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Kewtanical Burdens Thomas Dervan
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Tristesse Banal Rhiannon Auriol
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world in miniature Meg Watts
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The Red Tree Johnny White Really-Really
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At the Hortus, Amsterdam C.P. Nield
32 Trip Report Adam Husain 46 About our contributors 47 Acknowledgements & Content Warnings
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Adam Husain Orna Rifkin Thomas Dervan Kitty Blain
Kewtanical Burdens Thomas Dervan Kew Gardens is a tourist spot and a quite lovely day out. Four point five TripAdvised stars based on 8,480 reviews: little use arguing with that. Reviewers call it absolutely incredible, otherwise gorgeous, tell us how it is wonderful to wander through those immaculately cared for gardens. A site of World Heritage, per UNESCO. Nice and safe, too, with its own dedicated police force, the Kew Constabulary. One amongst them, Ed, aged 49, says he loves his job, the garden has beautiful trees, flowers and buildings, and a great tradition: he is in the fresh air every day. But then in summertime ‘Out with the Petal Patrol’, The Independent, 2011 it does get a little more taxing, he tells us. Elderly people, coached in on tour buses, collapse out of exhaustion: they have refused to buy and eat anything, not even a trout baguette (eight pounds), have refused to drink the glass-bottled seltzer water on offer at the Pavillion Palace Café (three stars, 93 reviews, this time What a Disappointment, Shoddy All Round, Awful, Insulting, and Dire to Say the Least). Heart attacks are common: not uncommon also is the ordeal of having to call three ambulances in a day, says Ed. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, idyll in a constant state of crisis. Imagine it: ambulances dispatched from 4
the hospital before they have been called, not-insignificant swoons and faintings greeting them on their arrival—or even, maybe, triggered by their arrival, by paramedics bursting out from between the tall hedges, by the sudden shrill ‘wee woo’, the high-pitched calls of ‘knee knaw knee’. Gardens and in particular Botanical Gardens are strange places. Filled up with contradictions, and defined by those contradictions. Example: any ‘public’ garden or park, if it wishes to be anything more than a lawn or a playing field, must be spread over with bushes and with trees, and therefore be filled with what are, in effect, private spaces. Sheltered clearings, areas of close tree cover, or hideouts behind rows of dense brambles. Most of us, at one point or another, escaped into them as kids, or teenagers. ‘Secluded corners’, is what we might call them generally, and more aptly maybe if the garden also has a wall running around it—as so many gardens do. Boundaries in their many forms (walls, hedgerows, fences, and in Kew’s case, a deep moat) are, in fact, weirdly inextricable from our notion of the garden. What we tend to think of as an open space can only come into being through an act of enclosure. And this has been so from the first. ‘Paradise’, one of the words we use to refer to Adam and Eve’s garden habitation, comes from the Proto-Iranian ‘paridayjah’: 1. A circular boundary wall, or 2. A place enclosed by one. What else was the Garden in Eden? Genesis 2:9: a place where out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that 5
is pleasant to the sight, and good for food. A place that first of all provides pleasure to the senses, but one that also has some agricultural use. What we are to make (if anything) of this ordering in as it stands in the bible, I am not sure. Still, it points to something else: that in this thing called “the garden”, the aesthetical and the practical are simultaneous. A garden tends neither to be merely decorative, nor merely functional or productive, but rather it most often straddles these categories. In your back gardens, beds of silver cabbages edged with red carnations, lettuces mixed with alyssum, and a chicken hutch sprawled over with Elizabeth Bishop, Manuelzinho rose vines. All of this could not be truer for Kew. Like so many other Botanics, it is both what we might call a ‘pleasure garden’ and a ‘vegetable garden.’ Somewhere among the gentle sloping lawns, the irregular beds of flowers - behind those lines of gargantuan foreign shrubs, and clusters of ruddy glasshouses, one can find many buildings dedicated exclusively to horticultural research. The final bullet point in the ‘Kew Science Strategy’ (accessible on the Kew Gardens website) informs us of these buildings’ purpose. To curate, they say, to use and enhance what they call the garden’s global resource in order to provide robust data and a strong evidence base for our UK and global stakeholders. Kew has for much of its history served this function as a quote-unquote Research Institution with a global resource and global stakeholders who stood to profit from that 6
research. For most of the 19th century and much of the 20th, Kew Gardens was the centre of a network of colonial Botanical Gardens (Sydney, Singapore, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Calcutta, St Vincent[...]) whose collective function was to gather, study, and ship plant specimens around the British Empire. Why? Because by figuring out 1. which plants could grow where, 2. how well they could grow in those places, and 3. how much profit might be brought in from said plants, British colonial administrators could enhance their system of colonial profiteering, better parcel and allocate their exploitation of brown people across the empire. After slavery was outlawed in the colonies in 1807, and formally abolished a few decades later, this increasingly meant trafficking around huge numbers of mostly Indian labourers, to work on sugar, tea and coffee plantations in places as far-flung as East Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Mostly young men, those who did not die on the long ocean journeys (it is estimated that between fifteen and twenty percent did) worked in extremely harsh conditions for a fraction of the pay offered to (white) farmers from the motherland. They were often forced to sign contracts they could not read, and as we know from the current ethnic make-up of many of these places - Jamaica, Fiji, South Africa - many who perhaps expected to return to India after a short stint of work never did. The configuration of globalised food production and distribution in place today between countries in the ‘first’ 7
