Mar Roscoe’s Garden – an essay
‘The garden that is finished is dead.’
H.E.Bates
1
It was a Tuesday morning in March 2006 and I was sitting in the eco-chic minimalist interior of the National Wildflower Centre in Knowsley near Liverpool with the Committee of the Knowsley Flower Show. I had been invited to Liverpool for a week to experience the city’s horticultural heritage, of which, at that time, I knew nothing. As an artist, that connection that comes through people and plants had been a starting point for my work for a few years. Maybe this visit would spark something for the Capital of Culture year in 2008? To be honest I wasn’t hopeful, but there seemed a keen-ness in the air. In advance of my visit I had asked to meet people who had an interest in plants and flowers. The Knowsley Flower Show Committee was the first group I had met. They were all enthusiastic and very knowledgeable amateur gardeners, who, now retired, were able to invest time in their greatest love. We had begun by talking about the genesis of their flower show and local horticultural history. Rightly curious, they in turn had asked me about my interest in plants. I was telling them about a visit to Colombia I had made and how, through meeting people connected to flowers there, a wholly new view of the country had emerged, one very different from the ubiquitous drugs n’ violence portrayed in the media. Now, I can’t recall exactly how, but one of the Committee who had said very little up to this point, (other than that he was the only one who didn’t do any gardening) suddenly surprised his fellows by revealing that as a young seaman he had jumped ship in Colombia and spent a year living near Cali on a coffee plantation. As he spoke, a blush spread across his face along with a wry smile; as if in the telling he was shedding the years. Seated before us, he was that young man again.
There followed a quiet ripple through the company. The seams of a life, presumed tightly sewn, had just loosened before our eyes. As his friends paused to recover, I asked the ex-seaman with the blushing grin if he had seen many orchids during his time in Colombia, a stupid question really, perhaps asked through embarrassment, with the obvious reply that it hadn’t been the orchids that had attracted his attention that year, but yes, there were, (so he had heard), more orchid species in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Ah yes, orchids, said the only Committee member whose mind still seemed within North West England: the orchids, what happened to all those orchids? The Liverpool orchids? His voice was strained. The orchids were the stars of the botanic garden. What happened to them?
There was a moment.
And then the Knowsley Flower Show Committee suddenly returned from South America and started to tell me about the Liverpool Botanic Garden, a place I had never heard of. Together they conjured glasshouses filled with rare orchids, the flower shows, the gold medals that were won. It wasn’t just orchids, there were dozens of tropical species. The first ones were brought in through the port, on the ships, said one person. That was when the garden was in the city centre, added another. They built a new garden after the war, said another member after the second world war, added someone else I used to visit with the children. Intrigued, I asked where I could see the orchids and the tropical plants and this garden, an image of which was now growing in my mind, only to be told that it was all gone. Destroyed by Derek Hatton, one of the members quietly said.
There was another moment.
All the orchids were lost, he said, they’re all gone now. I hadn’t heard the name of Derek Hatton for years, but I was instantly transported back to our living room, at home in Maidstone, Kent sitting on the settee with my grandfather and watching the television News at Six. It must have been in the early eighties when I was a teenager. The memory of being there with him was as vivid as the image that was on the TV screen. In my minds eye I could see a man, a politician, giving a speech to fervent applause from the steps of a great hall in Liverpool. Now, twenty five years or so later I was hooked by his connection to a vast and by all accounts exquisite collection of orchids, all gone, and the strong feelings of those present, which, like my memory, seemed undimmed through the passage of time. Not all the orchids are gone, someone said. A few of them survived. I’ve seen them in that small glasshouse at Calderstones Park. And then someone else added: Actually, there are hundreds of orchids still alive. They’re just out of public view. It was in that moment, somewhere between Maidstone, Colombia and Liverpool, courtesy of the personal revelation of an ex-seaman and the hospitality of the Flower Show Committee that my journey began. A garden destroyed, forgotten; in my lifetime too. I wanted to discover its story. Just before I left, I gave each of the Flower Show Committee members a postcard. On it was a photograph I had taken of a Colombian orchid grower with one of her prize blooms. The ex-seaman read the caption which gave her name: Ah yes, Beatriz… he sighed.
