Hyperbole Most Florid - Farrer & Purdom

Reginald Farrer

There’s something rather reminiscent of Monty Python in the writings of the intrepid ‘plant hunter’, Reginald Farrer – the elevated absurdity of hunting flowers, as he describes it, always gets me grinning with glee:

“As I drew near my anxiety and the beating of my heart grew almost painful. Despair seized me when I remembered previous failures, the open situation, the devastating hailstorms of these later days. Panting I at last scrambled up beneath the cliff, and ascended to the neck where, among the moss and tiny Rhododendrons, the Primula had dappled that whole saddle with sparks of blue fire. And now, of those hundreds of flowers, there survived only some three or four capsules, standing grim and lonely on their elongated stalks above the minute scrub. And every one of them was white and empty as an ancient skull. I cursed the plant’s exaggerated and giraffe-like throat, that prevents more than about one per cent. of the blossoms from setting seed. Then in my gloom I turned to climb down again, wanly remembering a certain long ledge of rock on the cliff-face below where there had been some fine specimens. Was it worth while to have a look on chance of seed remaining? Capsules, indeed, I soon saw from afar, four or five of them standing sturdily up in a line under the boulder. Empty, of course. I hardly cared or dared go nearer. At a second glance, however, I stood stricken, stock-still, and almost afraid to breathe; for there in the cup of each, discapsuled, loose, and at the mercy of a moment’s flaw of wind, there still lay seed. Pavid and incredulous I crept nearer with utmost caution, moving with Agag-like delicacy for fear I might shake the mountain, and spreading myself out as wide as possible to intercept the breeze. I reached the pods, and with agonised firm precision I nipped them off between finger and thumb, in anguish lest a single grain should drop; and so, with sweat upon my brow, and a great sigh heaved, I pocketed up the Grand-Violet in a special pouch, and relapsed into the ecstasy of achievement.”

There’s also something very Proustian in his style of writing too. Farrer’s circuitous prose ambulates from one idle or acid philosophical reflection to another. Gossiping about the personality traits of flowers. His florid and lyrical sentences seem to wander, and his books are peppered with whimsical, wry and witty observations – rather like Jerome K. Jerome. Little surprise then that Farrer was a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen. His books and articles combine a mix of horticultural treatise with travelogues of his journeys through Asia or the mountain regions of Europe. They were immensely popular in their time. Yet reading them now I can’t help but hear them narrated in the comic voice of Michael Palin and his ‘Ripping Yarns’. There’s an almost pooterish mix of the tediously mundane with the genuinely intrepid in his writings – travelling through regions haunted by bandits and brigands in search of the most fragile of little flowers – all of which is deftly enlivened by the sheer panache of his most purple prose. Reading On the Eaves of the World, for instance, can be quite a giggle.

Farrer was a Yorkshireman born in 1880 in Marylebone, London to a well-to-do family, related to the Sitwells. He grew up in Ingleborough, the family home, in Clapham in the North Riding of Yorkshire, where he nurtured an early interest in the local flora of the surrounding limestone hills. Aged fourteen he redesigned the estate’s alpine garden and published a note on the local endemic sandwort, Arenaria gothica. He had a harelip (which he later obscured under a handsome waxed moustache) and possibly a cleft palate, which meant he spent much of his childhood undergoing operations and medical treatments. Hence in his early years he was schooled at home, but later on he followed in the family tradition, studying at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1902. 

Euan H. M. Cox (Glendoick)

Travel became another of his main passions. In the year after he left Oxford he embarked on a long tour of Asia, visiting Peking (Beijing), passing briefly through Korea, before spending eight months in Japan, where the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he “had an affair with a geisha girl.” His first book was an evocative account of this trip, The Garden of Asia, published in 1904. He was a frequent traveller with friends to the Alps and Dolomites, always interested in collecting alpine plants and writing about rock gardening. In 1908 he travelled to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), a trip which deepened his spiritual interest in Buddhism, a religion which he openly adopted as his own. He dabbled for a while in politics too, before deciding to pursue a career as a full time plant collector. Spending two years travelling through the borderlands of the “Chinese Alps of Tibet” from 1914-1916 with William Purdom, and returning in 1919 to the borderlands of West China and Burma with Euan H. M. Cox, who later wrote the first comprehensive history of plant hunters in the region. Farrer wrote about these journeys in On the Eaves of the World (1917) and The Rainbow Bridge (1921), the latter work being posthumously published, as he died at the early age of 40 whilst travelling in the China-Burma borderlands.

