?

by John Saul

Inside the turnstile he sensed things were afoot from the windswept character of the grounds, windswept places in his mind suggesting a location which had not been resolved, sorted out, while still in his head were the old photographs he'd scanned on the roadside board outside, leading him to expect a great open field with odd undulations and areas of water in head-scratching positions, and now beyond the entrance he thought maybe his senses had been right, maybe not, certainly he was in no mood for disappointments, so he told himself, though possibly that was exactly his mood, as confirmed by an exchange of words with the gatekeeper—on detecting his accent the man found him a guidebook in English and said he had been to Dartmoor, well that fitted, Dartmoor—on looking ahead more keenly he spied manicured rock features and an odd-looking blue glass structure, very blue, digital blue, leaving only some artful benches and evergreens in the distance to present any real welcome, so much of the botanical garden was wintering under bare ground, the earth and the weather are in alignment was the way the gatekeeper had put it, and indeed there was an actual wind, on turning aside from the board with a map by the entrance he felt it sweep across, dipping and swirling so insistently that he gathered the lapels of his coat, giving him a sense of unease for which German had a single word, Unbehagen—having a single word suggesting a culture used to a sense of unease, but be that as it may—here at Klein Flottbek in unsettling whips of wind he felt almost cheated, until the familiarity of a line of apple trees, cased in dark winter bark, pulled him back into a new present, where the irritation subsided, leaving just vestiges of an unease, as for him it would on entering a zoo, and it took no great brain to realise a botanical garden was a zoo of plants, nature in a constructed setting, instead of lions and tigers there were sequoias and ginkgos, there was bamboo for flamingoes, camellias for parrots, a zoo of plants was of course quieter, no fury-fuelled elephants, no lion stretched out on the rocks puzzling over the growl of a tiger it heard and smelled but never saw, but on the other hand who knew what the plants got up to below the ground, even without wild beasts a deadliness lurked, there were poisonous plants, which is the area he set off for first, still with an unease he couldn't explain, he had no idea what the source of it was but if he kept going, as he always did, he might stumble on what it was, so he decided to hoist himself up, mentally, and okay, look, while there was no enticing colour or blossom there was a glorious trail of names on signs, little white boards stuck in the soil beside straggly ground cover, the names alone drew him along, so that was coralberry, or would be once it pushed up through the soil, and that hart's tongue fern, long tongues, sticking out in all directions, including towards a Russian belladonna, bittersweet nightshade well I know to avoid that he thought, baneberry, silver candles from Japan, China, Korea, meadow saffron, Solomon’s seal from the Caucasus, the Himalayas, he could make out little fingernails of green—foam cress from the Balkans—better not touch it, or the lifeless soil beside it, apparently Welsh poppies lay there, he would have to take their word for it, at least the leatherleaf bush was bushy in a leathery way, as along the bed he went, past the yellow corydalis, blue comfrey, the male fern from North America with a range as far as Brazil, Tenby daffodils which apparently grow in Spain, the poisonous candia tulip originally from Turkey, when towards the end of the bed he caught sight of  the wilted twists of virgin tobacco labelled S America? and on his morning out at Klein Flottbek it was this that startled him most, this ?, this question mark, the having-acquired-something and not-knowing-where-it-came-from, his Unbehagen found its way to this sign, latched onto it, did no one know where the tobacco came from, who brought it here, how, and the Tenby daffodils, Tenby was not in Spain, consequently on seeing two dungareed gardeners re-routing a line of hosing he felt an urge to question them, only he had no question formulated, even some small talk to start things off evaded him, he could hardly enquire about their hose, or their surprisingly orange gloves, a colour that jumped out of the day, he could ask about winter pruning but didn't know what the question was there either, all that came to mind was Does no one know where the virgin tobacco came from, question mark, or Excuse me but if these daffodils were growing happily in Spain, does this mean, er, along came someone from Tenby, yes Tenby mid-Wales—he wracked his brain for the German word for Wales—and this Tenby person, probably a man, named the flowers after himself, thinking himself a prophet perhaps, a shaman, before scooting back, pockets full of seeds to Wales, these were questions he might ask, give them a go, were his German better but it wasn't, he had enough for small talk about, say, Dartmoor, but the question mark attached to the tobacco was another matter, investigating that with a gardener struck him as hopeless as asking a museum attendant if he thought the Mona Lisa had her expression because she found Leonardo faintly ridiculous, so he sat on an admirable bench at a distance from the gardeners in their dark uniforms and simply observed them flipping the hose and snipping with their secateurs, before noticing properly that the Klein Flottbek botanical gardens had these blue glass pyramids, two of them, little pavilions—like the entrance to a little Louvre it occurred to him, doubtless because the Mona Lisa had crossed his mind—he might go there next but for now turned to the little guidebook the gatekeeper had given him in return for a small donation, to the words of its author, Dr Carsten Schirarend, hoping to delve down into the puzzles he had detected, the tobacco, the daffodils, the zoo-ness, and soon he was reading how the city was ideally situated for trade in plants, international trade, a starting point for plant-hunting expeditions, of which no details were given, leaving him to figure out—as he looked with some yearning across the windswept field towards the group of redwoods in one corner of the gardens—all this comes from trade, homo negotiatus, as ancient as hunger, trade—it occurred to him there could be a different string of notice boards with labels, another row of signs beside the plants thrust into the earth, all about trade, saying acquire, grab, appropriate (S. America?), and along another path subterfuge, lies, money, down another threats? duress? violence? in other words he felt himself visited suddenly by revelations