If there’s one thing better than a gatekeeper butterfly, it’s wild marjoram playing host to a flurry of gatekeepers. Almost impossible to count for all the rising, fluttering and resettling, their warm orange and brown wings with white double-dots in a black eye-spot are only a wing-flick away from mottled invisibility: now you see me, now you don’t.
I’m their lone admirer, sat on a mossy stone in the garden at John Clare cottage, but I don’t feel alone. Honeysuckle has me in a heady hug, undulating fronds of hart’s-tongue fern wave from beneath a rock, the whiteness of a teneral damselfly in the grass intrigues and delights me. I know this garden has a long history of providing companionship, not least to the poet after whom the cottage is named, who knew “the woodbine at the garden gate” as “affection’s friend” and asked of the butterfly: “Wouldst thou in my garden come, / To join the bee’s delightful hum”.
John Clare’s life in the Helpston cottage where he was born is well documented, as is his fondness for the garden where he would sit on the bench to enjoy the “swart twilight of a summers eve” and “the sailing puddock’s [red kite’s] shrill ‘peelew’”. Less well known are the other occupants of the one-up, one-down tenancies in the old rubble stone cottage, who shared this garden (and the outdoor privy) with Clare and his young family in the 1820s and early 30s.
One cottager in particular interests me: Henry Howsden, born to John the shepherd and his wife, Mary. I picture him as a young lad two centuries ago, hiding in the flowerbeds, chasing butterflies, pointing up at the puddocks, playing games with his siblings and Clare’s children. Did he learn to love nature in this garden with its golden russet apple tree, vegetables, herbaceous plants and self-seeded wildflowers: the “weedling[s] wild” that Clare so loved? Perhaps as an adult, Henry shared this affinity with his bairns, and so on down the family line to my granny, who passed on her love of the wild to me. A precious legacy from the shepherd’s boy – my great-great-great-grandfather.
