I'd Have Liked To Have Been There...

It's been hot...it has honestly.

I sat out in the back garden and watched a Jenny Wren flying back and forth with wisps of moss in her beak to the nest she's building in the old apple tree...the apple tree is rather like a tenement building for birds rather than humans. The small birds make their nests in the ivy that drapes from the gnarled branches...a Blackbird nests in the crook of two of the smaller branches and the stupid Pigeons have their apology for a home right at the top...

They sat there cooing to each other for a good hour, before they finally shut up and flew away...

I like those white Fan-tailed doves that grand people have living in a Dove-Cote in immaculate stable yards...they date from the late Mediaeval period when Doves and Pigeons were bred for food...don't suppose their Dove-Cotes cost a huge amount of money from an up-market garden centre though...

They kept fish in moats and added a few Swans for Feast days...along with extensive and very carefully managed Rabbit Warrens. Actually, to be a Warrener was an excellent job... don't know anything about the chap in charge of the fish or the Swans...it was important of course, so maybe he was at the higher end of serfdom, like his mate the Warrener...

Something I'd have loved to see were the great glass-houses of the early 1700's...filled with Apricots and Peaches...Grape-Vines and even Pineapples...not just fruits though...they grew a huge variety of exotic Orchids to adorn the tables and elegant sideboards of the big house. African violets were popular for the ladies bedrooms and sitting rooms, while the heavily scented flowering Jasmine stood on landings and in hallways.

There would have been more than enough staff to feed and dig and pot on...to keep the coal boilers going for the necessary heat and plenty enough lads to wheel barrow load after barrow load of muck from the stables to the vegetable beds...

I'd have liked to see all the activity and be privy to the head gardeners way of growing...to be able to eat a ripe Peach straight from the tree and wander round the herb garden on a summers afternoon. Bee-hives were another essential...for pollination and for the honey they produced...usually sited to one side of the enclosed herbal they were regarded as being almost mystical beings...

It would be good to peek around the door of the stone flagged shed where the village girls learned how to produce sweet scented waters for the bath...cooling salves for a headache...an ointment for the outbreaks of the Scabies...

There are plenty of historical re-enactments but it wouldn't be the same...I'd know that lad pushing a wheelbarrow works in the local bank and the girl carefully stripping lavender flowers from their stems is the same girl who sweeps up the hair at the hairdressers...

I'd want to see the real people...the man coming back from the Rabbit Warren with a dozen fat Rabbits for the cook...I'd like to follow him home and meet his wife and his children...

To wander around that beautiful house surrounded by a moat...the walls decorated with hand wrought tapestries stitched with vivid threads bought from a travelling salesman...to bend and sniff the home-made beeswax polish on a great wooden chest holding fine linens...with lavender bags from the herbal garden between them, to keep them smelling fresh.

Perhaps to be there at night, when the rush lights were lit casting shadows around the nooks and crannies, while visitors left their mounts in the stable yard to be bedded down by hard-working grooms and the table in the great hall was laid with fine silver and pewter...goblets of wine made from the grapes and sweetmeats from the herbs...a platter perhaps, of ripe Apricots...fish decorated with slices of Oranges from the Glasshouse...warm from the oven breads and dishes of Broad Beans and tiny new Peas...salty pats of freshly made butter

There might have been a junket for dessert, made from the new milk of the house cows, flavoured with wild Strawberries picked that afternoon from the fields by the children of the Head Gardener.

This article is factual about the gardening and the hot-houses of the early 1700's...the information comes from a gardening book I have written in 1729. The house, moat and stable yards are from the beautiful Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk...the rest is a product of my imagination.