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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Interview Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Little things do mean a lot. They bring back memories of the past, and remembering them is like humming a tune you love. Unconsciously you find yourself repeating this tune to yourself, often with a shadow of a smile drawn on your face. People around you may wonder what has come over you.
Small events, a news item or a photograph, may create a feeling of nostalgia for something you have done before. When I read about the start of the Edinburgh Festival my mind automatically returns to the first festival to which I was invited as cultural attaché, just as when I read the first review of Henry Wood's Promenade concerts I think always of myself standing up in the gods through the Messiah or Beethoven's ninth.
Such nostalgia is a cumulative thing, and I often find myself dwelling on the years I spent in London between 1945 and the end of 1956. I remember them all with love and gratitude.
This week I read an article in the Weekend Review of the Independent about the Chelsea Flower Show, and once again I found myself among the elegant fountains and massed rhododendrons, the smell of roses and honeysuckle, old fashioned lupines and ravishing columbines, pinstripes and panamas.
I used to live in Cheyney Place, close to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, in whose gardens the Chelsea Flower Show has been held since 1913. What always fascinated me about the event was the discovery of the English countryside in the middle of the most densely populated city in Britain. Wandering around the show you quickly forget that you are in the heart of one of the world's largest cities for instead you are surrounded by all these pulsating, growing, flowering things, with mixed aromas filling the air.
In the Independent article Anna Pavord writes of her belief in the importance of the show maintaining the delicate balance between exhibits that are there because they bring money, those that push forward into new horticultural or design territory, those that are there for spectacle, and those that relate directly to most people's experience of gardening.
The Chelsea Flower Show is, of course, a testimony to the great British love affair with gardens, and with flowers. The British are, I think, fascinated with both, and dream of nothing more than having time to spend in their gardens, pruning, sowing, weeding, picking. Indeed, I myself caught some of this fervour when I lived in a semi-detached house in South Woodford. Many were the weekend I spent gardening. It was time in which I developed a real association with nature, an association which made me all the keener to preserve natural beauty.
Perhaps this is why I believe that loving nature and educating people --especially children and the young -- into appreciating what God has given us in the way of flora, is part and parcel of the fight for a cleaner environment. It is not enough to stop people smoking in closed areas, or polluting the water and air. We must teach ourselves how to love nature.
