Country diary: you might not want these willow boughs on your wall
Buscot, Oxfordshire: There’s nothing twee about these trees, though they inspired a William Morris wallpaper design
Roger Deakin came to Buscot Lock for a post-party swim in the 1990s, and wrote in Waterlog of a circular pool, surrounded by willows: “the very trees that inspired [William Morris] to design his Willow Boughs [sic] wallpaper”. I’ve swum in several of Deakin’s haunts and the double endorsement of Morris makes this an irresistible pit stop in a September heatwave.
The studied quaintness of Buscot village seems to suit neither of the ghosts I’m chasing. The lock – the smallest on the Thames – lies alongside an island so manicured it might have been trimmed with silver scissors. Lock Cottage is diddy Cotswold perfection and the miniature pink roses in its garden make giants of the red admirals flickering there. It’s more Hornby trainset than Arts and Crafts.
There’s nothing twee about the willows, though, and I have no trouble finding Deakin’s unruly spirit among them, next to one of the muddy chutes into the water, “the sort of thing known to opponents of wild swimming as bank erosion”. I scan the branches for a hint of Morris, but my search image is the one my mum pasted over all four walls of the downstairs loo when I was a teenager, and the trees refuse it. They don’t do decorum and they don’t do pattern repeat. They are thrashing in the warm breeze, like headbangers at a tea dance. I’m a little disappointed – though whether with Morris for stylising too far, or with nature for not living up to billing, I’m not sure.
I wander over the lock, into Gloucestershire, and dangle my feet from the empty mooring staithe. The water is khaki-gold, and there’s a steady stream of fallen willow leaves entrained in the slow flow. Each leaf is a deft stroke of paint on the gilded surface, some green, others gold speckled with brown, like perfectly ripe bananas. The river toys with them, making its own compositions. I wait, half-expecting a proto-Willow Bough to tessellate before my eyes. But this artist is a genre buster. After a few minutes it decides that what the canvas most needs is a rash of Pop Art pink from some Himalayan balsam petals, then, in an emphatically modernist flourish, a scarlet spot, a guelder rose berry, just... yes, just there.
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