At Home

by Bill Bryson

  “And when I explained to him the value of the bats and what he’d done, he actually broke down and cried,” Tuttle said. In fact, as Tuttle pointed out, “more people die of food poisoning at church picnics annually than have died in all history from contact with bats.”

  Today bats are among the most endangered of all animals. About a quarter of bat species are on extinction watch lists—that is an amazingly and indeed appallingly high proportion for such a vital creature—and over forty species teeter on the very edge of extinction. Because bats are so reclusive and often so difficult to study, much about their population numbers remains uncertain. In Britain, for example, it is unknown whether there are seventeen surviving species of bats or sixteen. Authorities haven’t got enough evidence to decide whether the greater mouse-eared bat is extinct or just laying very low.

  What is certain is that matters everywhere may be about to get much worse. In early 2006 a highly lethal new fungal disease, called white-nose syndrome (because it turns the hair around the victims’ noses white), was discovered among hibernating bats in a cave in New York. The disease kills up to 95 percent of the bats that it infects. It has now spread to half a dozen other states and will almost certainly spread farther. As of late 2009, scientists still had no idea what it is about the fungus that kills its host, how it spreads, where it originated, or how to stop it. All that is certain is that the fungus is specially adapted to survive in cold conditions—not good news for the bats of much of North America, Europe, and Asia.

  III

  The direction of movement for populations is not always downward, it must be said. Sometimes populations boom, occasionally in ways that shape history. Never has that been more true than in 1873, when farmers in the western United States and across the plains of Canada experienced a devastating visitation unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. From out of nowhere there came swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts—great chirring masses of motion and appetite that blotted out the sun and devoured everything in their path. Wherever the swarms landed, the effects were appalling. They stripped clean fields and orchards. They ate laundry off lines and wool off the backs of living sheep. They ate leather and canvas and even the handles of wooden tools. One amazed witness reported them landing in such numbers that they put out a good-sized fire. It was, according to most witnesses, like experiencing the end of the world. The noise was deafening. One swarm was estimated as being 1,800 miles long and perhaps 110 miles wide. It took five days to pass. It is thought to have contained at least 10 billion individual insects, but other estimates have put the figure as high as 12.5 trillion, with a massed weight of 27.5 million tons. It was almost certainly the largest gathering of living things ever seen on Earth. Nothing would deflect them. When two swarms met, they would push through each other and emerge in unbroken ranks on the other side. No amount of battering them with shovels or spraying with insecticide made any measurable impact.

  This was exactly at a time when people were moving in vast numbers into the western United States and Canada, and creating a new wheatbelt across the great plains. Nebraska’s population, for instance, went from twenty-eight thousand to over a million in one generation. Altogether four million new farms were created west of the Mississippi in the period after the U.S. Civil War, and many of these new farmers were heavily indebted both with mortgages on their houses and land and with loans on flotillas of new equipment—reapers, threshers, harvesters, and so on—needed to farm on an industrial scale. Hundreds of thousands of others had invested huge sums in railroads, grain silos, and businesses of every type to support the booming populations of the West. Now vast numbers of people were being literally wiped out.

  At the end of the summer, the locusts vanished, and a measure of hopeful relief crept in. But the optimism was misplaced. The locusts returned in the following three summers, each time in larger numbers than before. The unnerving thought that life in the West might become untenable began to take hold. No less alarming was the thought that the locusts could spread eastward and begin to devour the even richer farmlands of the Midwest and the East. There has never been a darker or more helpless moment in the whole of American history.

  And then it all just came to an end. In 1877, the swarms were much reduced and the locusts within them seemed curiously lethargic. The next year they didn’t come at all. The Rocky Mountain locust (its formal name was Melanoplus spretus) didn’t just retreat but vanished altogether. It was a miracle. The last living specimen was found in Canada in 1902. None has been seen since.

  It took more than a century for scientists to work out what had happened, but it appears that the locusts retired every winter to hibernate and breed in the loamy soils abutting the winding rivers of the high plains east of the Rockies. These, it turned out, were the very places where new waves of incoming farmers were transforming the land through ploughing and irrigation—actions that killed the locusts and their pupae as they slept. They couldn’t have devised a more effective remedy if they had spent millions of dollars and studied the matter for years. No extinction can ever be called a good thing, but this was probably as close to positive as such an event can get.

  Had the locusts continued to thrive, the world would have been a very different place. Global agriculture and commerce, the peopling of the West, and ultimately the fate of our Old Rectory, as well as almost everything else beyond, connected to, and in between, would have been profoundly reshaped in ways we can scarcely imagine. American farmers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were already gripped with a form of angry populism that was deeply resentful of banks and big business, and these feelings were widely echoed in the cities, particularly among newly arrived immigrants. Had agriculture collapsed sufficiently to produce widespread hardship and hunger, there might well have been an overwhelming rush to socialism. There were certainly many who ardently desired such an outcome.