and found himself suspecting another, buried world shot through with criminality, subject to obfuscation, a new guidebook was needed to speak sweepingly, authoritatively, of what, the phrase would come to him, yes, the underbelly of trade pursued in the name of beauty and of science, or was he getting carried away, having instincts about something without the evidence was always tricky, he got up from his bench and walked slowly, then more quickly, towards the redwoods, touching the bark of other trees in their labelled groves until he came to these giants, came below them, coastal trees set down far from any coast, let alone on their familiar continent, as up they soared, the sign for visitors did not carry a question mark but instead gave minimal information, N. America, that was it, two words, the background and history of the movement of a plant, probably just a seed, in two words, N. America, one of which had even been cut further to an N., as he came to the nearest trunk he realised a further phenomenon, their magnificence, and he touched the bark, yes, a wonder, dry like cork, gently wooden, not like the scaly beeches shortly before, or the stone hides of the monkey-puzzle trees, this bark was light and dry, extraordinary, he sensed the pull of the sequoias, of all the plants, drawing him to them with their magnetism, distracting us away from their history, but what were the facts, the history, who got them here and how, and he thought to try his phone, that sprawl of information he carried with him everywhere, the self-professed experts and professors, usually without their photographs, strangers often offering their services for free, and the phone did help sometimes, it had got him here, had told him about the movements of a bus a mile away, the 115 coming towards him and about to take him to Klein Flottbek, so he entered the words plant hunters between inverted commas to keep the words together, aware the algorithms would nonetheless try and drive a wedge between one word and the other, as instantly a storm of information came flashing down the fibre-optic cables, a frenzied whirlstrom of names and societies, dates, expeditions, he scrolled down names and dates, past machetes and canoes, bears and mosquitoes, hands stuck to oars by ice, striking him most forcefully came the hunt by a certain Robert Fortune, hired by the East India Company, which was suddenly all over his phone, amid which this Robert Fortune set out to solve the riddles of how China made its unrivalled tea, to get hold of plants and seeds, wrest for Britain the priceless industrial secrets which held the Chinese monopoly on tea, so that Fortune could make just that—his fortune—(hand shaking, he stopped on another bench to take it in) and this Fortune duly disguised himself, shaving his head, wearing a braid, donning Chinese dress, learning Mandarin, following the customs, and, cleverest of all, arranging to be carried about in a sedan chair to gain himself entry through the gates of towns and cities and it worked, eventually, deceit paid off, as it often does, a matter of grab, grasp, abetted by deception, lies, money, long after which Robert Fortune accidentally fell into an animal trap to be mauled by a bull, those were the days—so the report was headed, Those Were the Days—he scrolled on, through rivers being waded and trees chopped down for their cones until coming to David Douglas who gave his name to the Douglas fir though neither he or the trees had any connection to Douglas the place on the Isle of Man, none, David Douglas had travelled far, far away, across continents, hunting everything in sight, until it was said of him there is scarcely a spot of ground deserving the name of a garden, which does not owe many of its most powerful attractions to the living roots and seeds which have been sent by him, these words kept him rooted to the fine bench, had him reeling as if he had slid around the curve of the question mark and was about to slam into the full stop, the dot at the bottom, he was concluding the big hole in the story had been covered by this ?, though there had been giveaways in the names, Douglas, Tenby, while if the botanic magnets weren't quite doing their work they were certainly trying, being kept clean by the gardeners, one in her green dungarees sprucing up the path with her leaf-blower, another quietly, electrically, on the move on four wheels, it's work, endeavour, can't you see the great array of beautiful magnets, sequoias, lakeside grasses and roses on their way, even under dark cloud the blue glass pyramids were gleaming, who could not be drawn to them, the leaf-blower stopped for him to pass, he came to a tree of overwhelming beauty, the noticeboard in larger than the standard print said it was a jaquemontil birch given to this wonderful desert garden by Sheikh Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed of the United Arab Emirates who had graciously donated the pyramids, where he could step inside and view experiments being made in the desert dust, or could have, had the pyramids not been closed for the season, empty, flagstones and decking and builders' boards lying in disarray, all was shabby close up while pristine from a distance, a fine thing these pyramids were, standing in for the whole shebang, for the sake of prestige, the show and showing off, page 36 of the guidebook had the Sheikh in his official portrait with a falcon, a hunter himself, got to get it, have it, show it, bask in the light, have the titles, the glory, the audiences, the sex, all of which could work on a visitor were it not for a ?, the ? brought in the harems, east and west, the bandits past and present, their palaces and cars and Rolex watches, all gleaming like the pyramids, and fur traders, and orchid hunters, tea clippers and kings and queens, cotton seeds and empire, always empire, if the Dutch had a monopoly on nutmeg and cloves, spices, then break it for the sake of empire, in the one-way traffic of Benin bronzes and Elgin marbles, the botany fever was heating him too, overheating, and at another ? he saw in the scented section—another living grave without a name—he turned off his phone so he might come to his senses, his other senses, saying to himself look there, waiting to appear from beneath the earth, a hare's ear—hare's ear, hart's tongue, bloody cranesbill, what next? next? next he went back to his other, other senses, real senses, the place wasn't right, unease fell far short for how he felt, he felt rage, in a rage he went to leave the botanical gardens by the way he came, past the apple trees to the gate, in no mood to nod to the gatekeeper, who he overheard saying to another visitor, yes I was in Dartmoor, and indeed yes, it is as you say, the bees like it here.