Also born in 1880, William Purdom was a professionally trained plant hunter. He began his botanical career working for the nurseries of Low & Sons in Enfield, and later for Veitch & Sons, before joining the staff and continuing his studies with the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In 1909 he was recruited by the Arnold Arboretum, attached to Harvard University in the USA, and sent to China. Purdom’s 1909-1912 expedition to the Kansu region was not as productive as had been hoped, largely due to the local difficulties Purdom encountered in the form of ‘brigandage’ and political unrest. So Purdom joined forces with Farrer in 1914. Describing Purdom as “an excellent traveller”, Euan Cox thought “he was always shy and retiring, quite overshadowed by Farrer’s personality. Purdom, however, was a perfect companion who knew Chinese well and was much liked by them in return.” As with Ernest Henry Wilson, Purdom’s interests were not simply limited to botany, he also showed a keen and perceptive interest in anthropology. Like Wilson, he was also highly adept with a glass-plate camera, particularly portraiture. By this means he created a rich ethnographic record of the communities he encountered in the borderlands and many of these images have been preserved in the Arnold Arboretum archives (see here). After completing Farrer’s expedition in 1916 Purdom joined the Chinese Forestry Service where he became a division chief, supervising a system of tree planting as part of the construction of the Chinese Railway system. He too died young, passing away at the French hospital in Peking (Beijing) after a short illness in November 1921, just over a year after his friend, Farrer.

Bill Purdom disguised as a Chinese 'Coolie' in order to secretly collect plants on a sacred mountain, where he was mistaken for a brigand

Purdom published little, so it is harder to gauge a sense of what he was like, but we get glimpses of the man in other writer’s descriptions, such as that given above by Cox. Farrer makes frequent mention of him in On the Eaves of the World, but again these descriptions often tend to be short – yet they give fleeting hints as to his personality. For instance, when Purdom and Farrer were invited to a lavish banquet hosted by a local Chinese dignitary, Farrer quips: “Dear Purdom, whose facility in getting on with the Chinese is only equalled by his depression before any prospect of having to do so, manifested no enthusiasm on the occasion; but for me my first Chinese feast was a matter of some excitement and flutter.” 

It seems Purdom was well respected amongst his peers. Opinions on Farrer were rather more qualified. Frank Kingdon Ward noted his shortcomings, but also had praise for Farrer too, saying: “He had a wonderful eye for a good plant, and an almost uncanny knowledge of how to preserve seed. His specimens were always beautifully preserved and described, his seeds always germinated. As an all-round plant collector he probably had no equal.” Euan Cox, who accompanied Farrer on his second and final expedition to China, agreed with Kingdon Ward but also noted somewhat more critically that: “His prowess as a plant introducer more than outweighed his care as a botanical collector, for he abhorred weeds, and would not collect herbarium material unless he proposed collecting the seed of the plant afterwards. Thus from a botanical standpoint, where everything in a strange land is worthy of inclusion in the vasculum, he was slipshod in his methods. This is proved by the fact that during his two expeditions, one through an extremely rich area, he only collected about 1,920 specimens.”

Much like fellow botanist, Joseph Rock, Farrer often liked to dress up in flamboyant Chinese costume

