Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

February 2007 Volume 5(1)

Endpiece

Of books and gardens

Colin Will finds he can’t get away from things botanic – and getting his hands dirty.

While we were in Frankfurt recently we visited the Städler Museum to see its new exhibition – Gärten (The Painter’s Garden: Design, Inspiration, Delight). I have to say it was breathtaking. From the Upper Rhine Master’s Little Garden of Paradise (c.1410) to the moderns, it was a delight to eye and mind. When I was Chief Librarian at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, the collection of herbals and other illustrated botanical texts were a constant joy. I took great pleasure in showing them to visitors, and to specialist botanists and artists. It was a rare privilege, having responsibility for this major national collection, and always a pleasure, never a chore.

I was reminded of this in Frankfurt, seeing a copy of Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis displayed in the Städler. The hand-coloured copy is something Edinburgh doesn’t own, but we did (do) have a huge copy of the Double Elephant (I think) version, with all three flowering seasons bound into one book. It’s the largest – and heaviest – book I’ve ever come across. It’s a florilegium, celebrating the plants grown in the garden of the Prince-Bishop of Eichstädt. After the death of the Prince, it’s said that by 1630 his garden was no more than a vegetable plot, but at least we still have the Hortus, a celebration of plants and plantings that can inspire today’s botanists, artists and bibliophiles. Another series of illustrations were by Hans Weiditz, my favourite among the early botanical artists. He prepared these for Otto Brunfels’ Contrafayt Kreuterbuch of 1529, although he’s perhaps better known for his work on Leonhard Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium of 1540. Weiditz was among the first to draw plants from living specimens, with all their irregularities and imperfections, rather than the idealised versions of earlier artists. Another reminder of the RBGE Library was seeing some of the plates from Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes of British Algae. This remarkable work used living specimens of seaweeds to, as it were, take their own photographs by a chemical process related to the production of draughtsman’s ‘blueprints’.

Other highlights of the exhibition were, for me, Thomas Eakins’ Arcadia, the Corots, a Watteau, a Fragonard, a Delacroix, some fantastic Constable skies, a luminous van Gogh painting of the asylum garden at Nuenen, and some marvellous Impressionists. The German Romantics of the 19th century were well represented too, and were almost all new to me. I have to say that going round an exhibition with a two-year old is not conducive to concentration, and I’d have liked to stay longer, but what I saw was stunning. It also reminded me what a fantastic job I once had, before I was seduced into the dubious pleasures of senior management, away from the books and paintings I love.

What I do now can’t really be called a ‘job’; it’s a sort of mosaic of literary and voluntary activities that I find immensely satisfying. Something that has taken up a lot of my time in recent months has been helping to put together a financial package on behalf of Tyne & Esk Writers. This is the umbrella organisation for writing groups in Midlothian and East Lothian. In the past, we’ve been fortunate to employ Writing Fellows, in partnership with East Lothian and Midlothian Libraries and the Scottish Arts Council. This time, we approached Leader Plus as the third partner with a proposal to employ a Creative Writing Development Consultant, a slightly different flavour of writer with a different role and a wider remit. I’m delighted that we were successful in our application, and the new writer is about to be appointed. One of our more Scotophilic bards has suggested that the new job title should be Bidie-in Screiver, but I don’t think that would catch on.

Returning to the botanical/horticultural theme, one of my voluntary activities is involved with the 18th/19th century Amisfield Walled Garden at Haddington. This is a huge garden, at over 3ha the second-largest walled garden in Scotland (I’m told), and was originally part of the Wemyss estate, though now owned by East Lothian Council. The Amisfield Preservation Trust, of which I’m a Director (I own my own fork), is trying to preserve the fabric and develop the garden for community use and as a visitor attraction (difficult when you’re next to a sewage works). The walls are over 3m high and in excellent condition, but the pavilions at each corner have lost their domed roofs. Much of our work in the past year has been to clear scrub – brambles, nettles and thistles – but the centre of the garden was planted up as a tree nursery and later abandoned. It’s a major headache, trying to decide what to do with these trees, which are now neither decorative nor particularly useful to people or wildlife. Over the winter, however, we’ve managed to clear some beds round the perimeter, and we’re about to plant seeds of ‘heritage’ vegetables and potato varieties not seen in East Lothian since the 1930s. And I’ll be revisiting the RBGE Library to swot up on Victorian kitchen gardening techniques. What goes around comes around.
Colin Will

www.colinwill.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 5(1) February 2007

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Last updated: 30-Mar-2007