and ‘third’ worlds—responsible, tangentially, for nigh on a quarter of all the world’s greenhouse emissions—echoes that model spearheaded and partially administered in this relatively small bit of parkland in South-West London. So yes: the utter tranquillity of the cruelty of the world, here along the beds of flowers Antarctic, and here under the tropic umbrage of gingko trees - here, indeed, right by the river Thames’ glittering side, as Erasmus Darwin, granddad of better-remembered Charles, put it. In his epic poem ‘The Economy of Vegetation’, published in 1791, Darwin (Erasmus Darwin, that is) called this garden Imperial Kew, not Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature, only because it represented an empire Alan Bewell of plants in and of itself, but because it both supported and owed its existence to colonial expansion and the British Empire’s concomitant control of global resources. In response to the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests that arose last year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the management at Kew have recently begun the process of decolonising the gardens. In effect this ‘decolonisation’ means updating the display placards one finds dotted around inside the greenhouses, wih a view to adequately acknowledging the connection of the various specimens to the historical facts outlined above. Unfortunately it is no surprise that this very small measure has provoked cynical remarks from Tory MPs like Sir John Hayes (a member of the somehow-not-a-joke ‘Parliamentary
Group for Common Sense’) who responded by denouncing the garden’s management as quote out of touch with what he refers to as the sentiment of Patriotic Britain (end quote). Yea, alright, mate - sure. Tory cynicism aside, this process of ‘decolonization’ cannot be anything but fraught. Narrating the garden’s historical involvement in colonialism via sign and display board could, if handled poorly, have the effect of tidying away this element of the past, and denying that the history has a living legacy. And it might also obscure the fact that the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, both as a Research Institution and a charming bit of parkland, has never actually severed links with the profiteers and exploiters of the world. Take the Sackler bridge. When Adam and I broke in (very carefully and without breaking anything, mind) to Kew one evening a few nights before Christmas, we worked our way slowly from our entrance point toward the central area of the park, where one finds a semi-large pond sprinkled with small treed islets. It had been our intention to traverse the pond by the recently inaugurated over-crossing - a slick wooden thing that gently winds crosswise along the water. (We did not in the end. Adam and I got scared. We had suddenly heard a vaguely mechanical sound in the middle distance, one I later imagined as the rasping of peacocks turning themselves off and then back on again in the dark —and we had to turn back. But never mind. The import-
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ant thing was this:) the bridge, like Oxford’s Art History Library, and, incidentally, the newest wing of the V&A, draws its name and financial patronage from the Sackler family. One of America’s wealthiest families, the Sacklers are best known for playing a central role in precipitating the Opioid Epidemic in the United States: in the 1990s one of their companies, Purdue Pharma, aggressively promoted the highly addictive opioid painkiller Oxycontin, whose widespread use, alongside other opioids (over 50 out of every 100 Americans have a prescription for an opioid drug) had resulted, by 2017, in at least 399,230 Drug and Opioid-Involved Overdose deaths by overdose. The Sacklers Deaths — United States, have used a lot of the money made Scholl, Seth, et al. ‘18 getting people addicted to opioids for philanthropy, mostly directed at various prestigious, albeit financially strapped, cultural institutions. And so here we are. But what about pleasure? So far we have spoken mostly of Kew as an agricultural research institution, but as we have already said, it has also always been something other than that, too. In fact, Kew has served as a pleasure garden for longer than it has served as (what we may now only refer to euphemistically as) a ‘vegetable garden’. It began in the 16th and 17th Centuries, like many other Botanic Gardens—see in particular the gardens in Padua, Italy— as a sort of philosophical-artistic project. Their early cultivators sought to gather all the plants of the world and arrange them harmoniously in order to recreate, in min10
iature, that biblical garden at Eden we were talking about earlier. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the gardeners at Kew came under the influence of Romanticism. And unlike the gardeners on the European continent, who continued to lay out their gardens according to rigid geometrical principles, they began to model the garden as if it were an idealised country landscape. Instead of orderly patterns of colours, they sought to create ‘scenes’ that brought together various natural elements in an artificial harmony that would be more perfect than perfect nature. When in 1783 the poet Anna Seward visited Erasmus Darwin’s private botanical garden at Litchfield in Hampshire, she was moved to write a series of verses, in which she eulogised the practice of Romantic gardening. Instead of flattening the steep grassy slopes, she writes, Darwin has smoothed the wavy green. Instead of a grid of straight paths and circular fishponds, he has lain down willing path-ways, rill: small stream and let flow vagrant rills. Where the ground was waterlogged, he has not sought to drain it merely, but also to create in the same place new artificial features, has stretch’d o’er the marshy vale, she writes, a willowy mound. The effect of this kind of gardening is uncanny. It was well into night when Adam and I entered Kew, but the clouds overhead reflected a dull orange hum from into the city, and what we had therefore was a half-light, draping everything in a shadowless vagueness, that nonetheless allowed us to make out the extent of the garden ahead of 11