Frank Kingdon Ward

Farrer’s lack of scientific rigour was something Frank Kingdon Ward lamented also, but Farrer himself was quite open about his lack of interest and aptitude in this area of exploration. In writing about his preparations before an expedition he stated that: “The mind of a Napoleon is required to weigh up accurately beforehand all that is essential and all that is omissible in a voyage of two seasons; to my own thinking, almost everything is omissible once one makes up one’s mind to it, and it is wonderful how simple life can become when resolutely resolved into its bare essentials. In my own case, I find it reduces itself to the materials of washing and the works of Jane Austen; of the two, at extreme need, it would be the washing materials that I would jettison. As for scientific implements such as one considers necessary to the dignity of such an expedition to the Back of Beyond, I believe they are a delusion and a fraud, and in the hands of the ignorant as useful and profitable as a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout – and much less so than a fair woman without discretion. Fain I would take plane-tables and theodolites and all the learned apparatus of modern black magic. But even an aneroid is beyond my control at present, and inspires me with nothing but the blackest distrust. So far as I have observed these instruments in action, you twist the face round till the pointer marks the height you think you ought to be at, and then you triumphantly say, ‘There you are!’” Despite this, rather tongue in cheek debunking of the modern methodologies of scientific exploration, Farrer was on the cusp of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society at the time of his death.

Words may have been more his forte than surveying. This was something which both Cox and Kingdon Ward were agreed upon. Cox esteemed Farrer’s use of language as magical: “… the writings of Reginald Farrer [managed] to titillate the imagination of budding gardeners and to weave a kind of spell over the whole process of plant collecting in the East.” Kingdon Ward similarly found a virtue in his faults: “[Farrer] wrote a great deal, and though he was guilty of hyperbole and extravagant language, though he paid scant heed to the formulae of Chinese nomenclature, or to the exact requirements of latitude and longitude, yet he succeeded in drawing attention to an aspect of geography too often neglected – the sheer beauty of scenery and the refining influence of vegetation on it.”

Vide: – Farrer giving a lyrical vignette of his travels: “Steeply the little woodcutters’ track now mounts on the coppiced hillside, where tall Lady-slippers of buttery-yellow compete with swollen cousins whose petals are striped with vinous purple, and whose enormous rounded bag is of richest crimson maroon. One winds upwards thence to the alpine woodland, deep between vast pinnacle mountains of limestone, mere prickles on the flanks of the Min S’an ridge, but clothed with cool forest in a fashion very heartening after the drought and torridness of the valley regions and the lower gorges. The path, almost unguessable now, wanders through the woodland in the shade, in and out of the stream-bed. Beneath the shade of the trees, in the solemn stillness, the Wood-nymph Primula recurs, amid strange Solomon’ seals, and Arums with fantastic tails and spotted evil faces.” – Reading lines like these it’s almost as if Farrer has wandered the length of the Guermantes Way and kept going, wandering all the way to Asia!

Farrer might not have been as rigorously scientific as his contemporaries nor as systematic in his methods, such as collectors like Wilson, Forrest, and Kingdon Ward, or Sheriff and Ludlow were, but he could be just as perceptive and even prescient. Noting the local environmental depredations of one particular region with a long eye to the future – much like Ernest Henry Wilson and Jean Kingdon Ward both observed in their later writings – for instance (this quote also contains one of my most favourite typos to make it into print): “The next day we left Tao Hor, saying good-bye to it forever, and cut across the angle to the right, up into a land of undistinguishable loess plains and bummocks [sic] and downs, perfectly barren and lifeless, uniformly dust-coloured, and as hideous as a slag-dump under a cold grey sky. It is hard to believe that these terrible regions of Northern Kansu can ever have had woodlands or life. Possibly they never did, though it is certain – that at one time the now-ruined country must have been much better watered and wooded in general. Nowadays, thanks to the destruction of every twig for ages past, Northern Kansu is as desert as Sahara, bleak and torn and hopeless except in the flat vales of its starveling stony rivers, where the means of livelihood are scratched and scraped into existence. But the desert gains each year, the verdant flats of Lanchow are encircled as far as eye can see in wrinkled dust-yellow ranges of stark lifelessness and in no time the cities along the great North Road to Russia, Liang-jô, Su-jô, Kan-jô, Hami, Urumtchi will be going the way of the lost civilisation of Khotan, swamped in the ocean of sand which is Central Asia.”

Whether Proustian or Python-esque, Reginald Farrer’s writings are genuinely entertaining romps which manage to transform plant hunting into something rather more sublime than the usual catalogue of staid old colonial tropes more commonly found in such contemporary travelogues, even if his books are still firmly rooted in that soil from which the myth of the lone white explorer first germinated. It’s easy to see why his writings had such popular appeal amongst the armchair explorers back home in Blighty. 

