The World's Best Garden

90% of the reason I joined the National Trust was to save money on visiting Stourhead Gardens. Actually, let’s be honest – it’s 100%. I used to ask to go there for my birthday, and one memorable year I was stung on the bottom by wasp. It’s a beautiful place. You may know it from the Keira Knightly Pride & Prejudice (2005) rainy-proposal-moment, or from its appearance in numerous other films and TV programs. If you don’t know it, it’s a beautiful, sweeping garden of the 18^th Centur,y English style. Featuring trees from all over the world, its carefully engineered picturesque views are no accident: it’s a work of art made out of nature. My sister and I have been looking forward to taking her baby (5 months) for a walk around Stourhead Gardens. He loves being outside and seems delighted by gazing up at trees. This weekend we had the opportunity to go for a walk at Stourhead, and we weren’t disappointed. My nephew had a lovely time leaning back in his baby-carrier and admiring the treetops. Nappy changing on an ancient tree trunk after an explosive poo and my sister breast feeding on the floor of the Gothic cottage added a little something to the day out, but it didn’t quite live up to the wasp incident. Nappies aside, I always feel rejuvenated by being amongst the trees of Stourhead and seeing the lake. I find getting away from buildings and cars profoundly relaxing, and I am sure that humans don’t just need plants for oxygen, we also need them for our mental wellbeing. Literature and art have always been inspired by nature. Stourhead Gardens itself is a work of art made out of nature. When we’re driving to work every day, going from box to box in our little wheeled boxes, it’s easy to feel detached from the natural world around us, and to forget that we’re just another animal in a wider ecosystem. Unlike the other animals, however, we’re having a good stab at destroying the habitats that support that ecosystem.

Art inspired by nature in Stourhead Gardens

I’ve often written in this blog about how literature – Shakespeare in particular, of course – has shaped our view of women in society. The Covering Climate Now campaign in the run up to the UN Climate Summit has started me thinking about how that same literature shapes our view of our relationship to the natural world. Like many other writers Shakespeare uses nature for pathetic fallacy (where the weather or environment is given a mood or emotion that reflects those of the characters). The ‘green world’ is another main function of nature in the plays: characters escape to a forest location which provides safety, freedom, an escape from the moral corruption of the court, and a place where change is possible. I’ve written about the green world in Shakespeare’s comedies in my post: Finding the Forest of Arden. Nature is essential to the language, plots, and mechanics of Shakespeare’s plays. Generally speaking, though English literature presents nature in a similar way to how it presents women: something wild, and out of control that needs to be tamed or conquered. The difference between women and nature in literature though, is that nature is imagined to be unconquerable and eternal. What we’ve come to realise, much more slowly than we should, is that this is far from the truth. Ironically, humankind has changed and ‘conquered’ nature in a way that it might just lead to our own destruction. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.

Could Shakespeare help us look at nature differently? One of the scenes in Shakespeare that has captured my imagination since I was very young (mainly due to the BBC’s Animated Tales), is the conversation between the king and queen fairies in Act II Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Titania complains that the quarrels between them have caused a sickness in nature. The speech is long, describing failed crops, disease, floods, and significant changes in the weather expected in each season:

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which:

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

This climate change is caused by the disharmony between the king and queen of the fairies, but it sounds pretty similar to the climate change that we are seeing today.  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream this is pathetic fallacy on a seasonal level. Things have gone topsy-turvy in nature because Titania, queen of the fairies, has disobeyed her husband, Oberon, King of the Fairies. This unnatural situation – that is, a woman defying her husband – is put right by the end of the play, and therefore nature will be put right. Just an example of your casual, run-the-mill Shakespearean misogyny. Disruptions in nature reflect unnatural goings on in many of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Macbeth, when Macbeth kills Duncan – an act even more unnatural than murder because it is regicide – winds that sound like “death” and earthquakes make the night “unruly”. This sort of natural disruption is also connected to the idea of omens, in which aberrations in nature communicate something rotten in the state. Don’t you just love how disobeying your husband causes mass crop-failure and global warming, while a bloke doing murder results in a windy night? But let’s put a pin in that to one side for now. Similar disruptions in the natural world also occur in Hamlet and Julius Caesar (to name only a few) communicating the unethical activity of the characters and the oncoming or ongoing political unrest.

In this traditional sort of reading, nature functions to reflect the emotions or morals of the humans in the play. Perhaps we could usefully read these plays another way: as a reminder of the way human actions effect nature. Macbeth is a despot whose greed and ambition wreak havoc in the lives of those around him. Such forms of government are very often also harmful to the environment. Think of greed-driven governments who mine their natural resources with no thought of the effects on the environment. Human conflict - the sort that takes place in plays like Julius Caesar and King Lear takes its toll on the habitats of humans and animals alike, and the resultant pollution can last for generations. Rather than reading these changes in nature as a figurative representation of human actions, we can read them as a result of those actions. We need to re-educate ourselves about the natural world; could Shakespeare have a role to play?

Man-made climate change has existed since the dawn of humankind, but it is now happening at such a pace that nature can’t keep up. We are now in danger of destroying not only the habitats other animals, but our own. Our environmental peril is a big, and therefore difficult idea to conceptualise, and there are plenty of factors as to why we as a culture are able to ignore it. One of these factors is the stories that we, as a civilization, have always told and continue to tell. We imagine nature as a vast, eternal, wild thing that we strive to conquer, but can never succeed. We need to say goodbye to this colonial attitude and realise that we make changes to the world just by being in it, and that we must therefore be responsible.

With my nephew.