us. And what would happen every once and a while, as we went deeper into the garden, was a strange encounter. Our position would open onto a view that had the composition of a painting, with a mess of features at once coinciding into a total harmony. On reaching one spot, we find a bundle of grey trees suddenly gathered in a line, curving at a smooth gradient toward the horizon. Below, the haphazard undulations of grassy slopes would suddenly converge into a striking pattern. In the midst of them, now perfectly framed, some building or another, a miniature Greek temple, a greenhouse, or the tower of the Chinese Pagoda, perhaps, distantly rising. As a landscaped pleasure garden, Kew was initially reserved for the Royal Family, a place through whose glades exotic (Erasmus Darwin again) the Royal Partners sometimes steal. In the mid-19th century, it was opened for the first time to the public, at first for only a few hours in the afternoon. It remained closed in the mornings so that there was enough time, the management said, for the garden’s academics to do their important research. Of course, when in 1842, reporters from the Gardener’s Chronicle broke into the gardens to see said research in action, they found scholars thoroughly engaged in lying out dozing on the grass, or in courting the lovers they had brought in with them, in ogling and quizzing also the lovers of their colleagues. This story opens the door to two further facets of the garden. Gardens want breaking into, and besides that, they
are a natural place for lover’s trysts. We must think of this again in terms of their public privacy, their open closed-offness. Though I could find no reference to such activities in Kew, we need only go to upriver to find the Russell Square Gardens, a place that served for much of the last century as a haven for proscribed erotic encounters between queer men—encounters that the local authority has of course continually tried to put a stop to, be it through the installation of bright lamplights or the erection around the square of tall wrought-iron railings. In Medieval tales of prohibited and ‘improper’ love, gardens, more often private ones, serve a similar purpose. As a space both within and outside the private property, the garden offers a common point of entrance for the lover into the beloved’s home, and it is often the garden itself which serves for a place for them to consummate their love, to do some toing and some froing (and that is to say, to fuck). The private garden offers the lovers a refuge both from strictures of family life and the constraints of society and culture writ large, there in the urban environment beyond its walls. The public garden can serve the same function. Even if wasn’t for the above illicit purposes, people have always breaking into Kew. From its earliest days the garden held plant specimens that were extremely rare and thus immensely valuable. And so that people would frequently break in and steal such specimens in order to sell them outside for
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a private profit is hardly a surprise. And I wonder whether such acts of plant-robbery were what in part began the propagation in England of the many foreign plants which are now considered pests. Some have apparently become so loathed as ‘intruders’ that horticultural journalists cannot help themselves, and begin echoing anti-immigration rhetoric when talking about them. Take for instance the rhododendron, originally brought over for Botanical Gardens in the 18th century, which, albeit a magnificent springtime spectacle, is, according to an article in the Guardian, a thug, prone to run wild, has spread out of control, is invading some of our ‘A spectacular thug is out of most precious countryside ... smothering native control’, The Guardian, 2017 species, even blocking out the sun (!!!). As for other break-ins, one of the most well-known to Kew happened in 1913. One evening, Olive Wharry, aged 27, and Lilian Lenton, aged 22, entered the garden under darkness. They lay waiting in the undergrowth of the garden until morning, at which point they would put their plan into action. A few days earlier another group of like-minded women had calculated and executed a similar mission, entering the Orchid houses and wantonly RBGK Metropolitan Police, Misc. Papers Volume 1845-1920, f. 51 destroying all the expensive flowers. When they escaped, they left behind an envelope bearing the words ‘Votes for Women’— their wanton destruction was part of a campaign of direct action that aimed to force the Royals Family, whose name the Royal Botanic Gardens continue to bear, into acknowledging the cause of women’s
suffrage. Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton emerged from the aforementioned undergrowth, and set fire to the old Tea Pavillion, which promptly burnt to fuck. What to do with all of this—what to make of it? When Adam and I broke into the gardens, we did not do anything very interesting. We looked at different things and sort of thought about them, though we did not think about them a great deal, then and there, since we were, most of the time we were there, quite nervous. We were nervous of the sounds of birds fluttering in the trees, of water droplets, which, fidgety on their leaves, would catch us by surprise, pattering down all at once upon the broad gravel paths, and nervous, most of all—of course—of the nightguards there might be, from the Kew Constabulary, nightguards we imagined would emerge at any moment from the foggy dark with bright torches (they did not). We did not get much further into the garden from our riverside entry-point than the topmost point of the Syon Vista, a vast length of grass cleared between treelines. It offers a direct view from the Palm House, deep inside the garden, all the long distance to Thames (which at this hour was not very much glittering) and then across the river to Syon House, an old castellate manor house set back a little on the far bank. From where we were stood near the river I gazed down toward the Palm House, a small grey bulk framed in a narrow gap in the furthest trees. I looked at the thing and felt a strange, serene sense of longing. It
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appeared something like an upturned ocean-liner: 16,000 sections of glass, held together by a gently arching scaffold, whose wrought iron line-tracings I could hardly discern from back here.
