The Wasp and the Orchid

by Danielle Clode

  Within half an hour, John replies. He is Edith’s grandson, and is only too delighted to help.

  Edith’s parents married in London and their oldest child, Harry, was born in Richmond, but they soon returned to Old Woking. By the time of the 1871 census, Henry and Lottie were living in Church Street, next to St Peter’s Church, with four children under four – Harry (four), Lottie (three), Annie Maria (one) and Harriett (one month) – along with a twelve-year-old nurse girl, Jane Tickner. Henry is listed as a carpenter. It is hard to imagine how they might have all lived comfortably in the tiny three-bedroom stone cottage, ducking beneath the curved and rough-hewn beams that supported the roof.

  By 1874 the family had moved half a mile down the High Street, to Hale Lodge. Reputed to have once been the hunting lodge of Queen Elizabeth I on her forays from Windsor Castle, Hale Lodge was, in fact, even smaller than the tiny Church Cottage. But in Edith’s memory it would loom large. It was in this house that Edith was born, on 29 July 1874.

  ‘Like Hood,’ Edith later wrote, ‘we all remember the house where we were born, “the little window where the sun came peeping in at morn”.’

  Hale Lodge was smothered in ‘an avalanche of summer greenery’ that screened all but the main outline of the house: ivy scrambling over the double-framed white casement windows and steep tiled roof. The front portico was a riot of flowering climbers; the garden was filled with flowering shrubs protected to the east with a row of small pencil pines. Harry mentioned that they were often awakened by bird netters looking for nests hidden deep in the ivy.

  It is the ivy that Edith remembers.

  ‘My earliest memories are of its tiny, greenish flowers, and their warm odour that floated up to me as I leaned from the windows they curtained,’ Edith recalled. ‘Sweet? Ask the bees that browsed among them all through the sunny hours, and the birds that cradled their babies in the cosy depths of polished leaves.’

  Hale Lodge, High Street, Old Woking: Edith’s birthplace, from a picture in one of Edith’s articles

  Hale Lodge still stands today, its red-brick walls now stripped neat and bare, the portico empty of flowers, save two small hanging baskets, and the front garden mowed into low-maintenance squares of grass. The long-lived pencil pines are the sole survivors, grown taller than the house now and fattened into century-old adolescence.

  The only picture of the house in all its floral glory seems to have been taken by the previous owners, the Jervis family, who lent the Harmses a photo taken a few years earlier. Harry rephotographed the image with an extension to his plate camera and reproduced a number of copies which he gave to family members, including Edith, who used it years later in a newspaper article on ‘wall gardening’.

  Guildford is 40 kilometres north-east of Selborne, once home to Gilbert White, England’s most famous naturalist. Surely that cannot be a coincidence. And yet there are few mentions of White in any of Edith’s writings, which surprises me as she remained strongly attached both to her home county and to the authors who wrote about the English countryside. Edith’s literary allusions are frequent and broad, even in her most biological articles, and yet to the modern eye, they are highly eclectic as well. Emerson is a firm favourite, while Thoreau is rarely mentioned. Her fondness for Richard Jefferies was well known to her daughters and grandsons, and yet of White, who lived so near to her home, who pioneered the close examination of the minutiae of local ecologies, who brought nature writing to such a wide popular audience, there is very little. White’s Natural History of Selborne was not immediately successful. First published in 1789, in the same year as the French Revolution, the book made few waves, but a fourth edition in 1827 marked the beginning of White’s longer-term fame. His book has never been out of print since and has run through some 300 editions.

  And yet in his introduction to the 1887 edition, Richard Jefferies wrote that White had fallen from favour. Jefferies discovered White’s writing ‘late in the day’. He speculated that White’s style of writing – fresh, naïve, simple, with an impression of effortlessness – was perhaps not popular at a time when nature writing abounded in ‘long words and sentences that come out with a slow, crushed motion, like a rail from the rolling-mill’. The same engaging effortlessness is apparent in Edith’s writing.