Yet inside he was a conflicted individual, seen by many of his contemporaries as crotchety and cantankerous. Writing to Osbert Sitwell from Burma in the year that he died Farrer summed up his own foibles thus: “I hate lies and humbug, journalism, Christianity, domesticity, dullness, and European civilisation in general with a fury that, if I let it, makes me feel quite ill.” All explorers, to varying degrees, by their very natures are outsiders, seeking an escape from the norm. What I find most interesting though is how such a singular character as Farrer’s diversifies the range of eccentric personalities which were all drawn to transcend the boundaries of their backgrounds, all seemingly seeking to lose themselves in these borderlands where they might perhaps have felt more at home or at ease within themselves. Farrer is one of the few who never made it back, and in a sense he remains an outsider to this day as he lies buried on a hillside in Burma, at a place called Kawngglanghpu. Yet he lives on through his many books, and also by means of the beautiful plants he collected so intrepidly which now grace so many English gardens; flowers so fully integrated into a cultivated and contrived English idyll as to be almost unseen, the backstories behind their foreign origins now sadly so little known. The foreign made familiar – I can’t help wondering if that fact might have made Farrer smile or curse were he to know it today?

Vilhelm Hammershøi - In The Silent Eye

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Having worked at the British Museum for many years I’ve long been fascinated by two somewhat eccentric views of the building. Both were painted from the same vantage point in 1905 by a Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi. In the mid-late 1990s I was very involved with the archaeology of the BM site ahead of the building of the Great Court which opened in 2000 (see here). As part of this we often consulted old photographs, paintings and plans of the BM buildings, using them to piece together clues about some of the architectural remnants we discovered. We opened up several trenches on the BM forecourt and most of the finds made there related to Montagu House, the seventeenth century building which preceded the current one. Eight metres below the present colonnade we managed to dig down into the old building itself. Later consulting a set of hand-drawn plans of Montagu House it was thrilling to see the exact step on which I’d sat with trowel in hand, effectively sitting in the basement of the old building which had been demolished in the 1840s (see here). We also found a large area of cobblestone paving in front of the main steps, although I can’t now recall if this was associated with the original courtyard of Montagu House or the later building, designed by Sir Robert Smirke, which still stands today – either way it had long been covered over and forgotten. Cobblestones and basement steps might seem like strange things to be fascinated by, but it’s often the smallest remnants which can lend a direct continuity between the past and the present. It’s these elements of the everyday which are most often passed over and rendered unseen. Physical archaeology, and, perhaps even moreso, the ‘archaeology’ of images is one of our best routes to reconnect with the past.

The British Museum, by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1905 (Fulsang Kunstmuseum)

I’m certainly not the only one who feels this way. Walking past the house in which Hammershøi painted these two views each day eventually piqued my interest. I couldn’t help wondering how closely the views from those upper storey windows today compared with his two views painted over a hundred years ago. Too shy to just knock on the door and ask the present inhabitant if they’d let me take a look, I decided to do a little research to see if anyone else had been struck by the same curiosity and had done the necessary footwork before me. I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

Michael Palin (photo by Chris Blott)

It seems me and “that Michael Palin chap from the telly” have a fair few things in common. Asides from being a big fan of Monty Python and his many entertaining and inspirational travel documentaries it seems he and I share a fascination for this artist and these two paintings in particular. In fact Palin used these two views as a springboard for a fascinating documentary in which he follows Hammershøi back to his native Copenhagen, via a brief excursion to Amsterdam en route (Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershøi, BBC, 2005 – see here). In this wonderful one hour long film Palin manages to track down many of the places, mostly interiors, which Hammershøi painted and delights in seeing what they look like today. He even interviews the current occupant of the flat in Great Russell Street in which Hammershøi and his wife stayed in 1905. What fascinates Palin the most about Hammershøi’s paintings are the ambiguities captured there in muted tones. Simple views of sunlight filtering into empty rooms. Half open doorways. Solitary women (often Hammershøi’s wife, or earlier on in his career, his sister) seen from behind, their bodies obscuring what they might be doing – playing a piano, reading a letter, threading a needle, or any number of activities we might care to imagine could absorb an individual deeply ensconced in their own company. (Palin is also taken by the motif of the woman’s exposed neck which is often repeated in many of Hammershøi’s paintings and which I find reminiscent of Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey – a very different painting and one which I find intensely moving). Suffused with a quiet stillness, one thing which all of Hammershøi’s paintings tend to evoke is the silence of a moment.