  Instead, of course, matters settled down, the West resumed its long expansion, America became the breadbasket of the world, and the British countryside went into a long tailspin from which it has never entirely recovered. That is a story that we shall get to in due course, but meanwhile let’s step into the garden and consider why so much of that landscape was, and indeed remains, so very attractive to be in.

  * The Norway rat was often in the past called the brown rat, and the roof rat has been called the black rat. However, the names are misleading—the color of a rat’s fur isn’t a reliable indicator of anything—so rodentologists now nearly always avoid the terms.

  • CHAPTER XII •

  THE GARDEN

  I

  In 1730, Queen Caroline of Anspach, the industrious and ever-improving wife of King George II, did a rather daring thing. She ordered the diversion of the little River Westbourne in London to make a large pond in the middle of Hyde Park. The pond, called the Serpentine, is still there and still much admired by visitors, though almost none realize quite how historic a body of water it is.

  This was the first manmade pond in the world designed not to look manmade. It is hard to imagine now quite what a radical step this was. Previously, all artificial bodies of water were rigorously geometrical—either boxily rectangular, in the manner of a reflecting pool, or circular, like the Round Pond in neighboring Kensington Gardens, built just two years earlier. Now here was an artificial body of water that was curvilinear and graceful, that meandered beguilingly and looked as if it had been formed, in a moment of careless serendipity, by nature. People were enchanted by the deception and flocked to admire it. The royal family were so pleased that for a time they kept two outsized yachts on the Serpentine even though there was barely space for them to turn without colliding.

  For Queen Caroline, it was a rare popular triumph, for her gardening ambitions were often ill-judged. In the same period, she appropriated two hundred acres of Hyde Park for the grounds of Kensington Palace, banishing private citizens from its leafy paths except on Saturdays, and then only for part of the year and only if they
looked respectable. This became, not surprisingly, a source of widespread resentment. The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James’s Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. “Only a crown, Madam,” he replied with a thin smile.

  So the Serpentine was an immediate success, and the credit for it—certainly for its engineering, probably also for its conception—belongs to a shadowy figure named Charles Bridgeman. Where exactly this man of dashing genius came from has always been a mystery. He appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, in 1709 with a set of signed drawings of an expert caliber for some proposed landscaping works at Blenheim Palace. Everything about him before this is conjectural: where he was born, the timing and circumstances of his upbringing, where he acquired his considerable skills. Historians can’t even agree whether to spell his name Bridgeman or Bridgman. Yet for the thirty years after he came on the scene he was everywhere that gardening of a high order was needed. He worked with all the leading architects—John Vanbrugh, William Kent, James Gibbs, Henry Flitcroft—on projects all over England. He designed and laid out Stowe, the most celebrated garden of the day. He was appointed royal gardener and managed the gardens at Hampton Court, Windsor, Kew, and all the royal parks throughout the king’s domain. He created Richmond Gardens. He designed the Round Pond and Serpentine. He surveyed and designed for estates all over the south of England. Wherever there was important gardening to be done, Bridgeman was there. No individual portrait of him exists, but he does appear, rather unexpectedly, in the second picture of Hogarth’s sequence “The Rake’s Progress,” where he is one of several people, including a tailor, a dancing instructor, and a jockey, importuning the young rake to invest his money with them. Even there, however, Bridgeman looks uncomfortable and stiff, as if he has somehow wandered into the wrong painting.*

  Gardening was already a huge business in England when Bridgeman came along. London’s Brompton Park Nursery, which stood on land now occupied by the mighty museums of South Kensington, covered one hundred acres and produced enormous volumes of shrubbery, exotic plants, and other green things for stately homes up and down the country. But these were gardens of a very different type from those we know today. For one thing, they were luridly colorful: paths were filled with colored gravel, statues were brightly painted, bedding plants were chosen for the intensity of their hues. Nothing was natural or understated. Hedges were shaped into galloping topiary. Paths and borders were kept rigorously straight and lined with fastidiously clipped box or yew. Formality ruled. The grounds of stately homes weren’t so much parks as exercises in geometry.

  Charles Bridgeman (fourth from left, holding garden plan) in William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Levee. (photo credit 12.1)

  Now quite suddenly all of that order and artificiality was being swept away, and the fashion became to make things look natural. Where this impulse came from isn’t at all easy to say. The early eighteenth century was a time when nearly all young men of privileged bearing traveled through Europe on grand tours. Practically without exception they returned home full of enthusiasm for the formal orders of the classical world and a burning desire to reproduce them in an English setting. Architecturally, they longed for nothing more than to be proudly and unimaginatively derivative. Where the grounds were concerned, however, they rejected rigidity and began to build an entirely new kind of world outdoors. For those who believe the British have gardening genius embedded in their chromosomes, this was the age that seemed to prove it.

