Free A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith Page B

signs to Astronomy, to the administration building, to the staff club, to the theatre and gallery, and to the departments of everything, but nobody had ever bothered with one to the botanical garden. The path behind the Geography building ended in a slough of pebbles, that after heavy rain would become just a pool. (Guy suspected an underground stream there, running towards the one that flowed through the garden.) Then if you managed to cross this, there was another path, made from cinders and clinker from the fires that had once failed to warm the first students’ halls of residence. This cinder path led to the greenhouses where Guy worked, planting out seedlings, measuring sepals and calyxes, noticing the tiniest of variations in the most minute of details, and where Erica sometimes worked, busy with experiments of her own. She also spent rather a lot of time on other projects of her own devising, such as scooping potentially toxic berriesfrom a pond, or watching pairs of goldfinches. She and Guy also worked in the corner of the sixth-floor lab that was theirs, and of course he had lectures to give and there were students to see; but the numbers enrolling on Botany modules were in decline. Guy tried not to think about it too often. If he had, he might have realised that his so-called Department of Botany was withering and in danger of being cut down completely.
    The path continued past the greenhouses, several of which were now abandoned, and should, if Health and Safety came down there again, be made inaccessible with ribbons of red and white tape and copious notices warning of the dangers of broken glass and uneven floors. On very cold nights the greenhouses suffered more cracks. It might not be long before a huge bough from one of the oaks destroyed them all. The glass would splinter into the earth, but the poppies and the chickweed, the teasels and vetches would soon make good the damage, like the microscopic mesh of blood cells that work swiftly to cover and then heal a wound.
    Beyond the greenhouses you could choose one of several paths. You could carry straight on and find some grassy banks and an orchard. The trees were neglected and now bore little fruit, and what there was fell into the uncut grass to be eaten only by wasps, squirrels and badgers. Susannah had collected apples for crumbles, pies and chutneys (so popular with her father), but the apples were all cookers, and so of no use to Felix or Guy or Erica, none of whom did much cooking.
    The other paths led to little wooden bridges (although ‘bridge’ perhaps was too grand a word for them). They were constructions of once sturdy beams, nailed together andmade slightly less treacherous by sheets of chicken wire. The stream ran several feet deep after heavy rain, but in high summer, or in the now common times of drought, it was reduced to a shallow (but still pleasingly noisy) few inches. On the other side of the stream was an open grassy area, which Guy thought of as the meadow. Many years back the garden’s designer had called it a lawn. There was a huge hollow stump of an oak, beneath which dwelt the badgers. Then behind the meadow were the terraces of collected plants, the botanical specimens and trees; Californian nutmegs and maidenhair trees, crimson, yellow and golden maples, several cabbage trees (
Cordyline australis
) and Spanish daggers (
Yucca gloriosa
), smoke trees and sumacs, and a precious white camellia with almost blue-tinged flowers, which Guy had planted. The inventory would have gone on for many pages, but even Guy and Erica didn’t know exactly what was in the garden. So many parts had become overgrown, and some slopes were becoming forbiddingly treacherous or too swampy for adults’ heavy feet. Snowy, the university cat, was one of the few beings to know every inch of it.
    If you walked the length of the meadow you would come to a series of ponds, fed by the stream, and beyond these to a completely wild area of