Montague Street, by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1905 (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek)

That play of light and gloom is something which seems peculiar to Scandinavian art. It is something which appeals to me as much as it does to Michael Palin. As with most people, my fascination began with the works of Edvard Munch. I remember when I was at Sixth Form I was very taken by Munch’s famous painting of The Scream from his projected but uncompleted ‘Frieze of Life’ series of works. At the time The Scream was temporarily on display in London. I never managed to see it myself on that occasion, but I remember discussing it with a close friend of mine who went to see it with the other students of her art class – she is now a highly talented painter herself (and incidentally, there’s something about the technique of her brushwork which I find reminiscent of Hammershøi – see here). We were greatly shocked when, only a year or so after The Scream had been on display in London, we saw some very dramatic CCTV footage shown on the TV News of the painting being stolen in Norway – the thieves exiting a high window and audaciously sliding the painting down a ladder propped against the side of the building, all done and away in a matter of moments. That same day I painted my own version of The Scream – to temporarily ‘replace’ the one which was now missing. Thankfully the actual Munch painting was recovered several years later. I’ve still not seen this famous version of The Scream, although I have seen other iterations of this motif made by Munch in different formats and different sizes in various exhibitions both in London and in Japan.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch, 1893 (National Gallery, Norway)

My copy of Munch's The Scream, painted 12 February 1994

A few years ago I found myself captivated by the landscape paintings of a Norwegian painter, Peder Balke. The National Gallery in London had a small exhibition of his works, which was accompanied by a very handsome book. Perhaps there’s something about the long dark gloomy weather of the autumn-winter-spring seasons in these northern latitudes which speaks to this sense of melancholy introspection reflected in the elemental transformations of the landscape (both interior as well as exterior), and the play of light and dark across muted surfaces which speaks to the Northern European soul in such a distinctive way. British painters have it too – think of the works of Whistler or Turner. Some painters, such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, fled from it – seeking out distinctly sunnier climes in the south of France or even as far afield as the Marquesas in the South Seas. Yet others, like Hammershøi, Balke, Munch, and Turner, embraced it and examined it to the full. 

La Route Royale près de Gentofte, by Vilhelm Hammershøi

There are no simple answers here. How we each fathom what these paintings are meant to depict is very much up to us. For me, when I look at Hammershøi’s oblique views of the British Museum, I am aware of the shift in focus. As with many of his paintings they can seem like a momentary distraction from the main event. An eye caught by something else passing by on the periphery. That something might even be a momentary passing thought, entirely unconnected, which distracts us albeit only very briefly. But another angle on these muted views which strikes me is how much like early photographs they are. There are no people depicted in these two canvases. Just buildings, railings, trees and empty thoroughfares which would normally be bustling with life at any hour of the day or night. They seem to me like those early photos in which the prolonged length of exposure time would necessarily dissolve any figures who were not absolutely stationary from appearing there. In that sense such early photographs, and similarly Hammershøi’s paintings, are like the still unchanging point of stillness itself. They embody the elements of life which remain unchanging. They are the places and the moments on which we can anchor, and in many senses – as Palin’s documentary shows – they can be the things which last the longest, outlasting us, even if they don’t quite remain exactly the same. In some senses, to me at any rate, Hammershøi’s paintings capture the unchanging essence of transience and transition. Tempus fugit – Time flies, even if it passes so slowly that we can’t perceive it changing. As the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a contemporary of Hammershøi, famously said: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Interior, by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1899 (Tate Gallery)

Photo of Michael Palin by Chris Blott, used here with kind permission of the photographer.