A Writer’s Life Readings Week 4: A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively

Curated and read by Beena Kamlani.

Hello everyone and welcome back.

Last week I read from Sandor Marai’s Embers, where entire lifetimes unraveled within the space of a room. This week, the theme is gardens and gardeners. As I look out of my Manhattan apartment, I see gardeners on the roofs of their brownstones bent over their shrubs, weeding, pruning, watering their winter-worn plants. They turn the earth and make furrows to plant seeds, looking to a future when they will bloom and delight the senses or nourish their bodies. They train tendrils across trellises and coax straggly bushes into shape. The Japanese maple directly across from my window seems fuller, redder than it was last year as its winey leaves quiver and lift in the breeze. The flowers are not out yet and perhaps that is why the green seems so green, the red so red. In summer, these rooftops will be a profuse and extravagant tide of colour and scent, drawing bees and neighborhood birds and the occasional low-flying hawk, looking for mice among the bushes. From far-away places—Basle and Vermont, Patmos and London--come Whatsapp messages on my phone, accompanied by pictures and videos of glorious gardens already in full bloom. They are images of perfection. I cannot stop watching our urban gardeners tame their small patches of earth. They are a resolute, indomitable bunch. Things grow here because they make them grow. In their dreams and visions of the future, the seed that will flower into a fragrant rose or a juicy red tomato, I see a shared sense of community and hope for us all. This week’s passage is from Penelope Lively, who wrote movingly about her days as a gardener in one of her lesser-known books, A House Unlocked. In it, she writes of the garden at Golsoncott, the family home, in northwest Somerset.

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Beyond the high yew hedge of the iris garden was the kitchen garden, a rectangular site of about half an acre, sloping up to a brick wall that supported a line of ancient plums. The archetypal kitchen garden, it now seems. A place that you could slowly nibble your way around, in high summer: the forest of raspberry canes, including the rare and succulent yellow variety; huge juicy ruby gooseberries; crisp raw peas; last year’s apples, stacked away on shelves in the gloriously aromatic apple house; plums, golden-fleshed Victorias, small sharp purple ones; sun-warm tomatoes from the green house, with yellow ones again a speciality.The Golsoncott garden now floats free of time and space—preserved in the mind’s eye, eloquent of elsewhere and of people who never knew it. But gardening as an activity has always seemed to me to defy the domination of the present. Digging, planting and planning, you move ahead, and look back. My own gardening days are done, but the crispest pleasure that I remember is that interesting sense of displacement. Sorting bulbs on an autumn afternoon—shiny brown tulips, the papery cluster of narcissi, the white teardrops of dwarf iris—you were both here and now but also projected forward into another season, when these things would have undergone their miraculous metamorphosis. Poring over the vibrant pages of a new seed catalogue, you were designing the summer to come—while scribbled notes in last year’s catalogues warned against the failures and the misplaced choices. And the seeds themselves were both a sensual delight—glossy pellets, parachutes, thistledown, tiny cuttlefish, flakes, spears, golden dust—and also amazing hostages to the future. Sowing seed in the greenhouse was an act of faith: the ritual of the seed trays, the tactile compost, the blank inviting markers and the special pen was like the performance of some religious office, the invocation of an event that was both impossible and entirely reliable. The seeds were the guarantee of the turning of the world, their strange disguises a coded account of the colour and the exuberance to come.As an activity, gardening is a combination of immediacy and imaginative projection. Perhaps that is why it is so satisfying—a fusion of physical endeavor with a dream of things to come. A garden is perilously unstable. A few decades of neglect and it melts into the landscape, its existence to be read only by the perceptive. It becomes archaeology, with some tenacious growths hinting at what once was there. Gardeners know this, the fragility of the present is set against the robustness of digging and planting, the emphatic qualities of earth and roots and stems. To garden is to seize the day.

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Thanks very much for listening. Until next week.

This passage was taken from A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively, published by Grove Press in 2001.