  One of the heroes of this movement was our old friend Sir John Vanbrugh. Because he was self-taught, he was able to bring a fresh perspective to matters. He considered the setting of his houses as no architect had before, for instance. At Castle Howard, almost the first thing he did was rotate the house 90 degrees on its axis, so that it faced north-south rather than east-west, as it had under earlier plans drawn up by William Talman. This made it impossible to provide the traditional long approach to the house, with glimpsed views across fields as a kind of visual foreplay, but had the compensating virtue that the house sat far more comfortably in the landscape and the occupants enjoyed an infinitely more satisfying outlook on the world beyond. This was a radical reversal of traditional orientation. Before this, houses weren’t built to enjoy a view. They were the view.

  To maximize important prospects, Vanbrugh introduced another inspired feature—the folly, a building designed with no other purpose in mind than to complete a view and provide a happy spot for the wandering eye to settle. His Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard was the first of its type. To this he added the most ingenious and transformative innovation of all: the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a sunken fence, a kind of palisade designed to separate the private part of an estate from its working parts without the visual intrusion of a conventional fence or hedge. It was an idea adapted from French military fortifications (where Vanbrugh would have first encountered them during his years of imprisonment). Because they were unseen until the last instant, people tended to discover them with a startled cry of “Ha-ha!”—and hence, so it is said, the name. The ha-ha wasn’t simply a practical device for keeping cows off the lawn, but an entirely new way of perceiving the world. Grounds, garden, parkland, estate—all became part of a continuous whole. Suddenly the attractive part of a property didn’t have to end at the lawn’s edge. It could run on to the horizon.

  One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more extensive houses and unimpeded views. It was almost as if a rich person couldn’t begin work on a grand house until he had thoroughly disrupted at least a few dozen menial lives. Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice in a long, sentimental poem, “The Deserted Village,” inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned.*

  Vanbrugh didn’t necessarily invent any of these things. Horace Walpole for one credited Bridgeman with inventing the ha-ha, and it may be, for all we know, that he gave the idea to Vanbrugh. But then it may equally be, for all we know, that Vanbrugh gave it to him. All that can be said is that by about 1710 people suddenly had lots of ideas for how to improve the landscape, principally by giving it an air of greater naturalism. One event that seems to have contributed was a storm of 1711 known as the Great Blow, which knocked down trees all over the country and caused a lot of people to notice, evidently for the first time, how agreeable a backdrop they had made. In any case, people suddenly became unusually devoted to nature.

  Joseph Addison, the essayist, became the voice of the movement with a series of articles in The Spectator called “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” in which he suggested that nature provided all the beauty one could want already. It just needed a bit of management, or as he put it in a famous line: “A Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.” (The newish word landscape, you will gather, hadn’t quite settled in yet.) “I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion,” he went on, “but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure,” and all at once the world seemed to agree with him.

  Stately homeowners everywhere gladly followed these precepts, introducing curving paths and wandering lakes, but for a time the improvements were mostly architectural. All across the country rich landowners packed their grounds with grottoes, temples,
prospect towers, artificial ruins, obelisks, castellated follies, menageries, orangeries, pantheons, amphitheaters, exedra (curved walls with niches for busts of heroic figures), the odd nymphaeum, and whatever other architectural caprices came to mind. These were not ornamental trifles, but hefty monuments. The Mausoleum at Castle Howard, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (and where Vanbrugh’s patron the third earl is now passing eternity), was as large and as costly as any of Christopher Wren’s London churches. Robert Adam drew up a plan to erect a complete walled Roman town, picturesquely ruined and entirely artificial, across a dozen acres of meadowy hillside in Herefordshire simply to give a minor noble named Lord Harley something diverting to gaze on from his breakfast table. That was never built, but other diversions of startling magnificence were. The famous pagoda at Kew Gardens, rising to a height of 163 feet, was for a long time the tallest freestanding structure in England. Until the nineteenth century it was richly gilded and covered with painted dragons—eighty in all—and tinkling brass bells, but these were sold off by King George IV to pay down his debts, so what we see today is really a stripped-down shell. At one time the grounds of Kew had nineteen other fantasy structures scattered about, including a Turkish mosque, an Alhambra Palace, a miniature Gothic cathedral, and temples to Aeolus, Arethusa, Bellona, Pan, peace, solitude, and the sun—all so that some members of the royal family would have a selection of diversions with which to punctuate their walks.

  For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown. Queen Caroline—she of the Serpentine in Hyde Park—had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit. Somewhat improbably, he went on to become the rector of a church at Byfleet in Surrey. Unfortunately, he appears not to have been happy there—he appears not to have been happy anywhere—and drowned himself in the Thames.