A Warning to the Curious Gardener

Settle down with some mulled wine or hot chocolate or whatever warms the cockles of your heart at this time of year, then we shall begin.

Imagine that it’s Christmas Eve over a hundred years ago and that you’re a member of the Chit Chat Club at Cambridge. You’ve just come out of the cold, moonlight, dim lamplight, and shadows of the evening and into a room with several candles dotted around it that are slowly dripping wax. There is a fire in the hearth and you sit on a chair near it and warm your hands by its flames. It begins to rain heavily outside. The raindrops colliding with the windows sound like someone drumming their fingers on a table. 

There is an air of expectation in the room. Various cliques within the club huddle together absorbed in their own private conversations. Then the man of the hour M.R. James appears and all is quiet. He takes a sheaf of paper out of his bag, sits down in a chair at the centre of the room and begins to read one of his tales of terror. For the next half an hour you listen, transfixed, chilled to the core by what James has dreamt up. 

Born fifty years after that other innovator of the ghost story Dickens, James revolutionised the genre. Common features of his stories are protagonists that are too curious for their own good, cursed objects, and flawed authority figures. However, the keen gardener may be most interested in how elements of the natural world and gardens are used in his plots. 

Yew, which has long had an association with the supernatural, crops up in A School Story, and Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance. In A School Story the narrator speaks of a horrifying discovery made in a yew thicket predicted by a school friend’s strange bit of Latin composition, and a maze made from a yew hedge dominates the grounds of the house that is the setting of Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, driving the narrative. 

In The Ash Tree the tree of the title harbours something terrible. Like Yews, Ash trees in the past were thought to have magical qualities. And what’s more a gardener brings the story to its conclusion. 

A woman’s desire for a rose garden in The Rose Garden is thwarted by an unnatural presence, and a mysterious glass tablet found in a garden reveals events that took place there in the past in The Residence at Whitminster.

Drawing on how nature, in all its vastness, can sometimes confuse the senses is a valuable strategy for writers of ghost stories. And James with his brief but intense descriptions of outdoor spaces, and his clever way of weaving folklore into his stories uses this tool brilliantly. 

This quote from his epistolary yarn The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance illustrates, with a dash of humour, the odd things that can cross a person’s mind in an unfamiliar environment: “I was not in trim for wandering about unknown pastures, especially on an evening when bushes looked like men, and a cow lowing in the distance might have been the last trump.” 

Now, if you haven’t already, and this whetted your appetite, you may want to explore the work of James this Christmas. And if you happen to see something lurking by the greenhouse, or something rushes past you on a chilly morning in the garden, I wouldn’t worry. It’s probably just a trick of the light. 

Happy Christmas All!