Gardening, grief and memory

New Statesman​

14-05-2025

There's a poignant horticultural adage that a garden looks best a year after its custodian dies. I heard it again recently, from the landscape designer Sarah Price, in her dreamy garden in Abergavenny, Wales. She would know: she first encountered the garden as a child, when it belonged to her grandparents, and now her own children play in its tunnels and streams (it really is the stuff of a fairy tale). It is a garden of succession.
Very few of us grow on previously untouched land, but there is a particular potency in tending to gardens that have been made or looked after by our loved ones. It's a theme that runs through Nova Scotia House, the debut novel from the British author and fashion journalist Charlie Porter.
Porter's slim but potent love story is told from the internal perspective of Johnny, a man in his late forties who is still living in the London home – and garden – of his lover Jerry, who died during the Aids crisis. They met planting tulips when Johnny, then 19, volunteered at 45-year-old painter Jerry's community gardens. Their deeply loving partnership occupied the last four years of Jerry's life.
A quarter of a century later, Johnny is still living in Jerry's council flat, growing the produce that once sustained Jerry. Gardening, along with walking and sex, is among the physical, repetitive acts that demarcate time, process and grief in the book. The garden – which is 'south-west long length' and subject to sun 'pretty much all day long' – acts as the novel's metronome. In the first pages, we learn that a tower of luxury flats is being built at the end of it. They will block the light that helped Jerry's plants grow and paintings emerge. Johnny will no longer be able to grow the food that he lives off: 'I don't want to leave I will have to leave I can't leave. Can I stay here why stay here. I don't want to think about it now. I don't want to think. What can I do.'
Jerry, and as a result, Johnny, live in social housing. In the era that Jerry was offered a council house, queer people were given homes by the state in particularly run-down estates. Before then, Jerry lived in warehouses and in counter-cultural communal set-ups. The garden is imbued with a similar radicalism: not as something to be admired for its beauty, but as a means of survival in a world where little was done about the deaths of so many young men.
Porter's novel is a pleasing celebration of how gardening, queer lives and the Aids crisis intertwined. Much of modern garden design is informed by the work of the New Perennial or Dutch Wave movement of the Seventies, which sought to replicate the patterns and habits of nature more closely in the garden, including an awareness of and respect for what plants looked like in death. Henk Gerritsen, who was the founding member of the Dutch Wave, lived with HIV until his death in 2008, but his partner, Anton Schlepers, had died in the Nineties during the Aids epidemic. 'People used to be so afraid of death in the garden,' Gerritsen once told the writer and garden designer Noel Kingsbury. 'Every yellow leaf was an imperfection, and had to be taken out… but now a whole generation has known death, so we do not ban it from the garden any more.'
Porter has said that he was inspired by the relationship between the film-maker and artist Derek Jarman and the actor Keith Collins, who was two decades Jaman's junior. Collins went on to tend the garden Jarman made in his final years, in the shingle cottage on the coast of Dungeness. Prospect Cottage, once belonging to the Jarman and left to Collins after his death, was acquired in 2020 by the Art Fund to protect it and its contents for the future. Its garden is now looked after by the gardener and plantsman Jonny Bruce, who brings in groups of volunteers to help with maintenance and planting. In Nova Scotia House, Jerry's friends hope to remember him with a quilt panel that depicts 'a garden but somehow make it the wildest party'. It's an ambitious vision, but I wonder if these gatherings might come close.
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[See more: If I could be a tree, I'd be a sycamore]
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