Rosemary, Mud, and the Past
Yesterday, in the nursery where I work, one of the landscapers was chatting to me about the winter jobs. Pruning roses, for sure. Pruning fruit trees. “And of course,” he said, “we take three days to trim the lavender back in the formal garden.” He paused for moment, and smiled. “I love a formal garden.”
I felt the scent of lavender when he described it, and it reminded me of how often the work gardeners do is blurred out of the record.
The other week I read Sophie Yeo’s fantastic book Nature’s Ghosts. Yeo offers a fascinating, scholarly and yet surprisingly hopeful perspective on nature, wilderness, and the long history of climate change. Her knowledge of plant history is utterly compelling. When she explains some detail of research into ancient pollen deposits or draws upon friable fossil remnants to recreate a long-gone ecosystem, you trust her. So it probably says terrible things about me as a person that one tiny, early detail nagged at me. Walking over the site of a lost medieval village, visible only as gentle humps and mounds of soil beneath green turf, Yeo poetically conjures up the bustling life of a family around their timber longhouse. Children play; adults huddle near their cattle for warmth. ‘I crouched beside a woman as she parted the mud to plant herbs in her plot, relishing the scent of rosemary and sage that wafted from the leaves crushed lightly in her hands’.
The description is paint-by-numbers evocative. References to smell and touch? Check. We are supposed to breathe in that imagined smell of rosemary and sage, that almost too-tactile image of hands dabbling into mud, and be transported back across the centuries. For reasons passing understanding, mud signifies the distant, primitive past in ways mere earth or soil cannot. Unfortunately, though, mud also kills Yeo’s evocative image stone dead. Rosemary - as a twelfth-century English author reminds us - grows best on well-drained, sandy land (‘sandi3um lænde’). The image of rosemary planted in mud is a peculiar one for an author whose main business is analysing the significance of how and where plants grow.
Why does it matter? The rhetorical significance of herbs and mud far outstrips the demands of botanical accuracy. It’s a Four Yorkshireman sketch in subtext: no matter that Yeo has just imagined this early medieval woman huddling up next to her cattle for warmth. When the narrative demands it, she becomes someone who can’t even afford manure or soil. Earth? You were lucky! We were so poor we couldn’t afford cow muck and soil, we had to make do with mud! It’s grim in the past.
What Yeo has depicted here is what we might call a ‘mud herb woman’. There’s a sense that certain aspects of history - like, say, the history of gardens - aren’t really that worth being precise about. Want to write about a woman with a close connection to nature? Just throw in some mud and herbs.
In Maggie O’Farrell’s wonderful Hamnet - which is a masterclass in using historical material culture well - it is, unfortunately, the case that Agnes, Shakespeare’s slightly weird, witchcrafty wife, is a mud herb woman. As a novel, Hamnet draws its considerable power from the precision of its historical frame of reference. The main plot concerning Shakespeare’s doomed son unwinds with agonising brilliance. Tiny details make the book come alive: the rows of tools on Hamnet’s grandfather’s bench; the sounds of a shifting Tudor house. It’s not precisely jarring that when we first meet Agnes - Anne Hathaway - she is calming her bees with the smoke from ‘a bunch of smouldering rosemary’. Nor that, by the end of the book, she has acquired a herb garden at New Place, complete with sage to make an ‘elixir’ for her husband. I can put up with the fact that the lavender she cuts back is planted inside the ‘vacancies’ of a knot garden (lavender is what you use to make the knots), because I know when I notice this glitch I am just being picky.
But I do mind that O’Farrell’s Agnes combines this fondness for herbs with a fey ‘otherness’ expressed in terms of her closeness to unimproved nature. When the young Will Shakespeare first hears of her, he pictures a strange creature ‘half-woman, half-animal … clothing clotted with mud and foliage’. When she plants up her garden at New Place - with pears that fruit in the first year, which must therefore be grafted specimens from a nursery - she also brings in a cutting from a wild rose. Which, of course, wouldn’t remotely strike anyone as utterly bonkers for a woman curating an elegant knot garden. There’s no sense of the deep practical knowledge of plants and herbs that was once central to people’s lives. The description makes invisible the work of plant nurseries, that provided the pear trees O’Farrell’s Agnes plants in her garden, and in turn it makes invisible the men and women - often unnamed, unknown, and not poetic in the least - who ran those nurseries and reared those plants, and worked with earth and soil.
Thinking again about rosemary, I was reminded of a wonderful moment in Hilary Mantel’s entirely perfect third book of the Wolf Hall trilogy. Mantel’s Cromwell has plenty of mud in his background. But the wheel of fortune turns and he is raised up, and we see him at the height of his success, ‘the second man of England’. Chief amongst his attributes is his infallible, unflinching memory. ‘The king likes to test [him], by asking him for details of obscure disputes from twenty years back. He sometimes carries a spring of dried rosemary or rue, and crumbles it in his palm as if inhaling the scent would help him. But everyone knows it is only a performance. The only things he cannot remember are things he never knew’.
Across her series, Mantel makes clear that Cromwell is a man steeped in Renaissance learning, in Humanist training of the memory. She describes the manuals he has read, and we are given a vivid sense of how Cromwell constructs his visual images and stores them in his mind. This memory training is visual and locative, not olfactory. When Cromwell pretends to sniff the crushed spring of rosemary, he is playing with the idea of memory, with the stereotype of what herbs mean as a broad signifier of the past. Mantel’s protagonist is far too cleverly constructed to smell rosemary and retreat into a cliched sense of the past. We sense that he would know which herbs do, and do not, grow in mud.