We were stood still. I pictured the plants inside the greenhouse, the palms and the other things. I remember a visit—vaguely—or several visits I made to the gardens when I was little. When we got to entering into the glasshouses, I was drawn most of all to the ugliest plants, I recollected. But I found myself then, beside Adam, unable to remember any of them with any exactness. And so in place of remembering them I imagined them. Strange gargantuan flowers giving off rich humid stinks, specimens with bulbous fleshy appendages, crimson, and yellowish green. Monstrous creeping plants, also, spreading in sharp, rigid contortions, spilling out onto the paved walkways that wound underneath the glass-topped canopy. 16
Little children, I thought, as if it were really profound, are the ultimate perverts of the world—the greenhouse a sort of freakshow, maybe, a place to take pleasure in the ‘abject’, or maybe just the ‘really weird’. And so what to make of that? I thought. Anything? There are so many competing uses, histories, visions of the Botanical Garden—so many things to say about it (most of which I have not said here) and so many different ways to say nothing about it at all, too. I thought of a hundred voices, almost but not quite Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf finishing their sentences, and of the jilted utterances of Virginia Woolf ’s characters in her story named for the gardens: “Lucky it isn’t Friday,” — “Why? D’you believe in luck?” — “They make you pay sixpence on Friday.” — “What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?” — “What’s ‘it’–what do you mean by ‘it’?” — “O, anything–I mean–you know what I mean.” When Adam and I found our way out onto the towpath, by an easier and less brambly route than that by which we had come in, we found ourselves not much different to that, and both in a funny mood. We walked a little downriver, sat for a while on a bench, ate mince pies and chocolate biscuits and drank what water we had left—and looked at each other a while, and in the end could not find it in ourselves to say much more than Wow, and Huh, yeah—things like Well, and there you go then, yeah. /// 17
Tristesse Banal tl;dr: the sky. a fuckboy flowerfairy inked onto each thigh. you grieve for the ficus. fantasise about knives. about floral theory. another ecology of. i’m just a little bit sad all of the time, you cry. health goth, you wear sex like a shroud. your face a proud arrow, accidental apollo, in the affectsphere tyrannical. archaic torso flowerless as the moon, cool stone bruised blue & when you forget to reply with a vagueness which is cruel still i forgive you – i too have been that desperate that beautiful.
Rhiannon Auriol 0 18
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world in miniature meg watts I lose all human reason inside the Berlin Botanical Garden
I am smaller than the smallest changes held in the daily turning of a season.
From the song of softest rain seldom playing over the cacti citadels
(a simple precise music, that falls from plate-glass ceilings)
to dance lessons with the sunflower petals
rearranging in whispering breezes:
this orchestra of orchard gardens sings through me, and my being.
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The Red Tree
“what has happened?”, and I said, “nothing’s happened”, and he’d been satisfied by that.
• • •
“Walk faster now.” “I’m walking as fast as I can,” I said. “Then walk faster than you can.” “I can’t,” I said.
• • •
After spending the fourth day horribly lying to myself that I believed a distant mountain to be the tree, and the fifth day looking at the ground so as I wouldn’t have to face reality, I came on the sixth day to accept I hadn’t been able to see the tree at all since the afternoon of the third day when I’d gasped and said, “what’s happened?”, and Andreas said, 22
On the morning of our departure Andreas had been quite visibly heartbroken when he saw it was me waiting for him in the dipping bower. He even said “oh no.” And I’d laughed and said with no meaning to it that maybe I should be the one to say “oh no.” “But when did it appear to you?” he asked. “Wednesday.” 23
“I know. What time?”
“I’m asleep,” said Andreas.
“Oh,” I said. “At night. Nine maybe? It was near enough dark. I almost didn’t report it. Because of how poor the light was.”
