Extract from A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice

There was a violent storm in January. The wind howled and thin sleet made Glasgow-grey diagonals, and the midday sky was turbulent and wild. Inside, staring at my computer screen, poring over my books, I could hear the windows rattle. Suddenly a walk in the Botanics seemed a much better option than Giulio Camillo.

Created in 1881, the main gates to Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens are in the west end, near Byres Road. The Gardens spread out north, and east along the River Kelvin, ending near Charing Cross in the city centre. There are distinct areas of the park that have their own atmosphere, formal and wild. At the Byres Road end are the heated glasshouses where the cyclamen and the palms and the magnolias are kept. Past the University, near the hospital and the municipal art gallery and museum, the park turns into Kelvingrove and has a fountain, and large expanses of green, and a red blaize football pitch. Here is a long formal path between high hedges where in the summer rude red poppies grow and there is a great profusion of flowers that die back again in the autumn. There are sculptures in the gardens. There is a stone lion almost swallowed by rhododendrons and a rampant tiger, carved from wood.

Industry, navigation, commerce and the arts, personified, sit around the bridge near the Art Gallery. Lister and Kelvin sit near the University in a secluded spot. Carlyle stares across the river at a soldier seated on a rock to commemorate the Boer War. At the top of the hill is a sculpture by Harry Bates dedicated to the memory of Field Marshal Earl Roberts, born in India in 1832, who died in France at the beginning of the First World War. His pedestal is flanked with rows of small, turbaned, Indian soldiers, marching into the future. Seated on a horse, high above our heads, Earl Roberts would have a great view of Govan and the river. West of Roberts, in a quiet clearing is a sculpture by Benno Schotz, that looks like a large twig: Psalmist playing on a lyre. Nearby, in Kelvin Way, is an oak tree, planted in April 1918, to commemorate the granting of votes to women. In the centre of the University, close to the Botanics, is a garden opened in 2002, designed by Christine Borland, resulting from her work at the Department of Human Anatomy, where dissections take place. The leaves of flowers and trees are inscribed onto the white, tooth-like, headrests of the benches that are placed here. There is a tiny hole pierced in the centre of each headrest, and a narrow channel cut into the top of each bench. Are these piercings and channels for thoughts, like blood, to flow into the ground? When I was last there, a man lay outstretched on a bench, his head cradled in the October sun.

To return to the walk in the Gardens, in January: there is a little side entrance to the park, near my house, that leads you down to the river through a dishevelled avenue of trees. In the spring it’s full of daffodils. In January the tall trunks creaked and the branches sang and thrashed. Despite the storm it wasn’t cold. It was exhilarating. There seemed no direction to the wind, it blasted courses from every quarter, pushing great gulps of air into the lungs. Brown leaves hurled around and broken branches lay across the paths. I heard later that slates and chimneys had fallen, roofs blown off, roads blocked. I felt the wind would blow me off my feet. I came to a clearing near the river where the path opens out and there are swings and a slide. Just as I got there, with a sickening click, a tall tree fell. Just like that, with a snap like a twig, it crashed into the green, and almost upon me. ‘It’s a sign!’ I thought. Yes, indeed, the most potent meaning of which, at that point, was to get the hell out of the park. So I ran back home through the wind and the rain to Camillo.

It’s not every day that you see a great tall old tree fall in front of your very eyes. Not every day that the roots revealed, torn back, upended, stand higher than your head. The tree became my adopted tree, and through the year I returned to it now and again. I wondered whether the wardens of the park would drag it away or whether it would be chopped up, wondered whether I could take a little piece of the wood and make something from it – a memoriam. The tree had fallen across a path, and as the year passed, a new path was made through the grass by the feet and the bicycle wheels and the pushchairs of the people who went by. The craggy roots became a climbing frame with earthy footholes. You could climb up and see the tree stretched out below you ten or eleven metres down the slope of the hill. It got sprayed on by dogs and with paint; the outermost branches were hacked off; the middle of the trunk became a bouncy hobbyhorse. The tree seemed very noble, very sad, and very dead.

One day, in autumn, when this book was nearly finished, I went to the park to look at my tree again. To my amazement, on the very topmost branch of this horizontal tree, was a tiny spray of bright green leaves. A botanist or horticulturalist, would be able to make some rational sense of this miraculous sprout of life, could say that the specific density and diameter of the trunk, the very make-up of its molecules, enabled it to hold the strength and length of sap required to feed these little shoots. A scientist could explain some deep evolutionary prerogative. A gardener would have a reason. Me? I thought: ‘It’s a sign!’ Although what it meant, I had not a clue.

I have to confess that my first instinct was to pluck that tiny spray of leaves from the tree. I would make it mine: I would take it home and put it in a jar with water and wait for new roots to grow. Who would notice? Who could have watched the tree as assiduously as I had done through the year? By right, I thought, these leaves are mine. But then I wondered whether the leaves, plucked, would survive their transplantation. Would I have to watch as the final remnant of life in my tree withered and turned brown and died before my eyes at home, fading in a jar of water? Wasn’t it better that I let it be? I settled for a photo instead. Here it is.