Book of Ma'Chi - 04 - Martin's den

Martin absentmindedly picked up the book as he walked through the garage to his den, which was accessed by some old creaky wooden stairs at the back of the garage. The den had been partitioned off with wooden partitioning from the old hayloft and it consisted of his computer on a wooden plank across two supports, his bed and an old broken leather settee, which he flopped into, to take a closer look at the soft brown leather book.

The title was the “Book of Ma’Chi”. It seemed to be some Indian texts about philosophy and normally Martin‘s interests lay more in catching up with the days transfer news from the Premier league on the Internet, than reading philosophical Indian writings, but he noticed that the back of the book apparently had no writing in it, and as he turned back to the first chapter he was drawn to the title of the Garden of Our Collective Paths.

Martin was caught in the seventeen-year-old paradox of not knowing what to do when he left school in June. University was an option but he had really had a skin full of schools and schooling and all that entails. His dream was to become a professional footballer; he played for the local amateur league club on a Saturday afternoon and was the most promising junior playing in the first team.

He'd always spent time playing in the garden and over the last couple of years he’d been helping to grow the organic vegetables which had become part of the essential offering to its paying guests. And somewhere Martin was attracted to the medicinal properties of plants; he had had some bad experiences with pharmaceutical drugs and antibiotics.

He fired up his MacBook to see the latest Facebook and Twitter entries and looked back at the book while it was booting.

The Garden of Ma’Chi is accessed through a large ebony door in one of in one of the six stone walls forming the hexagonal boundary to the garden. The door requires no key except to hold the brain shaped doorknob in your hand for a few seconds, where the warmth of your hand releases the locking mechanism and the door will swing open.

The first thing you see is the Botanists Garden laid out in some order; frames of small plants, greenhouses in different stages of use, a couple of wooden cabins – apparently made from the same material as the door, a few lean-to constructions with three sides open. The Botanist’s Garden has a studious feel to it; each sample has some kind of paper record attached to it, listing details of the contents and a series of observations by date. Some of the frames contain many different species in an early stage of development. Some of the lean-to constructions have many of the same plant species bearing witness to the efforts to reproduce larger scale populations of a specific characteristic.

Inside the wooden cabins you will find extensive filing of the paper cards, which are attached to each of the sample locations. Each draw containing these cards, is clearly labelled and each card has two or more holes punched in a tab that stands proud of the on top of the card. By sliding a thin metal rod through the holes in the same position, a selection of similar types can be made and extracted from the draw. There are at least hundred thousand cards stored in this way in these wooden houses.

Each wall of the Ma’Chi Garden is about twenty-five furlongs in length, making the perimeter of the garden roughly eighteen miles. The Botanist’s Garden has three neighbours. Directly to the south is an even more ordered environment with low cut hedges and paths dividing up areas of cultivated ground. Some of the areas enclosed by the low hedges are not planted; in this way you can see how the crop rotation works within this, the biggest of all vegetable gardens.

Crops grown here range from common carrots to exotic pineapples, each with its own separated area, each surrounded by a hedge, each well maintained and free of weeds and obviously the subject of a great deal of discipline and attention. In some of the areas, they are all about twenty yards square, one will find cultivations, which apparently have no crop, clover for example.

The partitions between the hedges are wide enough to get trolleys and wheelbarrows down so that harvested crops can be easily taken away. At the border between the Botanists Garden and the giant Vegetable Garden one will see an area of smaller cultivation in which appear to be some kind of apprenticeship areas where scaling up and trial planting is undertaken.

In the centre of the Garden of Ma’Chi is a lake about forty yards in diameter, in the middle of the lake is a roofed structure with eight pillars supporting its hexagonal red roof at each corner. Under the roof, the floor is made of pure white gravel.

The final neighbour of the Botanists Garden begins imperceptibly as one walks west from the Botanists wooden cabins to the north of the lake. The first thing one notices is that the structure and order of the Botanists begins to give way to more flowing depths of plants and the pre-laid plantings slowly decline, so that after thirty or forty yards you lose sight of the Botanists area and become surrounded by a collection of trees, bushes, hedges and raised beds of all types of more and more exotic plants.

Walking through this garden is a constant discovery, around every corner you meet a new clump of trees, or fruit or shrubs and sometimes a path just appears with apparently no sense or reason, and then its stops again. The path structure in this rather mysterious, even secretive part of the garden is like that of a maze, one very soon loses one’s sense of direction and if in a hurry to cross the garden, or get to a specific point in it, one would be well advised to do so on a sunny day when one can use the sun's direction as a navigational aid.

The most interesting part of this Mysterious Garden’s secret, is the wall itself. Not that the wall is special – its made of the same stone the rest of the wall is made from, but in the middle off the wall is a staircase which enables one to climb to the top. Being some twenty feet high this affords a view over the mysterious garden that is otherwise impossible to see.

When on the wall one becomes aware of the patterns, which cannot be seen from the ground. The wall itself is four yards wide at its top and has a waist high wooden rail on both sides. The view from this position is well worth exploring and the shapes visible in the planting and the more mysterious growth patterns change as you move your position on the wall.

By moving south around the wall one will reach another staircase, which enables a return to ground level. The wall at this point becomes irregular and the railings and flat viewing surface become more rocks and gaps that make walking and viewing impossible.

On the ground you will almost not notice that you have left the Mysterious Garden, because the final part of the garden takes some time to develop into its full jungle self, at first one thinks the shapes in the undergrowth, which could be seen from the top of the Mysterious Garden wall, are still visible, but soon one becomes aware that the natural vigour of the jungle is taking over.

The ecosystem of this naturally growing part the garden is wonderful to observe; here one will find traces of many different types of organic life from parasitic plants to birds that live on the insects in the bark of trees, snakes, wild boar, tigers and if one is very lucky even a pair of monsters.

Every now and then, on the increasingly difficult way through this natural part of the garden one may stumble across a clearing where some predecessor has cut away the undergrowth to expose the soil to the sun and here will one will see the meaning of nature's power – it takes almost no time at all for the first shoots of new plants and trees to appear in the apparently empty soil. The potential for growth is phenomenal.

It is possible to get completely lost in this jungle of growth, if one is fortunate enough to find the wall and follow it left or anti clockwise, eventually the part where the natural chaos of the Jungle meets the Vegetable Garden will be reached. There one will see the efforts of the gardeners team to tame the jungle as the new growth is hacked back regularly to prevent it from taking over the ordered part of the highly productive vegetable garden. Interesting to note here is that it takes constant attention from the gardeners to keep the jungle at bay.

Martin jumped slightly as he realised that the next page was blank and that the rest of the book was full of blank pages.

“That's a bit odd”, he thought to himself, “I've never seen a book so nicely bound with only one chapter in it. I wonder what that's all about.”

He put the book down on the settee and went across to his computer where the screensaver of his beloved football team was doing its thing, and he opened up Facebook to see who was on tonight.

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This is the fourth chapter from the Book of Ma'Chi