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As the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew prepare to celebrate their 250th anniversary, Dan Cruickshank unearths some of the surprising stories that shaped the famous gardens. His travels take him from the royal gardens to the corridors of power and the outposts of the Empire as he pieces together Kew’s story, uncovering tales of bravery, high adventure, passion and drama. (docuwiki)
‘The country blooms – a garden, and a grave’, Oliver Goldsmith ‘The Deserted Village’.
“The whole ambition of the picturesque was to rework the natural world into a ‘landscape’ – a word that came to England at the end of the sixteenth century
from the German, via the Dutch. Early English uses of ‘landskip’ are strongly cultural – the word is used to describe paintings,
particularly the backgrounds of paintings, and thereby any view that could conceivably be painted.”
“The picturesque encouraged the critical appreciation of nature as a spectacle. Observers of a scene – the word ‘scene’ itself reveals the implicit theatricality of viewing – became an audience, by turns appreciative or critical.
Hence natural landscapes became part of culture, and were understood, judged, and painted according to artistic conventions and aesthetic theories.
For a growing proportion of the increasingly urban population, initial encounters with natural landscapes would be through the medium of art: representations delivered either by pastoral poetry or in picturesque images.”
‘In grand scenes, even the peasant cannot be admitted, if he be employed in the low occupations of his profession: the spade, the scythe, and the rake are all excluded.’ What was allowed was pastoral idleness: the lazy cowherd resting on his pole . . . the peasant lolling on a rock’, an angler rather than a fisherman, and gypsies, banditti, and the occasional individual soldier in antique armour. The image of the countryside presented therefore looked very much in need of improvement – slack, inefficient, indigent, lawless, and archaic. Moreover, once ‘improved’ the landscape was likely to be as empty of agricultural labour as the picturesque depicted it since nearly all the peasantry would have been forced off the land.
timespace coordinates: 1973 remote Hebridean island Summerisle
The Wicker Man is a 1973 British mystery horror film directed by Robin Hardy. It stars Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt, and Christopher Lee. The screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, inspired by David Pinner‘s 1967 novel Ritual, centres on the visit of Police Sergeant Neil Howie to the isolated island of Summerisle, in search of a missing girl. Howie, a devout Christian, is appalled to find that the inhabitants of the island have abandoned Christianity and now practise a form of Celtic paganism.
In 2011, a spiritual sequel entitled The Wicker Tree was released to mixed reviews. This film was also directed by Hardy, and featured Lee in a cameo appearance. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: remote Welsh island, 1905
Apostle is a 2018 British-American period horror film written and directed by Gareth Evans and starring Dan Stevens, Lucy Boynton, Mark Lewis Jones, Bill Milner, Kristine Froseth and Michael Sheen. (wiki)
“A drifter on a dangerous mission to rescue his kidnapped sister tangles with a sinister religious cult on an isolated island.” (imdb)
Ambient 4: On Land is the eighth solo studio album by British ambient musician Brian Eno. It was the final edition in Eno’s ambient series, which began in 1978 with Music for Airports.
On Land is a mixture of synthesizer-based notes, nature/animal recordings, and a complex array of other sounds, most of which were unused, collected recordings from previous albums and the sessions that created them. As Eno explained, “… the making of records such as On Land involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and “composting”. (…) “instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones … I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work”.
Despite the music’s dark leanings, it is in a sense still highly “ambient” in that the tracks tend to blend into each other and thus fulfill all of Eno’s original expectations of what the term means. Nevertheless, there is still room for the occasional surprise, such as Jon Hassell‘s recognisable effect-laden trumpet in “Shadow“. Eno, cognizant of the deeper aural qualities, said, “On the whole, On Land is quite a disturbed landscape: some of the undertones deliberately threaten the overtones, so you get the pastoral prettiness on top, but underneath there’s a dissonance that’s like an impending earthquake”.
The album makes reference to definite geographical places, such as “Lizard Point“, named after the exposed, southernmost tip of mainland Britain, close to Land’s End in South-West England.
“Tal Coat” refers to Pierre Louis Jacob (1905–1985), aka Pierre Tal-Coat, a proponent of the French form of abstract expressionism, Tachisme. This interest in painting is reflected in his statement that the album was “… an attempt to transpose into music something that you can do in painting: creating a figurative environment. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art because it was abstract, not figurative. In contrast, my intention in On Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without referring to the history of music – more to a “history of listening””
“Lantern Marsh” was a place in East Anglia where he grew up. He remarks, “My experience of it derives not from having visited it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be”.
“Leeks Hills“, Eno explains, “is a little wood (much smaller now than when I was young, and this not merely the effect of age and memory) which stands between Woodbridge and Melton. There isn’t a whole lot left of it now, but it used to be quite extensive. To find it you travel down the main road connecting Woodbridge and it lies to your left as you go down the hill”.
“Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960” is named after the once prosperous seaport of Dunwich, England, which eroded into the sea over a period of three hundred years. (wiki <3)
For billions of years our planet was devoid of life, but something transformed it into a vibrant, living planet. That something was soil.
It’s a much-misunderstood substance, often dismissed as ‘dirt’,something to be avoided. Yet the crops we eat, the animals we rely on, the very oxygen we breathe, all depend on the existence of the plant life that bursts from the soil every year.
In this film, gardening expert Chris Beardshaw explores where soil comes from, what it’s made of and what makes it so essential to life. Using specialist microphotography, he reveals it as we’ve never seen it before – an intricate microscopic landscape, teeming with strange and wonderful life forms.
It’s a world where the chaos of life meets the permanence of rock, the two interacting with each other to make a living system of staggering complexity that sustains all life on Earth.
Chris explores how man is challenging this most precious resource on our planet and how new science is seeking to preserve it. (bbc)
TimeSpace Warps 