Two things happened: I read The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys and I found this vid.

I have long wanted to visit The Cloisters in New York. Shortly after finishing Humphreys’ novel I found this, and it was the gardens, I suppose, but I got hit by this enormous wave of longing.

It feels like homesickness, but for a future, a state not yet present. Can one feel homesick for a shape of life we feel should be there?

The novel was a sweet treat on the bitter tongue of the day in which I read it. It’s a story about a woman alone during WWII in England. She is a gardener, a plant researcher, and she is longing for something. She leaves London to take up a volunteer post in the south west growing food (potatoes, in fact) for the war effort.

The story is about her and her team of women, the gardens they create and restore and the soldiers they direct much of their longing toward.

One of the things I love about the book is that much of the story is told through plants. There is a thread in the larger narrative in which the main character (Gwen) finds and then restores a triptych of a garden. Each panel of the garden is dedicated to a feeling – longing, loss, love, for example. Through the restoration the deeper story of personal salvation is told. Gwen is redeemed from her isolation, but not in a traditionally romantic kind of way. This is a story told about war, after all.

Humphreys is a poet. The consequence is that her language is wonderfully evocative, rich and rhythmic. Another consequence is that there is a further story thread in which Gwen writes to Virginia Woolf. It is during the time over which the story occurs that Virginia disappears and is later found dead. The parallels between the death of a much loved and admired writer and the delicate blooms of the saffron crocus in the garden are never overtly made, but they are there.

And then there were the gardens of The Cloisters. Somehow this is the same story, part of it anyway. In a garden like that, even a kitchen garden, there is a story of longing. Maybe it’s because medieval gardens are enclosed? And this enclosure, the fenced unicorn of the Cloister’s tapestry, for example, is also symbolic of the purity of (proper) femininity—and the desperate results of such an ideal imposed on actual women.

Walled gardens: there’s the desire for health and security of course, but there is the need for beauty as well, and the fear that comes with loss and the dark quiet of a long winter. Really, gardens are deeply subversive creations.

My favourite gardens are usually the medicinal and magical ones. Mandragora. The line between illness and health is very thin. The nightshades, for example, will kill but they are also medicine. It’s their capacity to lift us up, to change us, that makes them magical. Mandragora. We are unable not to see ourselves in the world. It is both our sole avenue to leading a meaningful life, and the potential death of those species that take on our fears and hatreds.

Perhaps it’s the symbolism, the material poetry of gardens in wartime (and the medieval period seems to me one long religious war on sensuality), that ties longing to plants. I never feel that I know enough about them, about their specifics, their bodies, their needs. And each time I learn something, a new name, am able to individuate a specific tree from the forest, I feel that much closer to the earth which is my being. I suppose this is the homesickness.

What I loved most about Gwen and her troubles, was how they are grown out in the story. The troubles and their resolution are a bit like the espaliered trees along the wall next to her hidden garden of longing. They are pinned, but grow limbs past the limits of the wall ties and so reach places never intended for a woman to go. Not a beautiful tree, but an enduring one.

There’s an espaliered pear in The Cloisters too. I suspect it remains pinned, but that might be part of the reason why I want to see it for myself. I can’t help it you know, this reading the world in human terms. Neither can Humphreys, I suspect, and of course, this is what makes her book so wonderfully human.