and sometimes there were bruises on his face and his arms and shins. I knew Sandy treated him well enough so could only assume that his mother, or perhaps her man, who was Gilbert's stepfather, was not above giving him a beating or a kicking. I didn't enquire too closely. In fact, I ignored him as far as was possible. I'll allow I didn't like him much. I know I should have felt sorry for him. I
was
sorry. But he irritated me. He sniffed constantly, his face was covered in raw blemishes and he had a way of grinning, like a dog will grin at you with curled lips, to avert a beating. He was very polite to me, to my face, calling me Mr Lang, but there was an edge to the way he said the words, and I thought that if he could do me an ill turn, he probably would. I found him repellent. Jenny was always kind to him, and perhaps that too disposed me to dislike him. But she had a deal of sympathy for him, defending him more often than not. Sandy Caddas kept him very busy and we seldom had more than a glimpse of him, trailing after his master, or working with him at the loom and being roundly – albeit only verbally – abused when he got the threads in a fankle.

I think at that time I was as happy as I have ever been, before or since. Having got rid of the unwanted encumbrance of the
apothecary
business, I was working hard in the garden, learning more of my trade with each passing season and growing in confidence. I had complete charge of the physic garden as well, although the allowances for plants and manure were made to Thomas, who promptly handed them over to me, to spend as I saw fit. I think we both knew that there, at least, we were fighting a losing battle. Besides, we had another and perhaps still more serious problem.

A little over twenty years previously, the anatomist William Hunter had died in London and, in view of his old associations with the place, he had left his entire collection to the University at Glasgow. It was the result of a lifetime’s interest in many aspects of scholarship, minerals and archaeology included, and it contained books, manuscripts and artworks, as well as all kinds of anatomical curiosities.

‘It’s worth a fortune,’ observed Thomas. ‘And they will be very glad indeed to have it, but it is something of a poisoned chalice.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I wonder where they are going to put it all?’

I think he already knew what their plans were and had been reluctant to tell me because he also knew what my reaction would
be. Hunter had been so concerned for its preservation as a single collection that he had left a massive sum, £8,000, an amount of money which was almost beyond my comprehension, so that the university could build a museum to house it. There was to be a lecture hall as well, both for the benefit of students and for the general public to gain admittance and ‘enlightenment’, as he put it in his will. The museum would have to be built but, as usual, this would not be without a certain amount of debate.

I had learned by then, after so many years of labouring alongside these men of intellect, that nothing whatsoever could be done in the college without a good deal of argument. If these people were, by some miracle of transposition, to be precipitated into the real world, the world outside those venerable walls, I am convinced that they could never survive. They would not be able to so much as decide what to eat for supper, or whether they should change a shirt or wear it for one more day, so reluctant were they to determine anything without what they called ‘informed debate’. With so many opinionated people gathered in one place, it was inevitable I suppose. And who am I to complain? I had spent all my young years in and around the college and it must have influenced me too, even if the harsh realities of earning bread for the table and fuel for the fire were foremost in my mind each day.

During those first years of my appointment as gardener, Faculty was still much occupied with arguments over the siting of the museum. These seemed to be centred upon whether the teaching of anatomy and midwifery should be kept separate from the housing of Hunter’s great collection. Some wanted the two to be amalgamated into one building, while others argued that the elegance of the museum would definitely be harmed by the inclusion of facilities for the teaching of anatomy which was at that time and still is, for all I know, a dirty, smelly and far from elegant occupation. Parallels with butchery spring all too easily to mind. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, many of the professors considered the students to be wholly undesirable, a necessary evil, an inconvenient interruption to the real business of scholarship.

Besides, the mob outside the college walls (and who more alarming than the Glasgow mob, in full cry!) were known to be readily inflamed by any suggestion of grave robbing. And they invariably associated anatomy with the unlawful ‘resurrection’ of bodies for dissection. Always allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, they were probably right in their assumption that the anatomists were so desperate for corpses upon which to practise their new skills, that they would seldom seek to question the provenance of the cadavers on offer. They would simply take the goods the gods provided and do what they wished with them.