“OK then.” I gathered the blankets around me. “Goodnight.”
“Great,” said Andreas.
• • •
“They very nearly didn’t accredit it,” I said. “They very nearly didn’t accredit it,” repeated Andreas. “But then they did,” I said. “Eventually.” “It isn’t fair,” said Andreas.
As if it was some kind of a punishment Andreas wouldn’t let me help him carry his various rucksacks, and to be fair I did feel punished by it. I’d only brought one bag with me. And mine was much filled up with receipts and copper coins and empty orange juice cartons.
“Nothing is,” I said, wisely. • • •
• • •
“Can you pick up the pace a bit?” I was supposed to take ten paces away from the fire before emptying the stones out of my boots in the evenings. Andreas said he didn’t want to camp on a pile of stones. After all, who would? Obviously he never found stones in his own boots. I had had a lifetime to acquire a decent pair for myself. “Will we divide the treasure into two halves?” 24
“Do you want a proper answer to that?” I said.
• • •
It wasn’t Andreas’s job to comfort me. He’d told me that on the second day. After an hour or two of silently trudg25
ing side by side, he said, as if it was part of a conversation we were having, “and by the way, it isn’t my job to comfort you.” And I’d said, “haha!”, because my mind was on other things, and I gestured towards the far red tree flashing in the sunshine. “It looks as though it reaches the top of the sky,” I said. “Do you reckon it does?” “Such a stupid question,” said Andreas. “Such a wildly stupid thing to say.”
“Sometimes.” “We used to have lunch together in that corner of the library.” “Yes.” “With all the broken chairs,” I said. “Yes,” said Andreas. “I don’t remember it much,” I said. “Now, hurry up with dinner Andreas — I’m famished!”
• • • • • •
The compass I’d brought only worked when held at an angle. I’d found it under my bed and exercised prudence in not telling Andreas I had it. He’d only have gotten upset. Andreas had all sorts of compasses anyway. As well as provisions and cooking equipment and the tent we both slept in.
• • •
I’d been, basically, embarrassed when I looked out from my kitchen window and saw across the ranges the great red tree in the darkening light. I’d much rather have had a heart unobserved by trees. I told myself I was mistaken. It was just some clouds in the shape of a tree. Some rare red clouds bringing with them a terrible storm. I should warn the neighbours, not that they’d listen. But I could only keep that up so long.
“Do you remember school, Andreas?” 26
And I steeled myself and took a deep breath and decided 27
it was high time I get a grip for five minutes. Focus on the positives. Just for a change. And yes, I went to meet Andreas at dawn in the dipping bower. And yes, he had been so sad to see me.
“Concerning the red tree.” “Yes?” “The one over there,” I said, pointing to an empty horizon.
• • •
“What about it?” said Andreas. “Just that does it not surprise you?” I asked.
“Will there be others there?” “I believe there will,” said Andreas. “And will we get the chance to climb the tree?” “I believe so,” said Andreas. “But we won’t get there at all if you dawdle, will we?”
“Does what not surprise me?” “Well,” I said. “That it’s turned to yellow now.” Andreas was silent for a long time. Then he said, “No. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.” I embraced him and told him that I liked him a great deal, and by and by in that manner we continued. //
• • •
And so it was, on the morning of the seventh day, after Andreas had prepared and served the breakfast, and he’d got his bags on and I’d got mine, that I said, “excuse me Andreas, there’s something I want to say.”