The next day I stood before a scene of abject desolation. A yawning earthy scar. I was at the site of the last Liverpool Botanic Garden. There was a padlocked, glasshouse. Inside were a few jaggedy Yucca plants splitting out of their plastic pots and a glowering group of ancient standing stones known as ‘The Calder Stones’ which gave their name to the surrounding park. Panes of glass had recently fallen from the house and various patch-up jobs had been done; but the spirit of the glasshouse was undeniably broken. I remember thinking: there is nothing more broken than a broken glasshouse. I was with Dave Kelly, Senior Horticultural Officer, at Liverpool City Parks Department HQ in Calderstones Park. He said: people think that once the last botanic garden closed in the eighties, all the plants were lost. They have forgotten that this vast collection exists. He added: The plant collections are thriving, they just don’t have a permanent home. It was cold and we went back to his office. I asked if there was a book or history about the gardens or the collections, but Dave said none existed. He had photographs though. First he produced a CD of dozens of images of plants, each isolated against a primary coloured background. It looked like a psychedelic nursery catalogue. There were pictures of little pots of leafy Coleus some palms and orchids. Nothing to set the heart racing. One picture showed a white orchid with bright pink spots. To me, it looked as though it was a victim of some vicious orchid pox, the colour of its affliction heightened by the intense sky-blue backdrop.
Dave then got out a power-point presentation of the history of the gardens; he had put it together a year before to try and raise awareness amongst local community groups. The first page said ‘City of Liverpool Botanical Collection 1803-2005’ and featured the Liverpool crest – a Liver bird rampant with a sprig of foliage in its beak. For a moment I wondered if the sprig was symbolic – was it a plant from one of the former botanic gardens?
On the second page was a heading ‘Origins of the Collection’ beneath which Dave had posted a portrait from the nineteenth century. It was of a noble man of about 60 years, seated cross-legged in a red armchair with quill and paper to hand, turning toward the viewer as if momentarily pausing from his work. All around him were ranged the presumed articles of his labour – books, a globe and behind him a swathe of lush red curtaining artfully drawn back to reveal a library strewn with sunlight. That’s William Roscoe, said Dave. He founded the botanic collection. It was his vision. Dave then said, quietly: we seem to have lost some of his original ideas. He turned the page: this was the first botanic garden, he said, pointing to a beautiful engraving of a long low Georgian glasshouse framed by magnificent trees. Beside it was a delicate plan of the layout of the garden, a triangular shaped plot, bounded by streets named, it seemed, after the plants of biblical times - Myrtle, Laurel and Olive. With its neatly divided rows of botanical ‘family’ beds, stove-house, ponds and curator’s lodge it reminded me of plans I had seen of the early botanical gardens of Padua and Pisa. It was as if a template of renaissance Italy had been lightly placed upon this corner plot of northwest England.
Beneath, Dave’s bullet points continued with the geographical origin of the garden’s plants, listed like an imperalist’s mantra - Europe, North America, South America, the Middle and Far East, the Pacific Islands, Australia and Russia – the world, in fact. The first botanic garden was so successful that it outgrew the facility, Dave said. So they built a bigger one further out of the city at a place called Wavertree.