  Edith does not cite any writer as the inspiration for her interest in nature. It was from her uneducated father – builder and beekeeper – that she inherited her skills in ‘the close and loving observation that enabled her to make her notable and valuable insect biological discovery’.

  ‘Father was a natural observer,’ said Edith. ‘He noticed at once anything unusual. He questioned why it was unusual, then waited patiently watching, till he found his answer, not in books, but by patient loving observation.’

  I am not the first person to attempt a biography of Edith Coleman. As I dig beneath the surface I realise that others have worked this patch before me. Their efforts have broken the ground and prepared the soil. Kate Baker, Lynette Young, Rica Erickson and Loris Peggie have all felt that Edith’s contributions deserved remembrance, and some of them have compiled, to greater or lesser extents, archives and manuscripts about her from which I can work. Unpublished manuscripts and resources lie dormant in various archives, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.

  When I travelled to Canberra to search the Australian Academy of Science’s archives, I was hoping to find something on a woman of science. But instead I found Kate Baker’s unpublished manuscript in the National Library of Australia, on figures of Australian literature. Kate Baker was a flag-bearer for Australian writers, an indomitable battler who would not stand to see the worthy forgotten. It is Baker who saved Joseph Furphy’s legacy for us. And it is Baker who recorded Edith’s thoughts about her childhood and parents. Baker considered Edith to be a writer first, then a naturalist.

  Edith’s oldest brother, Harry, had joined several other apprentices in his father’s business, which included decorating the coffins they made with ornamental brass nails. Edith later described her father as an architect, although it was Harry who was sent to learn architectural drawing, which he did not enjoy, soon returning to building.

  Harry had a history of illness and chest complaints throughout his teens. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent one year in bed and was sent to Torquay to recuperate. Doctor Sels in Guildford suggested that Harry go to Australia or Florida, where the warmer climate would be more favourable.

  In late 1886, Harry boarded the steamer the SS Arabic, with a letter of introduction from Reverend Charles Dodgson (better known as the author Lewis Carroll) to a Queensland sugar farmer and an arrangement to meet friends, the Exeters, who had already gone to Melbourne. The steamer sailed for New Zealand, via Tenerife and Hobart, with coal piled over the deck for the six-week journey. Harry was ticketed to Sydney, but managed to transfer at Hobart (with some difficulty) to Melbourne instead, where he was met by the Exeter family and soon got a job with a grocer, Hatch, near the Junction on High Street in Kew. He sent home good reports, that his new life in Australia suited him well.

  When the youngest children were small, they attended a dame or granny school in Woking – a sort of kindergarten where the children were set to master ‘the ABC and counting of beads’, before being sent to the village school, a few miles distant. George recalled walking with Edith, Harriett and Hervey through the snow in winter.

  ‘I can remember Father coming to pick us up on occasions when there was a snowstorm. He would lay the four of us on the bottom of the cart and cover us up with a horse rug. On one occasion we were caught in a terrible storm and the young horse wouldn’t face it and backed into a ditch! We thought it was great fun.’

  The move to nearby Guildford in 1886, to a terrace house tight-packed in Denzil Road, must have been quite a change for the younger children. Guildford was considerably larger than Old Woking and the children’s new schools were very different in approach. No longer were they all together in the one class, unde
r the instruction of a kindly master and his gentle assistants. At Holy Trinity and St Mary’s National School, the boys went off to one school with male teachers and the girls had female teachers at another. Little George did not like his new master. He hated school, in fact. The gaffer had once beaten him unconscious for falling asleep in class during The Merchant of Venice. The Bawdy Bard was enough to send anyone to sleep, George complained. Why could they not study Pope or Scott?

