The Big Wheel
I remember vividly my Dad buying an album by a relatively unknown group called Massive Attack when I was aged 10. The house was always full of music, new and old, as we grew up and this exposure had laid a cultural foundation to the perfumery Dad and I created through Gorilla perfume at Lush.
The band Massive Attack - maybe most of all - had a big influence over our perfumery, no matter how strange that sounds.
We both ‘suffered’ various synesthesic ‘afflictions’ whereby music and perfume melded together in indescribable ways and this can definitely be traced back to Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines.
This album left an indelible mark; one that has remained through my adult life too. I can still remember I had the album on a battered cassette that I would play on a small Sony Walkman that had a broken tape deck but could still play my favourite tapes. I’d listen to the album, over and over again, before bed and would rewind one particular song to the point of stretching the precious brown reel within. It was a song called the Hymn of the Big Wheel that really stuck. It literally became a hymn for me, a lilting ode to the planet and the grief of a changing climate:
“There’s a hole in my soul like a cavity,
Seems like a world is put together just by gravity
The wheel keeps on turning, the sky’s rearranging
Look my son the weather is changing”
Horace Andy’s prescient lyrics have stuck with me even though I hadn’t listened to the song for several decades. That was until the beginning of the year when it bubbled back up into my consciousness. Is it because my eldest daughter turned 10 this year? Maybe it’s because I’d been to Somaliland and seen for myself a clear relationship between a changing climate and the impact on human life?
The Big Wheel seemed to somehow be appropriate. It keeps on turning, no matter our angst and worries. But how do I feel trying to explain to my daughter that the lyrics I first heard as a child still resonate and, in fact, are even more relevant nearly three decades later.
It left me with a lump in my throat.
After my trip to Somaliland earlier this year, I had huddled with the children in the newly acquired walled garden. It had become clear to me then that a very Big Wheel was needed; something that mimicked the formal gardens of old and maybe the world of the future.
I’d taken inspiration from a trip to the Schumacher college gardens on the Dartington estate in South Devon after my return from Somaliland, where head gardener, June Mitchell, showed me a series of concentric beds that were heaving with herbs and flowers. Standing in the middle of that circle, wafts of aromatics drifted past; marjoram, lupins, marigolds and fennel. It struck me then that if you curate the planting correctly then you will encounter the delicious opportunity of living perfumes. True bouquets of fragrant plants, visual treats and life-giving, nectar-rich varieties creating a real blast of redolent flower power.
Talking then with the gardeners at Carey from ‘Beeutiful Gardens’ (their expertise in pollinator-friendly, organic flowers) we talk through the potential of a Big Wheel at the centre of the design. And sure enough, just last week, as Samhain was celebrated, ground is broken on a giant circular bed at the heart of the garden.
The prospect of Springs seedlings emerging is still a way off but the excitement of a healing Big Wheel bed that will offer a sense of hope and peace despite a future that can feel tinged with ecological and economic uncertainty. Well, it fills me with a soothing feeling.
This can become a place where the frenetic over stimulation of the outside world; where the real rhythms of the planet can play their beat, where the true pace of the planets’ revolutions can be felt. That sentiment should be amplified and then, I can’t help thinking, will be what mends my soul sometime again.
