River of Smoke(14)

Yet, despite all his tics and idiosyncrasies there was a gravity in his manner, a penetration in his gaze, that precluded his being taken for a mere crank or eccentric. Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose was in fact a man of unusual accomplishment and considerable wealth: a noted nurseryman and plant-hunter, he had made a great deal of money through the marketing of seeds, saplings, cuttings and horticultural implements – his patented moss-scrapers, barkscalers and garden-scarifiers had a large and devoted following in England. His principal enterprise, a nursery called Penrose & Sons, was based in Falmouth, in Cornwall: it was reputed especially for its Chinese importations, some of which – like certain varieties of plumbago, flowering quince and wintersweet – had gained enormous popularity in the British Isles.

It was the plant-hunter’s avocation that had brought Fitcher eastwards again, in his own vessel, the Redruth, a two-masted brig.

The Redruth sailed into Port Louis two days after the Ibis, after a voyage that had also been beset by misfortune and tragedy. No one on the brig had suffered more than Fitcher himself, and it was at the urging of his own crew that he decided to go ashore for a break: on the first clear day after the Redruth’s arrival two sailors rowed him ashore and hired him a horse so he could pay a visit to the Botanical Gardens at Pamplemousses.

It was largely because of the Botanical Gardens that Port Louis had been included in the Redruth’s itinerary. The Pamplemousses garden was among the earliest of its kind and counted, among its founders and curators, some of the most illustrious names in botany – the great Pierre Poivre, who had identified the true black pepper, had worked there, as also Philibert Commerson, the discoverer of bougainvillea. Had there existed such a thing as a route of pilgrimage for horticulturists the Pamplemousses garden would have been, without a doubt, one of its most hallowed stations.

Pamplemousses was not much more than an hour’s ride from Port Louis. Fitcher had visited the garden once before, on the return leg of his first voyage to China: at that time the island was a French colony – now it was a British possession and much had changed in appearance. But, somewhat to his own surprise, Fitcher had no trouble in finding the road that led to the village. On the way, growing by the roadside, he noticed some fine specimens of a shrub known as ‘Fire in the Bush’, a handsome convolvulus that produced a great mass of flaming red flowers. At other times a find like this would have excited and exhilarated him; he would have dismounted to look more closely at the plants – but his state of mind now was not such as to allow this so he rode on without stopping.

Pamplemousses was upon him before he was aware of it.

The village was one of the prettiest on the island, with brightly painted bungalows, whitewashed churches, and cobbled lanes that tinkled musically under a horse’s hooves. The houses and squares were much as Fitcher remembered, but when his eyes strayed in the direction of the Botanical Gardens, he received a shock that almost toppled him from his mount: where once there had been orderly, well-spaced trees and broad, picturesque vistas, there was now a wild and tangled muddle of greenery. He shook his head in disbelief and looked again, more closely: the gateposts were where he would have expected them to be, but there seemed to be nothing beyond but jungle.

Reining in his horse, Fitcher appealed to an elderly passer-by: ‘Madam! The garden? D’ee know the way?’

The woman pursed her lips and shook her head: ‘Ah, msieu … le garden is no more … depwi twenty years … abandonné by l’Anglais …’

She wandered off, shaking her head, leaving Fitcher to continue on his way.

Although Fitcher was saddened to learn that his own compatriots were responsible for the garden’s decline, he was not entirely surprised. Since the death of Sir Joseph Banks, the last Curator of Kew Gardens, Britain’s own botanical institutions had fallen into neglect, so it was scarcely a cause for wonder that a garden in a distant colony should be in a state of disrepair. Yet this did nothing to mitigate Fitcher’s revulsion at the sight of the wilderness that loomed before him now: the untrimmed crowns of the garden’s trees had grown into each other, forming a canopy so dense that the grounds beneath, with their flower-beds and flag-stoned pathways, were shrouded in darkness; along the peripheries of the compound, the greenery was as impenetrable as a wall, and the unclipped aerial roots of the banyans that flanked the main gateway had thickened into a forbidding barrier – a portcullis that seemed to be designed to keep intruders at bay. This was no primeval jungle, for no ordinary wilderness would contain such a proliferation of species, from different continents. In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel.