HERBAL HEALING
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A herbal garden designed for Chelsea Flower Show 2024 has been given a second home at the College. It is just one reminder of the many significant and healing connections between human beings and the plants whose roots can be found deep in our culture.
LOOKING AFTER THE GROUNDS AT DULWICH COLLEGE Rhydian Evans (Y13) Taken from The Alleynian , 2024
Certified gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, a beautiful and purposeful botanical garden was welcomed onto the College’s grounds in the Summer of 2024. Designed by Helen Olney, the garden was the brainchild of Professor Chris Griffiths OBE (63-73) and Dr Su Lwin, joint founders of the Burma Skincare Initiative (BSI). The hope is that it will help to raise awareness of the charity, which provides resources, research and education in the field of dermatological health in the Southeast Asian nation of Burma (also known as Myanmar). The garden includes native Burmese plants such as the Athryium fern, the waterlily known as ‘kya’ in Burma, the intricately textured snakebark maple and the Himalayan birch. The many plants within the garden have been chosen to symbolise and to pay respect to those people, with often treatable skin conditions, whom the charity strives to help. Non-botanical flourishes in the seven by twelve-metre plot include a ‘stupa’ (a traditional Burmese site of worship and meditation); seating inspired by a Burmese letter meaning ‘coming together’; and, above the lily pond, a house on stilts. All of the plants in the garden grow in both Burma and the UK – and they include dill, Dulwich’s namesake herb, reminding us of the habitat which would have surrounded us had we lived here around a millennium ago. We have come full circle with the BSI’s dill and the cornflower providing tangible living links to Saxon age Dulwich and to Edward Alleyn himself, with their very roots in the College’s soil.
During Covid, just as more people started walking along the periphery of the College, Paul’s wildflower initiative was coming into full force, and with the simultaneous sowing of annuals, perennials and biennials, the balance of flowers has taken on a different timbre every year as different species bloom in sequence. Even within grasses, Paul has sought out old-fashioned varieties such as crested dogstail or sweet fennel, resisting monoculture in favour of plants which are more soil-suitable and – in the case of the latter – good for pollinators, especially hoverflies. The flowers themselves appear in waves, the first ones to arrive being poppies, corncockles and cornflowers, with their papery, pastel-blue petals. Paul reminded me that the cornflower is the College’s emblem: it was Edward Alleyn’s favourite flower, and on the very first Founder’s Day in June 1620 (a year after the College’s founding) he started a tradition of wearing them to the event. The cornflower also appears in the work of Raymond Chandler OA. It seems only fitting that a plant so steeped in Alleynian history itself should now, thanks to Paul and his team, proliferate on our grounds. You can find moths, bees, damselflies and even the Darter dragonfly, as well as edible plants such as hedge garlic, now appearing on the grounds. This shows the diverse impacts which even small changes can have, and which can be seen throughout the ecosystem, such as birds finding food in seedheads left un-mowed. But Paul’s plans do not stop here: he hopes to add a ‘butterfly section’ to the ‘herbaceous walkway’ which is already providing human benefits. It really is a lesson in ‘rethinking and re-educating ourselves’, as Paul puts it, and he and his team are – figuratively as well as literally – path-finders.
As I cycle up College Road each morning, through the canopy of the horse chestnut trees I can glimpse an oasis of land surrounding the orange-red neogothic frontage. In these grounds, there’s a memory of some older place – of a small hamlet, the Anglo-Saxons’ Dilwysshe. A name is an excellent clue to follow when looking to understand a place’s former ecosystem, and the ‘wysshe’ or ‘wisca’ (meadow) of the name’s prefix ‘dil’ or ‘dul’ (the herb dill, which traces its origins to the Middle East) is no exception: when we say ‘Dulwich’ we are really saying ‘Dill Meadow’, linguistically transmuted through time. While dill does still grow on the lofty bank of Grange Lane, a nationwide purge has taken place that has left the Anglo-Saxon’s ‘wysshe’ unrecognisable. Through the industrialisation of agriculture and its impact on ecosystems, the ways in which our food is produced and our localities look have utterly changed. One of the most distressing changes is that 98% of this nation’s wildflower meadows have been lost. The reds, yellows and blues of wildflowers have been replaced with supposedly pragmatic monocultures, often comprising just one species of grass, and justified via the inherently exploitative narrative of the land being made more productive. Monoculture, I would argue, is as unnatural and barren as desertification. Yet our narratives manage to normalise the processes and their outcomes. Did you know, for example, that the artificial fertilisation of cattle causes them to produce abnormal, fluid excrements which lead to parasites and the spread of disease? And yet these are normalised as ‘cow pats’, when in reality they are the sign of a dysfunctional ecosystem and a lack of its – I stress natural – self-regulation. To return to a more positive, local narrative, what is now seeping up from the depths of the College’s very soil is a concept which is forward-thinking yet inspired by the past; a change which is actually a return to something older; an ingenious yet simple set of ideas. In November, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Purnell, who heads up the College’s team of 14 ground staff, and who has worked at the school for 34 years. Paul talks passionately about the changes he has made, first to the functional playing fields, then to the wayside margins, which now nurture a growing crescendo of wildflowers. In striving to ‘feed the soil, rather than just the plants’, he realised that expensive fertilisers and fungicides were not actually nourishing the soil ecosystem. Ten years down the line, he is replacing artificial products with natural ones, such as garlic, which not only saves money, but also creates healthier plants.
Rhydian Evans (Y13) Taken from The Alleynian , 2024
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