On the next page of his presentation, headed ‘Botanic Garden at Wavertree’ came reproductions of picture postcards, images of Victorian splendour showing a great domed glasshouse flanked by huge gleaming wings, bearing the legend ‘Palmhouse, Botanic Gardens Liverpool.’ Here Dave’s bullet points highlighted royal visits from Queen Victoria and Czar Alexander II, of the change of hands of the gardens from private ownership to a public popular attraction and in capitals ‘IN 1850 ALMOST 40% OF THE POPULATION VISITED’ as though tempting prospective funders of today with the potential visitor numbers that might be attracted by any future garden. The last bullet point read ‘The Collection continued to grow until 1941, but the glasshouse was destroyed in the blitz.’ What happened to the plants? I asked. They were taken into safe keeping, Dave said. I asked if there were any remnants of either garden. The first one’s all gone, built over, Dave said. There’s a footprint of the old glasshouse and garden at Wavertree.
Turning the final pages, Dave showed me images of the third and last garden, styled ‘Harthill Botanic Gardens’. He pointed to a black and white aerial photograph of a vast range of low industrial looking glasshouses. Dave told me that this futuristic, yet functional sequence had been built after the war as the council’s plant propagation nursery, but the mundane municipal bedding stock, (the salvias of civic pride) had slowly given way to the exiled tropical plants from the earlier bombed garden. There was an interior scene – a beautiful ferny greenhouse and a map of the site, orientated to match the aerial photograph. Two final bullet points were on this page, the first again in capitals:
-THE CITY REPRESENTED BRITAIN AT INTERNATIONAL SHOWS INCLUDING PARIS, COLOGNE, VIENNA AND THE FLORIADE AMSTERDAM, AND ALSO EXHIBITED AT HARROGATE AND CHELSEA.
And last of all:
-The glasshouses were demolished in 1984.
Dave said: People are under the impression that when the glasshouses were dismantled at Harthill that the plants were thrown away too. But it wasn’t the orchids that were being put into rubbish skips, it was the glass and the wooden frames. The place was rotting. It was falling apart. I asked if we could see the Liverpool Orchids. He made a phone call.
Within a few minutes we were driving through south Liverpool to a place called Greenhill Nursery where Dave said that the majority of the botanical collection was now held. On the journey we talked about the 1980’s and what had happened at the closure of the last garden. Dave said the perception was that the decision to close the gardens was purely political but that in truth the glasshouses had also reached the end of their life. It was resolved at the time to store the plants safely, albeit out of public view, thus safeguarding the collection until a new home could be found: It’s just that no one had envisaged twenty five years later the plants would still be at Greenhill. I asked if there had been any plans meanwhile to find a new home and Dave told me there had been numerous. For one reason and another none had been successful. It’s a complex issue, he said. There’s a lot more to it than just building a glasshouse and filling it with the plants.
I noticed that we had suddenly turned off the main road and were driving slowly through a post-war housing estate. I could see a dead end ahead but just before it we turned left through a gate and swung into a big yard. At first I thought we had arrived on an industrial estate. Then I realised that the vast complex of low, utilitarian looking buildings were in fact dilapidated glasshouses. It seemed an incongruous place for the home of a historic botanical collection, bordered as it was on three sides by the humdrum of domestic life - washing lines, distant sounds of children playing, dogs barking – and on the fourth by a railway, upon which trains rattled past to and from the city centre. Around the yard were a number of buildings; a redbrick house, long abandoned (which I later discovered used to be the former Nursery Manager’s house), and a little brick hut – the gardeners’ mess room. Leaving the car we stepped inside for a moment. Pinned to a notice-board, along with numerous health and safety certificates, was the same picture of William Roscoe that Dave had shown me earlier. This time attached to a brief biography, clearly downloaded from the internet.
We were joined by Gerard Weaver, who Dave had told me was one of five botanical gardeners, all working on this site and dedicated to maintaining the collection. Gerry took us out in the direction of the glasshouses, en route passing five padlocked shipping containers which he said served as the gardeners’ tool shed. It was one of those damp March days when the ubiquitous brown of winter is still upon the world and spring seems impossible. The air was chilly. We now approached the nearest of the houses, the glass of which was tantalisingly whitewashed obscuring the view within. Gerry unlocked the door. As we stepped inside we instantly left the cool of that northern spring behind and with one step entered the warmth of the tropics. Before us stretched a long vista divided centrally in two by a path. And either side, sitting on benches was row upon row upon row of lush bromeliads, a tropical plant, relative of the pineapple, all 400 species (as Gerry told me) of which were neatly ranged as if set out like a feast. Each plant was separate, in its own pot, its roots thus discrete from its neighbour, yet oddly, it seemed that as we entered the house, the plants turned to look at us, collectively. Later, much later I thought about that look that those plants had given; defiant, slightly suspicious. I realised that over the last twenty five years they had clearly seen it all before; the visitors come to gawp; be they consultants assembling a feasibility study on a possible new garden or politicians trooping in, making concerned noises.
Over the next hour, maybe it was an hour, I don’t really know, we walked the three of us between, it seemed, all the zones of the world, from one greenhouse to another, our sense of place punctuated only by the chill March moments between each house. We entered the dimly lit damp green of the tropics, and saw Cycads, Nepenthes and great banana plants. A pitch-perfect bird of paradise flower grew imperiously high, as if cocking a snook at the lower growing figs and sugar cane. In many places plants had found numerous ways to rebel against their cloister, as if staging a silent sit-in protest. Some had jumped ship and made new bed-fellows; ferns were growing in with orchids, Spanish moss draped itself round the glasshouse’s regulatory thermometers. In the ‘Jungle House’ plants had run riot and grown out of all proportion, crashing against the low roof or rooting down so deep that they could never be dug out. Here we came across the voices of Gerry’s colleagues, Peter, Alan and Jeff who, he informed us, were hacking back bamboo. They emerged to say hello wildly brandishing machetes; like Victorian plant hunters slashing their way out of virgin Brazilian rain forest.
Next stop was the succulent house. In the clear arid air, a giant aloe spread its fleshy leaves across our path like some great comic book monster, whilst two huge potted Yuccas leant like drunken dukes against the glasshouse wall, as if refusing to fall over completely. Health and Safety notices warned us to ‘Beware of Spiky Plants’ as though the cactuses had been sharpening their talons over the years. As we walked, Gerry’s passion for the collection emerged. He told me of a vanilla orchid that in the ten years he worked in one house never flowered, but once moved, bloomed; of cycads that after fifteen years he was still waiting to see in flower. He pointed out some of the oldest plants; Dracaenas, the Dragon’s Blood tree possibly thirty to forty years old, the national collection of Coleus. He told me about the endless propagation the gardeners entailed, to keep the collection alive as parent plants became pot bound and died. So that the plants became ceaseless rows of distant cousins once, twice, three times removed. Gerry spoke of the frustrations with the limited height of the houses; the impossibility of bringing some plants into maturity. Of falling glass panes, rupturing structures. And the constant feeling that people had forgotten about the collection. We have become invisible, Gerry said.
And then at last in the final house we entered were the orchids, the Liverpool orchids. Row upon row, pot upon pot – pink cattleyas with frilly edges, brown paphiopedilums, some large, showy and bulbous, others discrete, their flowers minute. These were the flowers that the Knowsley Flower Show Committee had most lamented when I met them a few days before. We stayed with the orchids for the longest, in a house that stretched to a distant vanishing point, these show girls of the plant world protected from excess sun by swathes of green netting swagged along the overhead watering pipes. We paused by a bench and Gerry conjured the image of the former orchid grower, Olly Maguire who once worked there, silently, day in day out, propagating.
The abiding image for me of that day was in the orchid house. It was like the feast laid out for Miss Havisham’s wedding in Charles Dickins’s ‘Great Expectations’. Except here there were no cobwebs, just the perfumed smell of earth and growth and of an air, not of decay or melancholy, but of expectation. In that strange half-way glasshouse, caught between worlds, the orchids seemed to be waiting for something.
Extract from Mr Roscoe’s Garden, Jyll Bradley 2008
‘The garden that is finished is dead.’
H.E.Bates
1
It was a Tuesday morning in March 2006 and I was sitting in the eco-chic minimalist interior of the National Wildflower Centre in Knowsley near Liverpool with the Committee of the Knowsley Flower Show. I had been invited to Liverpool for a week to experience the city’s horticultural heritage, of which, at that time, I knew nothing. As an artist, that connection that comes through people and plants had been a starting point for my work for a few years. Maybe this visit would spark something for the Capital of Culture year in 2008? To be honest I wasn’t hopeful, but there seemed a keen-ness in the air. In advance of my visit I had asked to meet people who had an interest in plants and flowers. The Knowsley Flower Show Committee was the first group I had met. They were all enthusiastic and very knowledgeable amateur gardeners, who, now retired, were able to invest time in their greatest love. We had begun by talking about the genesis of their flower show and local horticultural history. Rightly curious, they in turn had asked me about my interest in plants. I was telling them about a visit to Colombia I had made and how, through meeting people connected to flowers there, a wholly new view of the country had emerged, one very different from the ubiquitous drugs n’ violence portrayed in the media. Now, I can’t recall exactly how, but one of the Committee who had said very little up to this point, (other than that he was the only one who didn’t do any gardening) suddenly surprised his fellows by revealing that as a young seaman he had jumped ship in Colombia and spent a year living near Cali on a coffee plantation. As he spoke, a blush spread across his face along with a wry smile; as if in the telling he was shedding the years. Seated before us, he was that young man again.
There followed a quiet ripple through the company. The seams of a life, presumed tightly sewn, had just loosened before our eyes. As his friends paused to recover, I asked the ex-seaman with the blushing grin if he had seen many orchids during his time in Colombia, a stupid question really, perhaps asked through embarrassment, with the obvious reply that it hadn’t been the orchids that had attracted his attention that year, but yes, there were, (so he had heard), more orchid species in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Ah yes, orchids, said the only Committee member whose mind still seemed within North West England: the orchids, what happened to all those orchids? The Liverpool orchids? His voice was strained. The orchids were the stars of the botanic garden. What happened to them?
There was a moment.
And then the Knowsley Flower Show Committee suddenly returned from South America and started to tell me about the Liverpool Botanic Garden, a place I had never heard of. Together they conjured glasshouses filled with rare orchids, the flower shows, the gold medals that were won. It wasn’t just orchids, there were dozens of tropical species. The first ones were brought in through the port, on the ships, said one person. That was when the garden was in the city centre, added another. They built a new garden after the war, said another member after the second world war, added someone else I used to visit with the children. Intrigued, I asked where I could see the orchids and the tropical plants and this garden, an image of which was now growing in my mind, only to be told that it was all gone. Destroyed by Derek Hatton, one of the members quietly said.
There was another moment.
All the orchids were lost, he said, they’re all gone now. I hadn’t heard the name of Derek Hatton for years, but I was instantly transported back to our living room, at home in Maidstone, Kent sitting on the settee with my grandfather and watching the television News at Six. It must have been in the early eighties when I was a teenager. The memory of being there with him was as vivid as the image that was on the TV screen. In my minds eye I could see a man, a politician, giving a speech to fervent applause from the steps of a great hall in Liverpool. Now, twenty five years or so later I was hooked by his connection to a vast and by all accounts exquisite collection of orchids, all gone, and the strong feelings of those present, which, like my memory, seemed undimmed through the passage of time. Not all the orchids are gone, someone said. A few of them survived. I’ve seen them in that small glasshouse at Calderstones Park. And then someone else added: Actually, there are hundreds of orchids still alive. They’re just out of public view. It was in that moment, somewhere between Maidstone, Colombia and Liverpool, courtesy of the personal revelation of an ex-seaman and the hospitality of the Flower Show Committee that my journey began. A garden destroyed, forgotten; in my lifetime too. I wanted to discover its story. Just before I left, I gave each of the Flower Show Committee members a postcard. On it was a photograph I had taken of a Colombian orchid grower with one of her prize blooms. The ex-seaman read the caption which gave her name: Ah yes, Beatriz… he sighed.
The next day I stood before a scene of abject desolation. A yawning earthy scar. I was at the site of the last Liverpool Botanic Garden. There was a padlocked, glasshouse. Inside were a few jaggedy Yucca plants splitting out of their plastic pots and a glowering group of ancient standing stones known as ‘The Calder Stones’ which gave their name to the surrounding park. Panes of glass had recently fallen from the house and various patch-up jobs had been done; but the spirit of the glasshouse was undeniably broken. I remember thinking: there is nothing more broken than a broken glasshouse. I was with Dave Kelly, Senior Horticultural Officer, at Liverpool City Parks Department HQ in Calderstones Park. He said: people think that once the last botanic garden closed in the eighties, all the plants were lost. They have forgotten that this vast collection exists. He added: The plant collections are thriving, they just don’t have a permanent home. It was cold and we went back to his office. I asked if there was a book or history about the gardens or the collections, but Dave said none existed. He had photographs though. First he produced a CD of dozens of images of plants, each isolated against a primary coloured background. It looked like a psychedelic nursery catalogue. There were pictures of little pots of leafy Coleus some palms and orchids. Nothing to set the heart racing. One picture showed a white orchid with bright pink spots. To me, it looked as though it was a victim of some vicious orchid pox, the colour of its affliction heightened by the intense sky-blue backdrop.
Dave then got out a power-point presentation of the history of the gardens; he had put it together a year before to try and raise awareness amongst local community groups. The first page said ‘City of Liverpool Botanical Collection 1803-2005’ and featured the Liverpool crest – a Liver bird rampant with a sprig of foliage in its beak. For a moment I wondered if the sprig was symbolic – was it a plant from one of the former botanic gardens?
On the second page was a heading ‘Origins of the Collection’ beneath which Dave had posted a portrait from the nineteenth century. It was of a noble man of about 60 years, seated cross-legged in a red armchair with quill and paper to hand, turning toward the viewer as if momentarily pausing from his work. All around him were ranged the presumed articles of his labour – books, a globe and behind him a swathe of lush red curtaining artfully drawn back to reveal a library strewn with sunlight. That’s William Roscoe, said Dave. He founded the botanic collection. It was his vision. Dave then said, quietly: we seem to have lost some of his original ideas. He turned the page: this was the first botanic garden, he said, pointing to a beautiful engraving of a long low Georgian glasshouse framed by magnificent trees. Beside it was a delicate plan of the layout of the garden, a triangular shaped plot, bounded by streets named, it seemed, after the plants of biblical times - Myrtle, Laurel and Olive. With its neatly divided rows of botanical ‘family’ beds, stove-house, ponds and curator’s lodge it reminded me of plans I had seen of the early botanical gardens of Padua and Pisa. It was as if a template of renaissance Italy had been lightly placed upon this corner plot of northwest England.
Beneath, Dave’s bullet points continued with the geographical origin of the garden’s plants, listed like an imperalist’s mantra - Europe, North America, South America, the Middle and Far East, the Pacific Islands, Australia and Russia – the world, in fact. The first botanic garden was so successful that it outgrew the facility, Dave said. So they built a bigger one further out of the city at a place called Wavertree.
On the next page of his presentation, headed ‘Botanic Garden at Wavertree’ came reproductions of picture postcards, images of Victorian splendour showing a great domed glasshouse flanked by huge gleaming wings, bearing the legend ‘Palmhouse, Botanic Gardens Liverpool.’ Here Dave’s bullet points highlighted royal visits from Queen Victoria and Czar Alexander II, of the change of hands of the gardens from private ownership to a public popular attraction and in capitals ‘IN 1850 ALMOST 40% OF THE POPULATION VISITED’ as though tempting prospective funders of today with the potential visitor numbers that might be attracted by any future garden. The last bullet point read ‘The Collection continued to grow until 1941, but the glasshouse was destroyed in the blitz.’ What happened to the plants? I asked. They were taken into safe keeping, Dave said. I asked if there were any remnants of either garden. The first one’s all gone, built over, Dave said. There’s a footprint of the old glasshouse and garden at Wavertree.
Turning the final pages, Dave showed me images of the third and last garden, styled ‘Harthill Botanic Gardens’. He pointed to a black and white aerial photograph of a vast range of low industrial looking glasshouses. Dave told me that this futuristic, yet functional sequence had been built after the war as the council’s plant propagation nursery, but the mundane municipal bedding stock, (the salvias of civic pride) had slowly given way to the exiled tropical plants from the earlier bombed garden. There was an interior scene – a beautiful ferny greenhouse and a map of the site, orientated to match the aerial photograph. Two final bullet points were on this page, the first again in capitals:
-THE CITY REPRESENTED BRITAIN AT INTERNATIONAL SHOWS INCLUDING PARIS, COLOGNE, VIENNA AND THE FLORIADE AMSTERDAM, AND ALSO EXHIBITED AT HARROGATE AND CHELSEA.
And last of all:
-The glasshouses were demolished in 1984.
Dave said: People are under the impression that when the glasshouses were dismantled at Harthill that the plants were thrown away too. But it wasn’t the orchids that were being put into rubbish skips, it was the glass and the wooden frames. The place was rotting. It was falling apart. I asked if we could see the Liverpool Orchids. He made a phone call.
Within a few minutes we were driving through south Liverpool to a place called Greenhill Nursery where Dave said that the majority of the botanical collection was now held. On the journey we talked about the 1980’s and what had happened at the closure of the last garden. Dave said the perception was that the decision to close the gardens was purely political but that in truth the glasshouses had also reached the end of their life. It was resolved at the time to store the plants safely, albeit out of public view, thus safeguarding the collection until a new home could be found: It’s just that no one had envisaged twenty five years later the plants would still be at Greenhill. I asked if there had been any plans meanwhile to find a new home and Dave told me there had been numerous. For one reason and another none had been successful. It’s a complex issue, he said. There’s a lot more to it than just building a glasshouse and filling it with the plants.
I noticed that we had suddenly turned off the main road and were driving slowly through a post-war housing estate. I could see a dead end ahead but just before it we turned left through a gate and swung into a big yard. At first I thought we had arrived on an industrial estate. Then I realised that the vast complex of low, utilitarian looking buildings were in fact dilapidated glasshouses. It seemed an incongruous place for the home of a historic botanical collection, bordered as it was on three sides by the humdrum of domestic life - washing lines, distant sounds of children playing, dogs barking – and on the fourth by a railway, upon which trains rattled past to and from the city centre. Around the yard were a number of buildings; a redbrick house, long abandoned (which I later discovered used to be the former Nursery Manager’s house), and a little brick hut – the gardeners’ mess room. Leaving the car we stepped inside for a moment. Pinned to a notice-board, along with numerous health and safety certificates, was the same picture of William Roscoe that Dave had shown me earlier. This time attached to a brief biography, clearly downloaded from the internet.