  The Harms family in early 1881: Hervey, Annie, Charlotte and Harry (back), parents Lottie and Henry (seated), George, Harriett and Edith (front)

  For Edith, it is the plants that best recall the delights of her Surrey childhood. The dandelion brings memories of ‘the fairy-like beauty of its seeds, with their sphere of parachutes – the clocks of blowballs’. ‘The cowslip necklaces of our childhood’ were made in yellow clusters of Primula veris that grew wild with daisies and buttercups. She remembers ‘old-fashioned musk (Mimosa moschatus)’ as being in every English cottage garden.

  ‘One of the happiest memories of my childhood is of a day spent at St Anne’s Hill, once the home of Charles James Fox, the statesman,’ Edith wrote. ‘Though it had passed into other hands, the herb garden was left much as it was in Fox’s day. It was a garden such as Bacon might have described, in which sweet herbs grew no higher than the paths, and might be walked upon – to give off ravishing odors. They were herbs rooted in British traditions, all growing as perhaps they grew in that first garden planted eastward of Eden – before the hand of man had begun to curb their natural tendencies, and to coax them to fit the size and pattern of his garden.’

  The sensory richness of this childhood memory is obvious, as is its impact on her later life and work.

  ‘I did not know all of their names on that far-distant day,’ she added, ‘but there were basil, balm and borage, feverfew, fennel and thyme, chervil, chives and hyssop, tansy, tarragon, lad’s love and wormwood, rosemary, rue and yarrow, sages, lavenders and mints, lavage and smallage, coriander, camomile, cumin and caraway, anise, marjoram, melilot, woodruff and many more, all of which are growing in my own garden today. In warm sunshine their sweet odors lay hold of my heart. Not only do they bring back to memory that happy, far-off day, but they link my own garden with the gardens of mediaeval England.’

  Apt that Edith should cite Francis Bacon’s classic essay ‘Of Gardens’ as her model. His musings for a garden were grand (no less than thirty acres should be considered), but very much in favour of retaining their ‘natural wildness’.

  ‘Some thickets made only of sweet-briar and honeysuckle,’ he instructed, ‘and some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries, and primroses. For these are sweet, and prosper in the shade. And these to be in the heath, here and there, not in any order. I like also little heaps, in the nature of mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths), to be set, some with wild thyme; some with pinks; some with germander, that gives a good flower to the eye; some with periwinkle; some with violets; some with strawberries; some with cowslips; some with daisies; some with red roses; some with lilium convallium; some with sweet-williams red; some with bear’s-foot: and the like low flowers, being withal sweet and sightly. Part of which heaps to be with standards of little bushes pricked upon their top, and part without. The standards to be roses; juniper; holly; berberries (but here and there, because of the smell of their blossoms); red currants; gooseberries; rosemary; bays; sweetbriar; and such like.’

  Bacon’s essay of 1625 is regarded as a pioneer in garden writing. But then, he was a polymath and pioneer of so many things: politics, law, essays, plays, science. He wrote the first collection of personal essays ever written in English and founded the modern scientific method. Small wonder some people think he was Shakespeare. It was Bacon who proposed the use of observation over speculation, hypothesis testing rather than logic, writing articles not books, detail not generality, constant replication, critical questioning and the public sharing of knowledge – and the notion that anyone could make such contributions, that anyone could be such an analytical observer, could adopt this ‘scientific’ way of thinking. Not just a model for beautiful gardens then, but the very model for a modern naturalist and nature writer.

  In her later years Edith painted a ‘charming picture of a beautiful home life in which father, mother and children (six of them) all shared the same interests – literature, science and nature lore’. She seems to have mentioned her hometown often to her correspondents in England. She always hoped she might return one day.

  How different their lives might have been had they stayed in Surrey and its surrounds, following in the footsteps of countless generations of yeoman farming Harmses before them. But this idyllic childhood was about to end.

  On 6 April 1887, tragedy struck the Harms family. Edith’s closest sister, sixteen-year-old Harriett, died suddenly of meningitis.