Eventually, the authorities decided upon the physic garden as a site for the museum. It was fully enclosed, which would allow them to protect their precious collection from any possible incursions by the unwashed of the city who might wish to protest about the violence being inflicted upon the dead in the name of progress. The fact that the building reduced an already besieged physic garden to something the size of a pocket handkerchief didn’t seem to concern them. But the way in which the new building ate into the already meagre and polluted area of the garden meant that I had to spend even more time foraging about the surrounding
countryside
for specimens for Thomas’s lectures.

I must say that I enjoyed these excursions more, the more my knowledge grew. Occasionally, Thomas would even find, or perhaps he would make, the time to accompany me and we would scavenge about quite happily together, like lads let out of school. He taught me all he knew of botany in the field, and I was a regular sponge and absorbed everything he cared to tell me.

Once he brought bread and cheese, and we ensconced ourselves down beside a burn in the hills, somewhere to the south west of the city. We ate our makeshift meal with the song of water on stone as an accompaniment, and then we lay flat on our bellies, side by side, watching the eddies and dipping our fingers into the icy waters that had come tumbling down from the narrow,
birchfilled
glen behind us, but which were now flowing more smoothly between flat sun-warmed stones.

‘Can you guddle for trout?’ he asked, brushing crumbs from his hands into the water.

‘Aye. Well, I know how to dae it, but I would not say I am a master of the art.’

He nudged me, grinning. Although the water was cold, it was a warm day and before we knew it, we were in our bare feet, wading cautiously into the burn and standing there in companionable silence, peering down into the water. Neither of us caught anything that day, but I mind yet the fishes rising to the crumbs and flies on the surface, the breeze that lifted our hair, the scent of grasses and the sight and sound of swifts and swallows, soaring and diving all around us, hunting those same flies, their high, sharp calls piercing the air.

At such times I would find myself torn between disappointment that I would not be able to visit Jenny, and the absolute pleasure of his company. Not once did he suggest that I should introduce him to Jenny on those occasions. He never even mentioned her, and I never raised the matter either, much too happy to be his companion and confidant for however short a time, regretting only that such occasions were so few, so far between.

All the same, I was surprised when he suggested that an excursion farther afield might be in order: a journey to the island of Arran, which I had never even seen at that time, although its peaks and glens are clearly visible from the coast to the south and west of this city, when they are not obscured by all-too-frequent clouds and mist. But then I had never had occasion to travel so far. He said that we should be away some time – a week or more – and he made me read a volume from his library by one Martin Martin in order, I think, to tantalise me as much as to inform me.

It was called
A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland
. I have a copy of it in my own library now and often find myself
rereading
it, although it was written more than a hundred years ago.
Martin had visited the Isle of Arran and reported, among much else, that there was a ‘valuable curiosity in this isle which they call Baul Muluy, that is Molingus his stone globe’. This Molingus was, I believe, very nearly a contemporary of our own patron saint Mungo, living only half a century later, and dying a martyr to his Christian cause. Martin describes the globe in some detail.

‘It is a green stone, much like a globe in figure, about the bigness of a goose egg. The virtue of it is to remove stitches from the sides of sick persons, by laying it close to the place affected; and if the patient does not outlive the distemper they say the stone removes out of its bed of its own accord. The natives use this stone for swearing decisive oaths upon it.

‘They ascribe another extraordinary virtue to it, and it is this: the credulous vulgar firmly believe that if this stone is cast among the front of an enemy they will all run away and that as often as the enemy rallies, if this stone is cast among them, they will lose courage and retire. They say that MacDonald of the Isles carried this stone about him and that victory was always on his side when he threw it among the enemy. This stone is now in the custody of Margaret Miller, alias Mackintosh. She lives in Baelliminich and preserves the globe with abundance of care. It is wrapped up in fair linen cloth and about that there is a piece of woollen cloth; and she keeps it still locked up in her chest when it is not given out to exert its qualities.’

‘I should like very much to see that stone and test its medicinal properties,’ said Thomas, with a laugh.

‘And do you think it would be efficacious?’

‘Who knows what might happen if there was a belief in it? If I were one of the credulous vulgar, who knows what it might do for me?’

‘Perhaps we could bring it back with us and cast it before Faculty.’

‘Perhaps we could. But you will come with me?’

‘I’d like nothing better. But what will Faculty say if their gardener goes jaunting off on a sea voyage?’

