SPECTATE: An experiment in a greenhouse
SPECTATE is a series of flash essays. It is an evolving record of words concerned with the act of looking.
Before I arrived, stiff bodies had grown between the plants and the trees and the noise from the electrics had started to settle into small pools of agreement.
The greenhouse sat in the shade of a 10 o’clock sun, triangular and sturdy. Inside there were instruments, polished and tuned, set out on a dinner table in front of the audience. All of the seats were occupied by soft shells waiting for the audiophile’s playtime.
A tall banana tree – musa acuminata - stood still as the first of a set of tightly wound strings was being cut loose by the musician’s bow hairs. Plucked like sea bream from a dirty river. My head was already an accumulation of the sounds of the banana tree, the bow hairs, and the sea bream. Like a pair of crocodile teeth clamped onto the leaves at one end, and my eyelids at the other, I was tuning myself in to fauna frequencies.
A woman wearing a purple hat turned in her chair near the front of the crowd.
“Thank you all for being here today in-” Buzzing from the crocodile teeth cut her sentence in half. Musicians would call it a caesura; a short break that happens abruptly. I watched her from the back of the greenhouse, blocked in by fast growing ferns and jostling between snaking crawlers. I imagined that her words were the sounds of growth instead of real words, and though I watched her I was not hearing her.
Sometimes, when I’m driving, Gardeners’ Question Time plays on Radio Four. I listen to Radio Four because the car aerial struggles to pick up anything else. I think I drive an educated car. One which, when I leave it at night, pours itself an earl grey. I focus in on Gardeners’ Question Time not because I like gardening. I hate it, really. I can’t grow anything with success except houseplants, which feels like the cheat’s version of green fingers. I tune into the gardening experts voices: Hemerocallis (a daylily), Comptonia peregrina (a sweet fern), Blechnum spicant, (a hard fern), Scabiosa (a pincushion flower), Daucus carota (a wild carrot), Erigeron karvinskianus, (a Mexican fleabane).
Soleirolia soleirolii.
“Mind your own business,” I whispered to the ferns, “I’m trying to listen to the buzz.”
I pressed my nose against the greenhouse glass. Smell, I thought, is just as good as sound. From the outside I imagined I looked like a mutated plant, something left over from a failed Cronenberg film set. Mallards with moss hanging off their feet climbed out of the pond.
By the time the last pluck of string had bellowed out against the greenhouse’s insides, I was on all fours. In my hands:
a bundle of leaves
flower heads with their petals bitten off
scraps of flowerbed gravel
damp bark
Smell is just as good as sound, or an experiment in a greenhouse gone wrong.