A copper-beech cathedral

So, let me show you around a little bit of the Hermitage. We’ll start outside. Many CofE vicarages still come with unfeasibly large gardens, given we don’t generally have gardeners and housekeepers these days! And my garden here is far larger than I would choose. I’ve often resented that. Don’t get me wrong: I love the outdoors, and I love gardening. If I had the time to do this garden justice, I would be delighted, but I don't. So I have to pay someone to mow the lawn, and tidy up the borders from time to time. To stop the place looking like a complete jungle, I occasionally go out and hack back a few shrubs. I know I’m fortunate to have the space, here in the middle of a town, but overall, if I’m honest, it has more often felt like a burden than a blessing.

However, during this time in the Hermitage, both by choice and then forced by lockdown, I've come to see the garden as something very different. It gives me a space to exercise, to have fresh air; to see greenery, without doing more than stepping outside my back door, or even while sitting on my sofa; to stretch out in the sunshine. I am very grateful for it.

There is one part of my garden, though, that I've always loved, and I'd like to introduce you to it: my cathedral. That's a bit grand-sounding, isn’t it?! But come and see. Come down to the far end of the garden, an area that’s uncultivated because there’s always been the possibility of the Church selling it off. Come and feel the crunch of beech husks under your feet, step carefully around the primroses – hard to find gaps between them, here – and now look up. Step close to the trunk of this awesome mature copper beech and look up into its sky-reaching canopy, and tell me if that doesn’t look and feel to you like one of nature’s cathedrals. The trunk stretches up and up, almost straight, branches stretching out and draping down, with spring leaves of dark green and deep burgundy that become the stained glass through which the sun eases in. Here, right under the trunk, is the heart of the cathedral, the sanctuary, if we think of the east end of a traditional church building where the altar rests. Here heaven and earth connect: earth strains upwards with hard won growth and tentative budding twigs, and heaven reaches down with grace and beauty and glinting sunlight. The primroses – flowers just finishing now – are the congregation gathered around.

My imagination then gets carried away. Bear with me! Over to one side is a rather strange multi-stemmed laurel, its several trunks reaching outwards at angles that it can’t always sustain: one has fallen to half lie on the leaf mulch beneath. There’s a space in between the trunks just big enough for a person to stand, or to perch on one trunk that creates a sort-of seat. This to me is a small side chapel, or a prayer chapel as we might call it; a place to come and sit quietly, connected with others in the nave of the cathedral but slightly away from them too. A place for stillness, among the sloping trunks.

And then a little further away, under another mature beech tree (a green one – what do you call a non-copper beech?!) crowded round with distorted hollies and straggling yews, is what the child in me recognises as a very cool den. You could fit several people in here, sitting on chunks of log or whatever else comes to hand. This doesn’t feel like a place for solitude, but a place for gathering and conversation, discussion and learning, and probably coffee and cake too – the chapter house of the cathedral, perhaps. Now, I’m 48, and I don’t really expect to have friends round to sit in my den! But why shouldn’t we adults play too? So here is my den/chapter house.

Here, in this nature-given cathedral, grown over decades, I can sit apart, hearing the sounds of the town around, looking across a lawn to my house and seeing the tall tower of the church beyond, but screened from it all by a drapery of leaves, insulated by the gentle susurration of laurel and holly and yew and beech, and ancient apple too. Here, life is very grounded, in beech husk and skeleton leaf. Here, if I sit quietly, birds appear, and the muntjac might make wander past too. My cat will come padding across the lawn to find me. And here too, God is found, in the awesome soaring beech and the minute detail of primrose, in the very air itself.

Welcome to my cathedral.