‘Oh, Faculty have already agreed,’ he said, airily. ‘And all
without
the assistance of Baul Molingus. I have already asked them. You see this is in the nature of a collecting trip. Our first real collecting trip together, William. And perhaps the first of many more to come. I hope so at any rate!’

‘How did you persuade them?’

‘There is a tree grows on the island. A whitebeam of great beauty and interest, which is only to be found there. It is the
Sorbus pseudofennica
or Arran service tree, although I have also heard it called the bastard mountain ash.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘No, you would not. It was discovered only a handful of years ago, in Glen Diomhan at the north end of the island. In essence this tree seems to be some rare product of the rowan and the whitebeam together. I should like to see it, to draw its leaves, to bring a small specimen back with me if I could.’

‘It would never survive in the physic garden.’

‘No, it would not, although I have not said as much to Faculty. But perhaps my uncle’s garden in Ayrshire might be a better home for it. Will you come with me, William? I should very much like to have your company.’

It was a very long time ago, and now I am hard put to it to write the details of that voyage. I remember it more as a series of pictures, like a man looking at illustrations in some fine old volume. My mother fussed most dreadfully, I know that, and I’m sure she thought we would both be drowned and that she would never see either of us again. You would have thought we were sailing halfway round the world, rather than across the sea to Arran. She begged and pleaded with me not to go, but wild horses would not have prevented me.

I know that we took a gabbert from the Broomielaw down to the coast, and I have an image of the tall Merchants’ Steeple on
the skyline and the smoke of the city behind us, with the women doing their washing on the banks of the river as we went past. From the port, we could see the Isle of Arran lurking on the horizon, all misty peaks and troughs, like the blessed isle of the ancient Celts. Wearing borrowed oilskins against the weather, we embarked on a small sailing vessel which carried us over the Firth of Clyde. Thomas pointed out to me that the mountains are said to be in the shape of a sleeping warrior who will awaken when he is needed, but I’m afraid I couldn’t see it myself. Besides, although the firth was reasonably calm, I was very sick and disorientated, especially when we reached the mid point between the mainland and the island, and each shore seemed so very far away that the long horizontals on all sides, with the dazzling height of the sky above and the heaving green waters below, made my head spin. I was imagining all kinds of monsters down there. Once or twice, there would be a swell on the surface, and we would see some great creatures swimming by. The sailors said they were called basking sharks. They roamed these waters in profusion and were harmless enough creatures, being quite without teeth, except that they could overturn your boat if you did not keep a sharp lookout for them.

We had brought food with us, and Thomas, who seemed quite indifferent to the motion, encouraged me to eat. ‘An empty stomach does the mal de mer no good at all,’ he told me. ‘You must eat and it will settle you.’

Not a morsel could I manage, and the movement of the vessel induced a dreadful dizziness and stupefaction, followed by a dry retching which was most unpleasant. I felt chilled to the bone and utterly miserable. The sailors laughed at me behind their hands until Thomas spoke sharply to them, whereupon they looked sheepish and ignored me. I had begun to think that my mother had been right after all, that we never would arrive, but so dreadful were the sensations induced by the motion that, for a while, I confess I didn’t care whether we arrived or not. Death seemed a good and desirable option.

Then – quite suddenly so it seemed – the misty distances resolved themselves into land, we were in the lee of the island, the air had the scent of grass and other growing things upon it, and miraculously my sickness evaporated. I felt quite hungry.

We spent several days on the island, being offered hospitality, food and comfortable beds in one or two good houses, although what Martin Martin had pleased to call the ‘natives’ were poor enough and for the most part went barefoot and spoke in the Gaelic tongue. Our hosts were minor gentry, people of consequence with whom Thomas seemed familiar: a minister of the kirk and, later in the week, a younger son of some old highland family whose son attended the university. They were not ostentatiously rich. Their houses were not large and were overcrowded with children and dogs, as well as family servants who seemed more like friends and who might, so Thomas said, be impoverished relatives, but they lived contentedly enough and they possessed books which they seemed to prize. Thomas would never introduce me as his gardener, but rather as his friend and fellow botanist, and I would always concur. If he was happy to call me that, what reason did I have to argue with him? Nobody questioned him. I minded my manners, but these were island folk and they made me welcome, quietly and without fuss.