When I tell people that our rectory garden in south London was once a graveyard, they tend to shudder. Isn’t that creepy? Isn’t it odd to think of all those dead bodies down there? In fact, although a row of long-defunct gravestones still lines the dappled shade of our back wall, the coffins were (allegedly) removed in the late 19th century.
Once the dead were gone, this patch of land entered an even more startling period of its already vivid history. The incumbent rector, the Rev John William Horsley, then proceeded to turn it into a small menagerie for the entertainment of local schoolchildren. Here, smudge-faced urchins could hang over the wrought-iron railings and gaze at owls, pigeons, monkeys, guinea pigs, cockatoos and even, on one occasion, a zebra borrowed from the zoo.
It wasn’t the first of Horsley’s philanthropic, if eccentric, innovations. Later to become Canon of Southwark and already known for his writings on prison reform (he had previously served as chaplain at Clerkenwell prison), the energetic rector set about clearing the coffins from the crypt of his church. St Peter’s would now serve school dinners for the same local children. The Jamie Oliver of his day, then, with more than a touch of Johnny Morris thrown in.
Certainly, he appears to have been a charismatic figure: 6ft tall and with a long, dramatic, Darwinesque beard, he was also a keen gardener with a special interest in alpine plants. Our sitting room was once the place where he studied botany and molluscs (another passion, which led to a book, Our British Snails), as well as dealing with parish business.
The first time I saw this house, I knew none of this. In a panic because we had just been gazumped on the property we’d been in the process of buying, we found the Victorian rectory, which had been standing empty for months. On a baking afternoon in late August, as we waited for the estate agent to show us round, my daughter and I peered through the overgrown hedge that now grew through the same wrought-iron railings that all those pinafored schoolchildren had once peered through.
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And what we saw astonished us. A vast, unkempt space, with knee-high grass and tangled borders, and an unusual weeping tree in the centre. The diverse backdrops — monolithic 1960s estates on one side and the towering beauty of what turned out to be a John Soane church on the other — only made it more beguiling. A secret wild garden in the middle of London? “That can’t all belong to the house,” my daughter said. But it did. It does. And attempting to do a good enough job as its current custodian — the word “owner” just doesn’t feel right when it comes to such a unique place — has been a wonderfully unexpected adventure.
It’s true that, long before I discovered I liked to weed and plant and prune, gardens mattered to me. In some vital yet inexplicable way, they’ve shaped what I feel about the world — its possibility, its natural power — and they’ve surfaced again and again in the books I’ve written, including my latest, The Stopped Heart, which has just been published and is set in a country cottage.
The first garden that I remember amounted to a small lawn, a rose bed and a greenhouse with a memorably hot and peaty smell. Most of all, though, I remember the special thrill of watching my father empty out the paddling pool onto the grass at the end of a hot day – all that sparkling water spreading over the lawn in the late sunshine.
When I was six or seven, my parents bought a small plot of land and built their own bungalow. While they stood among the freshly dug foundations talking to the builders, I saw a snake with yellow and green zig-zag markings, curled among the tall grass. I held my breath — and when I described what I’d seen, no one believed me. But even once the garden was tamed and transformed, with a rockery, lawn and tarmac drive (great for tricycles), the memory of that slithery reptile remained, as if I might at any moment stumble on it again.
I was nine when we moved out of the town, and suddenly we had everything: an orchard, barns and three fields, which my father rented to a white-haired old farmer who liked to shout at us to get off his crops. I loved it. Kicking off my shoes and running barefoot up the path that led to the fields, I could pretend I was a gypsy and get lost until teatime.
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But soon it was back to fenced-in city gardens. In one house we just had a yard, but it was made very exotic by the chirp of my (new) stepfather’s zebra finches. The house after that had a gothic turret and a monkey puzzle tree. Two stepbrothers had now joined my sisters and me — and the old lady who lived across the road said that she loved to see our legs and feet appearing over the wall as we practised cartwheels on the small front lawn.
Not all of the gardens that have enthralled me have been mine. The most breathtaking has to be Palazzo Guicciardini, in Florence, where I worked as a gap-year nanny. One step off the street and a small wooden door let you into a world of orange trees and jasmine, clipped hedges and the lazy trickle of a fountain. How could a 19-year-old from Nottingham not fall utterly in love with such a place?
But the most beloved is still probably my late mother-in-law’s small and immaculately kept terrace by the river at Vauxhall, south London. My three babies and their cousins toddled and played here for many years, and the long evenings when we’d sit with a glass of wine at the end of a warm day and watch the boats chug by were among the sweetest of my adult life. Someone else lives there now — and half of those old plants have been taken in and given space in my own garden. When I’m stressed or sad, I only have to close my eyes to hear the drip of the hose on my mother-in-law’s perfect powder-blue delphiniums and smell the river at dusk as we called reluctant children to come in for their bath.
And now? There are no monkeys or zebras in our rectory garden, just a couple of cats and a collie who is obsessed with foxes. But the land next to us in which the church stands — carefully tended and giving daily pleasure to an entire community here in Walworth — is still known as the Monkey Park.
I don’t know what Canon Horsley would make of what we’ve done — the little terrace, the turquoise-painted raised beds full of Hydrangea paniculata, my cottage borders which, in summer, are ablaze with reds and pinks, magentas and mauves — but his garden is thriving. Still, I’m not sure I can take all the credit. Although we were assured that the coffins were all removed more than a century ago, sometimes I wonder. Over the years, the soil has given up some fascinating treasure — a tiny china doll’s head; a spoon with Horsley’s initials, JWH — but that’s not all. Now and then a very long nail works its way up to the surface of the soil. Or a fragment of bone that doesn’t quite look like a Sunday roast. Certainly, things grow very well here: my fingers have never been greener than when caring for this astonishingly fertile space.
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But creepy? Far from it. To me, this garden feels like the most peaceful plot on earth. And if some of the dead are still here — and in a way I hope they are, because they surely deserve to be left in peace — then I like to think that they don’t mind me pottering above them, pruning and weeding and snipping in the bright London sunshine.
The Stopped Heart by Julie Myerson is published by Jonathan Cape at £12.99. To buy it for £10.99, including p&p, call the Sunday Times Bookshop on 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop