Oxford Sketched in Green

I've been wanting to start a series about Oxford for a long time, and now, I think, enough memories have piled up to begin. So I've written this piece - about some of the green places in my city, the college parks and meadows - and more will probably be coming.

People ought to raise their heads more when standing under tall trees. It’s a dizzying experience, sparkles of leaves extending on and on, a whole world but in the other direction. Everyone looks up without hesitation in mountains and in gothic cathedrals – are trees different because they aren’t meant to be beautiful?

Chestnut trees surely are beautiful, whether the common man acknowledges this or not. There’s a picture of me, six years old, in sunglasses and a flowery dress, standing under one of them and smiling. That’s what they’ve been for me through the years – the trees of childhood, givers of shiny brown nuts for making the toy animals that seem so easy to build in books but always fall apart in real life.

But in Oxford I noticed a different side to chestnut trees. Gosh, they’re just beautiful! There’s one right outside my window, rainbowy in the autumn, happily green in the spring and summer. There’s one on a path I take to lectures, greenening my world. And there’s the ones in the various colleges, the ones under which I like to read philosophy.

The ringed bench goes all the way round the trunk of the chestnut tree in Saint John’s College, and you sit with back against rough bark. The monumental umbrella of leaves stretches out above, encircling your whole world from afar, like an enemy battalion or like someone leaning out to touch, hand always a few tantalizing inches away. I hold an almost equally monumental volume of Frege scholarship in my lap – with gargoyles nesting in corners of nearby walls and a sense of the wisdom of ages pushing itself against your back and in through your eyes, this place seems made for learning. But let’s not kid ourselves – the best study places are not necessarily the most beautiful. “Not today, Frege,” I think and lose myself in the blanket of green above my head.

Still, I come back to chestnuts to study again and again. There’s a wonderful one in Worcester College – you first see it through a gate, a bizarre barrier with no purpose save being a pretty, romantic frame. If you so wished, you could go round the gate, getting to the path under the chestnut tree without going through the doorway. But it is the pointlessness that makes the gate so lovely, of course.

You go through the gate, then, and encounter the chestnut tree. It washes its myriad branches in a glistening lake; on clear days the leaves double in number and I lean right over the edge of the water to see the highest ones.

The branches not busy with gazing at their reflection shade a lovely stone bench, crumbly and greened by moss, just like the pointless gate, with armrests the shape of sphinx heads. I make myself comfortable and sit down to some nice group theory – some days studying under chestnuts does work. On days right before exams mostly.

***

A mist-laden desert of greying yellow – Narnian lampposts sprout out of nowhere with surreal regularity. I walk past them, “Forty Walks in Oxfordshire” in hand, heading towards some uninteresting fields.

It’s one of those walks which require a certain degree of willpower for their worthwhileness – the latent beauty of the surroundings has to be unearthed from under the wintry mist. Little dewdrops and delicate greys can be soft rewards for the effort, but as it starts to rain and I splash my way further and further through the mud, I voice the thought that had been with me on this walk all along – what’s so special about this place? I had been blindly following the instructions in
my book, but, I had to admit, nowhere along the way was there anything particularly interesting, and any other route would have been just as good – or bad.

It came as an utmost shock to me, then, when I revisited this place – the meadows behind the University Parks – with Dominika in June, and saw possibly the most beautiful place in all of Oxford.

The Constable-esque view has “idyllic” written on every single blade of grass; the soft greys and yellows have given way to much softer greens, which melt away into the setting sunlight. To the right two starkly red tree trunks curtain a stage for a troupe of clumsy crimson cows. To the left the grass sooths endlessly, pinks filter through thin perpendiculars of trees and jump into little ponds. I see in my mind’s eye the days when I shall enjoy this newfound treasure more thoroughly. It is the sunset daybreak – the time of day when everything seems in front, though it is in fact mostly behind.

***

Head tilted slightly sideways, I dip my vision into the Cherwell. Inverted irises dot the bank, ingrowing trees are blown to and fro by the current. I lose my balance a bit, like someone who’d just seen something new, someone acknowledging beauty in upside-downness. The water overbrims with sparkling blueness. How can reflections be more beautiful, realer than the real thing? A duck glides by like a torpedo, a triangular trail of air behind it, slicing the wet world in half. Green and blue watercolour mixes and blurs into soft abstraction.