words by Johnny White Really-Really
“What?” he said. 28
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I said “goodnight” to Mum and Meg and then (aged twenty-two) sneaked vodka and four homemade mince pies from our kitchen cupboards. The Trip Report vodka, or a good part of it, went into hip flask, the same hip flask I’d used for Riverside by Adam Husain Walks 2014-6, and so it struck me that this “trip” (or this “writing expedition”, if one insists on calling it that) was also an attempt to replicate the excitement which we felt then, at that age, on the elusive trail of “experience”. In fact, I was excited reflecting that, although he would be unlikely to have weed, Thom would proffer cigarettes; quietly, I compacted my shit into a rucksack then lay back, fully-clothed, on my single bed, looking forward to sneaking from my childhood home, refusing to tell Mum and Meg, reprising, in this and other respects, the self-assigned role of “Selfish Arsehole” that I had played with such assiduity in late adolescence. After the hall lights went, I waited for two-three minutes then tiptoed, shoes in hand, across the hall, 32
[
while Radio Four piped like a cloud of hookah smoke from beneath Mum’s bedroom. I was already storifying these events (and this act of “storifying” was also typical of my adolescence), thinking to myself (as I tried to close the door) that the radio could be used in an exposition scene, where he - that is, I - would hear words such as “mutant strain”, “22nd December” and “London: Tier 4”. On the 23.57 to Richmond, Gide’s Isabelle ] half-reading Gide’s Isabelle, I anticipated then enjoyed, as I often have done, the moment when the train rises like an oboe from below ground post-Hammersmith, then snakes round the gardens and second storeys of Georgian terraced houses like a basilisk retching light. I became distracted (while finding an “eta” for Thom) by “At this stage in our proceedthe way that Google ings (and I would not be so Maps had begun to bold as to term them our “narsuperimpose Tube rative”), we may well indulge, as lines over the tradiperhaps we are wont, in asking tional map of Lonthe question of why – always, don, thinking (even nevertheless and simultanethough the simile was ously, bearing in mind the ultitired) of the funcmate fruitlessness of any such 33 question since, if there is one
tional parity between veins and transport systems, particularly between veins (which are conventionally depicted as (and might even be?) blue) and the light blue lines of the Southwestern Railway, which seemed to leak out of London as if exiting a worn-out heart. Kew Gardens Station was eloquent and quiet. Thom had dressed (surprise, surprise) far better than I had, wearing black cap and jacket, black shoes, black trousers, black socks and (no doubt) black underpants. We were walking to the river path, when my sister called and said that Mum had gotten up to pee and found the front door wide open and “where are you exactly?” “I’ve gone out for a walk.” “With anyone?” “No. I’ll be back in a few hours” I said. “sorry” I said, and “sorry” again, just for good measure. “It’s a shame your mum isn’t used to you going out” Thom said, soliciting a surge of Mum-envy in me (yet
another feeling redolent of late adolescence), and I wondered whether, in order to create this nostalgic Mum-envy sentiment, I hadn’t (accidentally-on-purpose) forgotten to lock the door while half-listening to Thom 34
thing that history (and by history, I mean of course historiological discourse) has shown us (and quite unequivocally), then it is the rampant impossibility of finding the, or even the most likely, cause of any historical event, any conclusion in this respect standing at most as an intermediary result (i.e. as another stage in the hellish & interminable dialectic), liable – nay, more than liable: likely! – to be renegotiated, if not wholeheartedly rebutted, by some future academic who will then show “conclusively” that this so called “conclusion” as to the “cause” of the so called “event” is in fact caused ipso facto et inter alia caused by this historian’s particular complex of political and cognitive biases, not to mention psychological or psychosomatic irregularities (late-stage bed-wetting, early stage baldness, etc.), rather than the historical event under question itself, a conclusion which, need we not mention, will in turn be liable to rebuttal and rejection on the same grounds by some future future academic, so that, ultimately, if one reads history books for long enough (as no doubt we are wont) the only conclusion that a sane man can reasonably draw is that they are a series of dodgy and elusive autobiographies, whose authors, instead of referring to events in their own lives, have, in a cowardly and niggardly fashion, decided to project 35 and silent TV screen of themselves onto the great
discuss some Czech psycho-geographer. I sortied my hip flask. “We had the same idea,” Thom said, exiting a
still larger, still more metallic hip flask, which contained, he told me, “fifteen-year-old Scotch” / Fifteen Year Above us, the clouds echoed the am- Old Scotch / ber of a gazillion street lights, while the puddles shone like so many Pepsi Max Big Ones
(fifty pence coins – that is). I stopped to take my jumper off, then my thermals, then rolled up my shirtsleeves, for it was so hot. “Wasn’t this supposed to be “winter”?” I thought. “Wasn’t I supposed to be travelling on a “winter’s night”?” Maybe people were right; maybe London actually wasn’t real, at least not in comparison to the other towns and cities of this United Kingdom – certainly it felt as if we were still, somehow, inside, wrapped in curves of coruscating glass, and pulverised by light. Kew Gardens is open to the public (on certain days, at certain hours, and for certain prices). We visited only once 36
the past – and only once this idea is wrapped (firm & snugly) into our little heads (cabezas, etc.) can we indulge, as I have already said that we might, in a little idle speculation as to this question of why (i.e., this question which has no doubt already liberally festooned a certain, festive proportion of your brain-spans) the questions as to “why it was that Thom & Adam visited Kew Gardens on, of all nights, 22 December 2020?”
