Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Green is seductive. There’s something unnatural about its chemistry. Nature, bent and abused, is grey. We’re happy with the grey variables: silver to sludge. Stand on a footbridge over the M25, anywhere between Junction 26 on the edge of Epping Forest and the Junction 25 exit for Enfield, and you’ll watch traffic through tattered sails of greenery, roadside plantings, overripe saplings fed on diesel. The context of the valley is revealed: mud paddocks bulldozed for future development, new systems of access roads, sour yellow Wimpey boxes for first-time buyers; low, wooded hills; the persistent chlorophyll of Enfield Chase and environs. Captured estates. Garden centres. Pubs that offer Thai, Chinese and Indian lunches, while hanging on to their fustian titles: The King and Tinker, The Pied Bull, The Volunteer, The Woodbine.

We dream of a green paradise. The solution to Gimpo’s teasing riddle — ‘to find out where the M25 leads’ — is here. After the circuits of madness, pilgrims must claim their reward: the secret garden. Residual desire is articulated in street names. Paradise Road and Paradise Row are both located in Waltham Abbey.

Going east from Waltham Cross, a confederacy of country houses and secure estates straddles the motorway. Theobalds Park, to the north of the road, is modest about its royal pedigree. If you drive along its boundaries you will be scanned by surveillance cameras, quizzed by interrogators at unmanned checkpoints. Walkers are suspect. The site reveals nothing that might provoke unwelcome attention. History declines into romantic fiction.

Philippa Gregory in her novel Earthly Joys (1998) nominates the gardener John Tradescant as her hero, a familiar generic trope. Tradescant is best known as a Lambeth figure, keeper of ‘Tradescant’s Ark’, a proto-museum and grand cabinet of curiosities, storehouse of plants, bones and anthropological swag. He is celebrated in the present Museum of Garden History in St Mary’s Church, alongside Lambeth Palace.

But Gregory is more interested in the young man, the tanned, strong-shouldered son of the soil. Tradescant is the gardener at Theobalds Palace. The relationship with his patron, the hunchbacked, avian figure of Robert Cecil is composed as a straightfaced version of a Fast Show homoerotic playlet, enacted by Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse. ‘Any early vegetables?’ his lordship asked. ‘Asparagus? They say His Majesty loves asparagus.’

Earthly Joys become earthy joys as Tradescant drops his breeches for the Duke of Buckingham. ‘The pain when it came to him was sharp like a pain of deep agonising desire, a pain that he welcomed, that he wanted to wash through him. And then it changed and became a deep pleasure and a terror to him, a feeling of submission and penetration and leaping desire and deep satisfaction. John thought he understood the passionate grief and lust of a woman who can take a man inside her.’

Gregory’s romance limns the period when Theobalds Park passed from Cecil to James I. A property to complete the circuit of royal residences. Known variously as Cullynges, Tongs, Thebaudes, Tibbolds, the palace was built by Lord Burleigh in 1560. The attraction of the estate was its distance from London and the court, a single day’s ride; enclosed forest could be domesticated, organised into gardens, walks, rides, hierarchies of contemplation. Cecil’s son ceded the palace to the Scottish interloper, James I. James’s grandson Charles II gifted the estate to the turncoat General Monck, Duke of Albermarle. So Theobalds declined, always with a sense of favours conferred, male alliances, pay-offs to special friends. Heritage flashbacks were all that remained by the time the land was purchased by the Victorian brewer Sir Henry Meux, Bart.

Cecil, according to a contemporary Life , ‘greatly delighted in making gardens’. Royal visits by Elizabeth cost him many thousands of pounds, but this retreat from the realpolitik of the state, the fabrication of conspiracies, justified paranoia, gave the civil servant scope to construct his paradise garden. On the forest fringe, posthumous fantasies could be played out, an Alhambra of scents, fountains, symmetries. A commissioned painting of Cecil (now in the National Portrait Gallery) places him, absurdly, on a mule: Don Quixote as Sancho Panza. Berobed, ringed, a raddled imago of power. ‘Riding in his garden and walks upon his little mule was his greatest disport.’

James I, resting here at the end of his progress from Scotland, experienced a thrill of recognition. Like romantic novelist Philippa Gregory, he found the discretion of Enfield profoundly erotic. Theobalds Park, according to Gregory, ‘had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones.’

Tradescant plotted a New Age makeover. ‘He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale… Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.’

The Earl of Salisbury entertained James I for four days at Theobalds, while the new king received the homage of the Lords of Council. Coming from the bleak north, James wanted to take possession of a house and grounds, elegantly planted, artfully laid out, on the side of London in which he was most comfortable. He commandeered Theobalds and a large portion of Enfield Chase, as a kind of dowry. A wall, ten miles in circumference, enclosed his estates.

The circuit of the wall crosses the motorway and cuts through the grounds of Capel Manor, now an horticultural college, garden centre and display of show gardens. The pleasure of walking through the grounds derives from the change of pulse, slowing of breath, coming away from the road gives you. All the usual irritants with which great gardens protect themselves are blessings: they make access difficult. Persistence is rewarded. Capel Manor, like its neighbour Myddelton House, is open to visitors on certain days, at certain times — if those times don’t have to be revised, if there are no plagues or elections on the horizon.

Capel is the first estate you notice, exiting the M25, making the tricky turn into Bullsmoor Lane. Follies, Gothic ruins, are glimpsed over the wall. Ivy-covered John Piper arches floating in sparse woodland. It’s only after you’ve bought your ticket and followed the signs that you recognise these stacks of tumbled masonry as customised fakes, commissioned from William Chambers. Rams and urns and centaur heads among pink rhododendrons. The small area of tolerated ‘wilderness’ is punted as a ‘garden feature’, introduced by William Robinson and other members of the ‘Natural’ school of the late nineteenth century. It doesn’t feel like woodland. A two-minute stroll loops you back to a prospect of the south lawn, the Liriodendron Tree, the famous Caucasian Elm ( Zelkova carpinifolia ); the ha-ha which marked the division of the Theobalds and Capel Manor estates.

On a mound that overlooks the motorway is another folly, an open-sided, open-roofed Temple of the Winds. Voices from the gardens are distorted. Children scampering around the maze. Water. Filtered traffic whooo-whooo-whoooing under Bulls Cross Ride.

Capel Manor, promoted under the slogan ‘Where the City meets the Countryside’, has downgraded the paradise theme to a series of botanical rooms, conservatories with the lid lifted off. There is a garden for ‘Physically Challenged People’ and a garden for ‘Visually Impaired People’. There is a Yellow Garden and a Blue Garden (with flowers blessed by the M25 ribbon-cutter). ‘Now this is my type of garden,’ said Margaret Thatcher at a photo-opportunity in 1989. Wisteria sinensis, Brunnera macrophylla, Lirioe muscari and Cynara cardunculus . ‘Blue is one of the “cold” colours, providing a calm and restful feel.’