Two young crows, beaks agape, sat quietly on the stump of a beech tree I cut down on the eastern bank below the castle walls in the late 1970s. The crows waited for a parent to turn up with the remains of a sandwich nicked from the cafe down the garden. They were living a kind of parallel existence as shrine animals, dark creatures in the garden’s gloriously vivid displays of flower, stealing tributes from visitors, essential to the life of the place but overlooked.
Cultural places in the public view have a wild private life. Behind the care and hard work that sustains a garden like this and gives it aesthetic qualities that people from all over the world come to experience, there is a wild life that grounds it in place and provides an ecological context for the cultural. Much of this life, once persecuted for its wildness, is now celebrated as wildlife but crows retain that outsider, transgressive character. However beautiful the garden is, crows reveal a secret bandit territory. Common and dark, they are almost invisible and yet nonetheless tutelary.
Other animals here were more noticeable: fallow deer bucks with antlers like hands in velvet socks grazed where grass was sweeter in the shade of trees; young squirrels scratted under rhododendrons; cabbage white and meadow brown butterflies tripped through psychedelic meadows of herbaceous borders; mating damselflies levitated over the pond; bumblebees rattled in hollyhocks; hoverflies docked on golden plates of yarrow.
Although the sky was greying, the air was still and hot, and the flower colours were tired of their own brilliance. Despite the lack of rain, the gardens (some of the best in Europe) were surprisingly lush, though their parched lawns looked stretched taut over the archaeological remains of older gardens beneath them.
A lot had changed since I cut that beech tree down. Although much of the world still looked the same, it was not, and yet there was the same mysterious atmosphere here, a kind of breath of leaf and flower rising from the earth that sustained those wonderful plants. The young crows, open-beaked, breathed that, too.
- Paul Evans reads his ghost story As I Walked Out One Morning in May, with wildlife recordings by Chris Watson, on BBC Radio 4 on Friday 27 July at 15.45 (UK time).