as a family – one of the innumerable weekend trips on which Mum insisted, and which she now insists were “more or less a waste of time”. Of the Gardens themselves, I can only remember fragments, and in particular the trauma of one infantine dilemma, where I attempted balance my interest in the plants with my desire to flee the greenhouse, which was so suffocating, and swelteringly hot. Beyond the Gardens, I remember the difficulty we took in finding an entrance; visiting in the years prior to the development of smartphones, we were obliged to walk on and on round a curving black wall, listlessly & semi-endlessly, unsure whether we were going in the right or wrong direction. I recall, also, the extraordinary ticket price – not because I was raised in a state of impecuniosity, but because I had, even by the age of four, ↓ 37
inherited my mother’s dislike of any lavish expenditure, the visit – the whole day, in fact – being consequently shrouded in a haze of guilt, and propelled by the anxious sense that I ought to do my best to “interest” and “benefit” myself, in order to “make it all worthwhile”. Kew did not reoccur in my life until we started walking the riverside (“we” - that is, myself, Fergus, a schoolfriend, who lived near Hammersmith, and Thom, who was principally Fergus’ friend, and lived near Barnes (so that became our stretch - Hammersmith to Barnes)). Aged thirteen, I can remember how agreeably shocked I was to see, in the midst of London, elms and alders checkering a rutted, puddled path – the “towpath” which, I later learned, was constructed in the 18th century, for horses and mules to walk along as they towed barges. Though Barnes was, as I have said, our normal stopping point, often we were in good spirits, and the three of us – or the four, or the two of us, etc. – would continue on to Kew Railway Bridge, and even further, following the towpath down the long, isolated stretch it threads from Kew to Richmond. Such a walk required, and requires, commitment. Once the stretch, which begins by a cricket pitch, is set upon, there is no absconding; on the right-hand side there is the river, while on the left, across a mossy moat, above a brick wall, the walker can only gaze into the impenetrable Gardens, can only glimpse sweeping evergreens, can only eye, from across the ditch, the lurid
“Of which I can find three causes (any good historian, naturally, finding their causes in threes): (1) That they, i.e., Thom & Adam, were attempting to “engage structured space in an unstructured way”, replicating (rather unoriginally) the thought that underlies practically all of “psychogeography” (that pseudo-, somehow-not-a-joke of a discipline) and, before that, the much-over-discussed Parisian peregrinations of Baudelaire (flâneurism, Walter Benjamin etc.) (2) They were attempting to “engage in a symbolic, pseudo-political gesture”, tracing the footsteps (perhaps literally) of the people who had broken into Kew for whatever protest it was that Thom had become vaguely interested in. (3) They were attempting to experience, if you like, an “experience” of something, when 39
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verdancy of cared-for lawn. Naturally enough, we often talked about what it would be like to steal inside. We talked – but didn’t look, or at least we did not carefully. As soon as Thom and I raised the project again, which was some months ago and some years after we had last walked that stretch together, he found a means of traversing the moat almost immediately, along an obvious sewage pipe. It became set that we would break in, as soon as I returned to London.
{
a. they had always been so cushioned from the “outside world”. b. “experience” connected some sort of danger or risk-taking in their pseudo-masculine psychologies. c. they had been deprived of any “experiences” for the last few months, having been (semi-forcibly) returned to adolescence, living once again with their parent or parents, in a state of life where nothing - I mean really no events - had been happening.”
“But what is, you ask, even counts as an “experience”? Whitehead (I mean late Whitehead) holds that an “experience” consists of events occurring within events, along the lines of set theory, so that
Stopping briefly before Syon House, I mentioned how Henry VIII’s corpse had rested there and, after filling with gas, had exploded outwards from its coffin. There was a buoy lit with a red light, and the water upstream from the buoy was also showing red (the river, flowing upstream, having tilted the buoy in that direction). I became anxious that Thom hadn’t, in fact, brought cigarettes and that perhaps, like me, he had recently “matured” enough to “quit” smoking. We reached the spot that Thom had reconnoitred, then hesitated, nervous, half-imagining the torches of patrolling guards. “Maybe we should wait,” Thom said. I agreed and, mercifully, he sortied his cigarettes. As we smoked, I took a flash photograph, well aware that it would be good to have a photograph for the report that we 40
↓
{
Kew Trip
{Arriving {Inside the Park {Going home
one event (like our “trip to Kew”), would be in fact (that is, qua Whitehead) the name for a set of other events, (like “arriving”), events which would be in turn only the name for a set of other events, (like “preparing my rucksack”, “sneaking from the house” etc.) and so on and so odd, matryoshka-style, potensh ad infinitum. The flaw with this idea is that each event is presented as discrete; there is no way of describing one thing blurring into another, an effect which, in my opinion, is the essential element of “experience”. (Take, say, as an extreme, Baudelairyan example, say, getting fucked on absinthe, and fucked to such a degree that “one thing” stops occurring “after”, but instead “simultaneously” ↓
41
had agreed to write, independently, about our “experience(s)”, and wanting also to capture the event for autobiographical reasons, since it was something of an oddity, Thom and I existing as giant pussies for the most part of our lives.