  Wind in the willows: Nature’s Æolian harps

  By Edith Coleman, 1930

  I offered him my company to a willow tree, either to make him a garland as being forsaken, or to bind him up a rod, as being worthy to be whipped. – Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

  If you have never heard the song the wind sings in the willows you have missed some of the sweetest music that Nature plays on her Æolian harps. Not every ear is attuned to the melodies of her gentle moments, which she lightly stirs the slender boughs into a far-off refrain which only an eager ear may follow; a hushed melody on muted strings; sweet, inarticulate sounds, soft as the song a mother sings to her first-born.

  Briccialdi has caught the song of the wind among many trees, and it has been conveyed to us by the magic flutes of Lemmone and Amadio, but no musician’s cunning has yet captured the elusive airs the wind weaves among the willow’s supple branches. The themes of her turbulent days, when she whips and lashes the tossing green limbs into the seething hiss of the sea’s unquiet moods, may be followed by the least imaginative ear.

  The weeping-willow has always been associated with sadness and despair, due doubtless to the drooping habit of its branches. Though it is so often chosen as a symbol of woe and mourning, however, there are times, even in winter, when a joyous ripple runs through its leafless boughs. Along the river the willow now trails brown tresses over slow, sluggish waters, like rows of sad dryads weeping for the loss of their summer finery. It will not be long now before they are clothed in the ‘green fire of spring’, and droop dreamily to full singing rivers.

  The weeping-willows have always been favourites. Back into the mists of the past they carry us, to the tears that fell by the rivers of Babylon, when the faithful children of Israel refused to be comforted. I remember reading somewhere that the great Linnæus had erred in naming the weeping-willow Salix Babylonica, for willows had never been known on the banks of the Euphrates; and that it was a kind of poplar tree upon which the captive Jews hung their harps when those who had brought them there demanded of them a song. It may be so. I have never looked it up, for, as I read, I felt a sense of loss. So long I had liked to murmur the beautiful words as I stood under some lovely willows in one of my happiest haunts. We are always, I think, a little impatient of those matter-of-fact people who shatter our pet illusions, and so, should any of you verify the statement, I beg of you not to tell me.

  Though frequently seen in valleys or along shady river banks the willow is really a lover of light and open spaces. Under these conditions it may attain a great height and girth, with widespread branches making deep shade. I have in mind two wonderful weeping-willows of great age. To every lover of Healesville they are an essential part of it. Old they are – Oh! so old – with wrinkled bole, and dreadful scars where each year it seems the winter winds have robbed them of a noble limb. Yet in spring as I stood beneath them they veiled me with a gossamer of tenderest green that drifted in the clear air like an emerald cloud.

  The willow family is large, embracing more than 300 species, and through the boughs of each the wind sings a special song.
The osiers along the rivers sometimes sing of sorrow, but not for long. Theirs are ‘short swallow flights of song that dip their wings in tears and skim away’. Perhaps the most popular are the pussy-foot willows, whose soft silver catkins delight us in springtime. When the gleaming silver buds begin to push their way above the close, red sheaths, we know that the time of the singing of birds is at hand. A week or two longer, when the ‘pussy-feet’ are half out of their protecting bracts, we may cut the twigs to adorn our homes. If these are put in bowls without water they will remain in exactly the same condition for years. The little red bracts may fall, but the development of the silky catkin has been effectually arrested, to be an unfailing reminder of spring until she comes again . . .

  Stand beneath a pussy-willow on a warm, sunshiny day, when the air is full of scent and the murmur of browsing bees. A glance at the heavily laden visitors tells how faithfully they are carrying out their part of the work. Later try to visit the flowers of the mother tree, growing in some nearby watercourse. Shake a branch and a cloud of seeds, each fitted with a parachute of silky hairs, sails away on its mission of finding new lands to settle. The bees have done their work well . . .

  Chapter 3

  SHIPS THAT PASS

  ‘Before me as I write are some almost perfect roses, buds half-awake, gathered with dew on them . . . They are sweetly scented, yet already they are half-forgotten names. Tomorrow we shall mourn their passing.’