We were joined by Gerard Weaver, who Dave had told me was one of five botanical gardeners, all working on this site and dedicated to maintaining the collection. Gerry took us out in the direction of the glasshouses, en route passing five padlocked shipping containers which he said served as the gardeners’ tool shed. It was one of those damp March days when the ubiquitous brown of winter is still upon the world and spring seems impossible. The air was chilly. We now approached the nearest of the houses, the glass of which was tantalisingly whitewashed obscuring the view within. Gerry unlocked the door. As we stepped inside we instantly left the cool of that northern spring behind and with one step entered the warmth of the tropics. Before us stretched a long vista divided centrally in two by a path. And either side, sitting on benches was row upon row upon row of lush bromeliads, a tropical plant, relative of the pineapple, all 400 species (as Gerry told me) of which were neatly ranged as if set out like a feast. Each plant was separate, in its own pot, its roots thus discrete from its neighbour, yet oddly, it seemed that as we entered the house, the plants turned to look at us, collectively. Later, much later I thought about that look that those plants had given; defiant, slightly suspicious. I realised that over the last twenty five years they had clearly seen it all before; the visitors come to gawp; be they consultants assembling a feasibility study on a possible new garden or politicians trooping in, making concerned noises.
Over the next hour, maybe it was an hour, I don’t really know, we walked the three of us between, it seemed, all the zones of the world, from one greenhouse to another, our sense of place punctuated only by the chill March moments between each house. We entered the dimly lit damp green of the tropics, and saw Cycads, Nepenthes and great banana plants. A pitch-perfect bird of paradise flower grew imperiously high, as if cocking a snook at the lower growing figs and sugar cane. In many places plants had found numerous ways to rebel against their cloister, as if staging a silent sit-in protest. Some had jumped ship and made new bed-fellows; ferns were growing in with orchids, Spanish moss draped itself round the glasshouse’s regulatory thermometers. In the ‘Jungle House’ plants had run riot and grown out of all proportion, crashing against the low roof or rooting down so deep that they could never be dug out. Here we came across the voices of Gerry’s colleagues, Peter, Alan and Jeff who, he informed us, were hacking back bamboo. They emerged to say hello wildly brandishing machetes; like Victorian plant hunters slashing their way out of virgin Brazilian rain forest.
Next stop was the succulent house. In the clear arid air, a giant aloe spread its fleshy leaves across our path like some great comic book monster, whilst two huge potted Yuccas leant like drunken dukes against the glasshouse wall, as if refusing to fall over completely. Health and Safety notices warned us to ‘Beware of Spiky Plants’ as though the cactuses had been sharpening their talons over the years. As we walked, Gerry’s passion for the collection emerged. He told me of a vanilla orchid that in the ten years he worked in one house never flowered, but once moved, bloomed; of cycads that after fifteen years he was still waiting to see in flower. He pointed out some of the oldest plants; Dracaenas, the Dragon’s Blood tree possibly thirty to forty years old, the national collection of Coleus. He told me about the endless propagation the gardeners entailed, to keep the collection alive as parent plants became pot bound and died. So that the plants became ceaseless rows of distant cousins once, twice, three times removed. Gerry spoke of the frustrations with the limited height of the houses; the impossibility of bringing some plants into maturity. Of falling glass panes, rupturing structures. And the constant feeling that people had forgotten about the collection. We have become invisible, Gerry said.
And then at last in the final house we entered were the orchids, the Liverpool orchids. Row upon row, pot upon pot – pink cattleyas with frilly edges, brown paphiopedilums, some large, showy and bulbous, others discrete, their flowers minute. These were the flowers that the Knowsley Flower Show Committee had most lamented when I met them a few days before. We stayed with the orchids for the longest, in a house that stretched to a distant vanishing point, these show girls of the plant world protected from excess sun by swathes of green netting swagged along the overhead watering pipes. We paused by a bench and Gerry conjured the image of the former orchid grower, Olly Maguire who once worked there, silently, day in day out, propagating.
The abiding image for me of that day was in the orchid house. It was like the feast laid out for Miss Havisham’s wedding in Charles Dickins’s ‘Great Expectations’. Except here there were no cobwebs, just the perfumed smell of earth and growth and of an air, not of decay or melancholy, but of expectation. In that strange half-way glasshouse, caught between worlds, the orchids seemed to be waiting for something.
Extract from Mr Roscoe’s Garden, Jyll Bradley 2008