Fig i. Thomas Dervan: Extreme Wetwipe
It was darker in the Gardens & we were in a thicket. We rustled leaves & snapped twigs, making a terrible, potentially-guard-alerting sound while our clothes got wet (so did our hands & feet). Each time we neared a tree, half a dozen rooks came squawking out of it, to settle on the next one, while all you could hear was the A316, pounding like an ocean of the middle distance. Thom said that Kew has its own police force or constabulary, men42
↓
[
with another). Conversations after these experiences typically attempt to arrange anything that can be recollected about the night previous into an order that might be, conceivably, “what actually happened”, yet the particular order of those “events”, or even the contents of those “events” (“cussing out Rebecca Long-Bailey”, “chanting “Basmati Rice”” etc.) has very little to do with the “experience” itself: rather, in such discussions, the experience is “elided”; the “experience” is not discussed, and this is how it must be since, to be drunk (or high, feverish, sleep-deprived etc.) is to be released, if only temporarily, from temporality (if, by that phenomenon, we intend a series of “events”) and to be ejected instead into what Bergson of all people would call durée pure, the stream of experience, a continuous present, which, nevertheless contains rapids and eddies of its own). Afterwards, what can one say about such an experience, without turning it – as is now happening – into another class of event, since discourse, particularly historiological discourse, always betrays “experience” in order to class it as something “that was caused by something and caused something else,” something “about which, fundamentally, something can be said”? 43
tioning also many of the articles that he’d read,
Kew still fragmenting (as it had previously fragmented) besides “You Are Here” signs and a well-pitched oneman tent (“so Kew,” I said, “still has its ornamental hermit, then”) a can of Heinz Beanz (used) glittering in the ambient light by way of recompense for our missing the Queen Whatever pavilion
in assorted or various directions: the Pagoda’s dark blue silhouette, livid & viable through a pre-planned gap in the foliage besides Thom, who asked if we should try the Sackler Bridge
and stopped at a rustling “A human rustling?” crouching in the shrubbery, experiencing the difficulty of ascribing anything to anything while considering another cigarette for certain hours, or a certain amount of time (durée pure that is, which still must be thought of, if it is to be discussed, as an event) afraid, or pretending-to-be-afraid, or pretending-to-be-afraid-to-be-excited-to-feel-danger 44
until Thom raised his head and signalled “back, back” like a Navy SEAL SWAT Team Commando for us to return, liberally festooned by ourselves, something having been altered in the narrative, crossing the lawn & re-crossing the moat re-watching Syon House to smoke again (pedestrians again) saying “it was nothing” “that rustle - most likely nothing” (safely on the other side that is)
no really: “nothing” nothing had happened or was happening: nothing to report on of our trip to Kew Gardens.
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Our Contributors <3
Thank you for reading RGB Colour Scheme Issue 5
Rhiannon Auriol is currently based in Edinburgh & online at rhiannon.auriol (ig) / rhiannonauriol (twitter) Ella K Clarke is a tree-hugger, writer, reviewer and general artsy-type based in Oxford & online @ellakclarke (ig) / @ellakclarke (twitter) Meg Watts is a writer, artist and activist currently based in Norwich & online at @megwattscreative (ig). C.P. Nield is a graduate from UEA with a Master’s degree in poetry. His poetry has been published in publications such as New Poetries IV (Carcanet), Ambit, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, PN Review and The Rialto.
Our special thanks to: The JCR of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, for providing funding towards
the printing of thie issue.
Joanna Hooper, for designing the front cover for this issue, and for allowing us to use her art and photographs throughout: for the contents page, on pages 16, 20, 21, and on this page as well as the cross-leaf. Ella Yolande, for allowing use to use her artwork for the back cover of this issue, and also as a background for the story ‘The Red Tree’. Ella Clarke, for submitting the photograph on page 30, across leaf from ‘At The Hortus, Amsterdam’.
Thomas Dervan is a co-editor of RGB Colour Scheme and a student at
Johnny White Really-Really, for allowing us to print his short story ‘The Red Tree’, first published on Medium.com.
St Hugh’s College, Oxford, reading Portuguese and Italian.
And all our very cool and wicked contributors. Thank you :)
Johnny White Really-Really is a comedian of some note. Joanna Hooper is an artist based in Edinburgh. Joanna can be found on insta @joannahooperart & @hurtsyourteeth. Ella Yolande is a visual artist working primarily with video, digital based
This issue was printed by Mixam in April 2021, using recycled paper. All proceeds from pay-what-you-want sales of this issue were split toward two charitable organizations: Haven Distribution (www.havendistribution. org.uk) and the Peckham Community Kitchen.
media & sculpture. Ella is online at www.ellayolande.co.uk or on insta @ellayolande. Adam Husain is a co-editor of RGB Colour Scheme and currently an MA student at the University of East Anglia.
Content Warnings: Kewtanical Burdens touches upon diverse upsetting topics, such as colonialism and drug related death. Tristesse Banal contains references of a masochistic nature, and Trip report contains gendered swear words.