DAVID WHEELER
BUSINESS PARK PLANTING
There are some hair-raising episodes in Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Khiva, none more so than his telling of a narrow escape from a knife-bearing ne’er-do-well in a Moscow hotel bedroom. Glazebrook was en route to ‘Russia’s Central Asia’ – playground of the Great Game – in, I surmise, the late 1980s.
Memories of my own mid-1970s time in that city also bear a few disturbing events, but no one as far I was aware seemed bent on cutting my throat. I was there in the month of March when most of the winter’s snow had thawed and refrozen several times, and wore a mantle of sooty smuts that turned the place greyer than I supposed it to be. I did see a few gardens, but had to apply powerful imagination to envisage the bouquets of fragrant roses that are said to bloom during the country’s short summer.
Overriding among my recollections is a train journey to Leningrad (as it then was), during which I expected many daylight hours of landscape-gazing from the warm comfort of a deeply upholstered poltrona. Sipping whisky, diluted (to make it last) with tepid apple juice – there was no water, hot or cold, in the burnished copper samovar that adorned every carriage – made up for the gross disappointment of seeing nothing: the 400-or-so mile-long track had been fenced in to deny the traveller any sight of Soviet field and forest.
On arrival, the Neva was frozen, the chill, worryingly, enough to penetrate my fur-lined overcoat hired from Moss Bros. Skeletal birches patiently awaited the Russian spring – seemingly a long way off. Nowhere were my spirits lifted except in the attic rooms of the Hermitage where French Impressionist paintings told of other climes, other landscapes and, yes, flower-filled gardens.
On his summer sojourn, Glazebrook was similarly downbeat about a few public spaces. ‘…like a liner adrift under a sullen sky, the Hotel Bokhara [in Uzbekistan, about two thousand miles south-east of Moscow] rose in tiers of decks above its lagoon of concrete. On the lagoon there seemed to float circular flower-beds of unspeakable brilliance, like fluorescent lifebuoys flung down from the crippled ship.’
Vividly, that image recalls some of the thankfully mostly redundant botanical excrescences inflicted on British open spaces by municipal parks departments. In its place we have what might be called Business Park Planting. You are familiar with it fringing supermarket car parks and ‘landscaped’ industrial estates. It generally involves the massed planting of hardy shrubs in great swathes. Berberis and mahonia thickets are pretty much impenetrable, but litter caught up in their prickly talons has no escape. Softer, deciduous, are the several shrubby dogwoods, often rewarding the passer-by with beautifully coloured bark at the Hydrangeas can brighten grey areas year’s low ebb, following several weeks of glorious autumnal hue.
By definition, these schemes must be ‘low maintenance’, requiring no more than an annual clipping to prevent lax or invasive branchlets from inconveniencing pedestrians or menacing a steady flow of traffic. We take it all for granted, but isn’t it time to ring the changes? Roses, even the many repeat-flowering kinds, are not the answer because of attributes shared with the above-mentioned pricklies. Would not coteries of long-flowering hydrangeas make for a prettier picture; might drifts of cerulean and indigo caryopteris do a better job; or cistus (in warmer counties), lavender, or camellias, cheery winter and early-spring flowerers, resplendently evergreen for months thereafter?
Elsewhere in Glazebrook’s pageturning account, he bemoans Russia for being a nation that ‘does not drink vodka for its taste, only for its effect’. Could the same be said of our staid and unimaginative public shrubberies?