Hortus Conclusus

In his phantasmagoric 1984 art collection Hallelujah Anyway Patrick Woodroffe includes the haunting image of the 'Hortus Conclusus', a ‘melancholy mediaeval prophecy’ depicted as a sprawling and ruinously ancient tree rooted onto a tower of rock, islanded above a cataract in a poisoned and desolate landscape. The real medieval hortus conclusus, in contrast, was the ‘Enclosed Garden’, a walled would-be paradise designed to recreate Eden for the delight of ladies in hennins and escoffions, but Woodroffe’s is – he has a learned and fictional folklorist declare – an apocalyptic vision:

When all things come to an end – as some day they surely must – then shall the very last man shut himself away in the Last Garden on Earth. There he shall hide and care for the last tree and the last flowers, while all around him the world shall be swallowed up. … And one day even the Last Garden shall be swept away and with it the very last man, and the Earth shall have no husbandman, and shall run savage like the Wilderness. And of Man there shall remain no trace, neither memory nor regret.

Sometimes, when it’s all in full leaf and hung with bees and butterflies, my garden feels like the Hortus Conclusus, as though nothing exists outside it but ruin; as though the waves of desolation are lapping at its walls (or chainlink fences overgrown with bindweed and bramble). The water trickles in the pond and the marjoram flowers provide multitudes of bees in umpteen varieties with plenty to keep them going. The burning world is a long way away.

Of course it’s not. As the earth warms some plants will retreat and others will advance, and insects or birds we find familiar in southern England will be ousted in favour of others, new fauna which will cause us different problems. In fifty years, when I am long gone, my garden, if it still exists, will look different, and not because this little bust and the other statuary will be absent. A younger generation will accommodate itself to changes like this, and will mourn the past no more than I am especially affected by the lack of elm trees in the English countryside, which all vanished in my childhood thanks to ophiostoma ulmi. I fear that will not be the worst they have to deal with.