Reflections on a 1953 edition of Adam the Gardener by Cyril Cowell and Morley Adams with an accompanying comic strip, featuring The Uncertain Man, inspired by the work
I am imagining what this comic strip is. I am reading it without even being in the same room as the book. I get up out of my chair and walk through to the room where the book is. I pick up the book. I am now reading it as if I am reading an article written about the comic strip without having ever read the strip itself.
I start wondering what it would have been like to be a weekly reader of Adam the Gardener. Wondering what it was like for the reader each week to meet Adam on the newsprint. I am wondering how it was for those readers to read and then garden. Did they take the paper to their sheds and lay it down with a mug of tea next to their trowel? Did they place the strip under a rock on the grass so it wouldn’t blow away, so they could read Adam as they started to work on their raised banks? When those newspapers found their ways to Chip Shops on a Friday night, did the greasy potatoes turn the garden a darker shade, creating a pond or two of frog-less oil spills that changed the smell of the paper and permanently altered the strip, as day became night with a vinegar sobbed sky?
I am now a reader of Adam the Gardener, a non-gardener without a garden. I am a cartoonist who was fired from a garden centre for sweeping the floor too long. I started imagining what this strip was before I started reading it.
The overalls you wear to paint that wall over there have just been painted and the wall remains blank. This is how I read the strip.
To me, the strip doesn’t teach the reader how to garden. It is not a functional and practical guide to gardening using language that is instructional. It is expertly paced poetry and has nothing to do with gardening, with lines about specific activity, growing into word plants that change depending on the light. The columns of text paint gentle pictures and offer soft tangents where we are told that koh-rabi is “nutty” in flavour and the size of a “tennis ball.”
Adam is a mystery. Passive yet prominent like a flapping blank flag, he awaits interpretation. He is another pigeon I will never have a conversation with. At times he is seemingly employed only to provide an illustrated service like the blank butler who offers a glass of his own concoction every evening that no one ever drinks, because no one wants to get to know the butler. Like placing a beached whale in a flooded tanker to transport them to safety though, the action of the cartoonist placing a character in a panel is complex. Interpretative speculations about Adam are spread like butter on toast, mixed into pillows of fluff from animals that we will never see in the wild but perhaps on a TV programme streamed on a mobile phone behind a smeary chopping board.
I still don’t know the answer to ‘Why?’
Adam is found in the gutters, before and after another maneuver. I find a sigh, a wipe of the brow, a cough, a sneeze, rubbing his hands together, re-tying a shoelace, dusting off earth from a trouser leg, scratching his side burns, stroking his chin. Looking up.
It is within those gutters I have also found these questions:
What is a garden?
What is a gardener?
Where does Adam live?
What is under Adam’s fingernails?
How many gardens were created from this comic strip?
What does Adam dream about?
How does Adam feel about competitive vegetable growing?
If Adam took his hat off would half of his head come off too?
Has Adam ever been on a train?
Another question: Does Adam ever sit down? Spending time once a week with Adam allows for a gap in time for him to have a break. Reading the collection of the strips, does not. The experience of reading the daily strips in this way can be anxiety inducing. As if viewing snail trails post snail, Adam’s jobs are sped up from a year to a day, the garden grows at an unnatural speed, plants and trees shooting out of the ground like a buried alive pop drinker’s coke bottle cap.
It brings a sense of concern for Adam. Adam never stops gardening, constantly working, back bent over, arms constantly in use. I can only find one panel where I could suggest that Adam is taking a break. On page 125 I find a wordless panel where Adam stands staring at a potato he has lifted from a sack. It is a rare moment of reflection in the world of Adam. Adam looks into that potato. He pauses. Forever. Phew!
The air trapped inside a panel
Another concern: I haven’t found one panel yet where Adam’s mouth is open. It is almost as if he’s breathed in and is holding that breath for the duration of the comic strip, from 1953 onwards. This intake of breath would have been of clean air from an empty garden. A waiting panel only containing the idea of oxygen from paper trees, no thing between the land and sky dividing line except the promise of a garden…soon!
That panel now contains smaller panels cluttered with information. When read as narrative these become vast exploratory storytelling devices at play - multi dimensional sandboxes subtly digging into the unlimited vortex of the page. The busier of these panels, with cutaways to beasties, knots, soil sculpting, roots, start to remind me of Richard McGuire’s Here, and like that work offer viewings of time that option past/present/future compartments all within a single panel.
The layered instructional panels and constant hard working of Adam may well be a reflection of the people who made this strip. Adam the Gardener was a weekly strip published in the 1940s by the Sunday Express, created by Cyril Cowell and Morley Adams. Cyrill Cowell (1888 – 1967) was an illustrator who drew and painted beautiful images of animals and the natural world for children’s books including the ‘Twitchy Whiskers’ series in the 1940s. Morley Adams (1876 - 1954) was a writer who contributed stories to many newspapers, magazines, and comics from the early 1900s onwards. He wrote biographies and non-fiction books, with a particular interest in games and hobbies, and became well known for popularizing the crossword in Britain, founding Morley Adams Ltd. to produce newspaper quizzes and puzzles. Finding Cowell’s painterly depictions of animals and nature in his other works, it is not surprising to find his pen patiently detailing the minutae of gardening, focusing here on the different movements of humankind on planet Earth to that of the talking squirrel. Adams’ ‘Toy making at Home: How to Make a Hundred Toys from Odds and Ends’ (1915) encourages the reader to recycle household items that are usually discarded after one use. The first toy in the book is the paper windmill, “which turn around gaily in the gentlest breeze.” It is not difficult to imagine this being found somewhere in Adam’s garden.
The panel with all of it’s sections doesn’t look too dissimilar to a deconstructed crossword puzzle to the garden, with the answers generously offered to the reader before the questions. It could also be said that the green fingers of the gardener are not unlike the inky fingers of the cartoonist. A solitary calling, life styled around plot and unearthing. Over time, the hunch of the drawing board will be helpful for positioning around the potato tower, religiously kneeling at the coming of spud, while in the background your strip drifts out of the studio door and into the folded newspaper office. It is the passion that stains the fingers of the dedicated soul who believes in the mark, and the care and attention your brush hairs up that eyebrow, one keratin stem at a time. This is not just putting a potted plant onto your desk - this is plant desk, with your hands plummeting the ground and coming up searching for more mud. Perhaps the comic panel is the garden of the page. A trimmed, organized moment, plotted into the infinite empty space, a place created where it didn’t exist. The panel as garden also needs it’s lawn mowed, or the grass may spill over, and the neighbours may complain.
The garden is found in the gardener
As I come to write another line, I see a mark on my computer screen. I can’t decide if it is a full stop I accidentally typed, or if it is a little airborne crumb that has gotten stuck to the screen. I take the cursor down to the mark, position it in front of the crumb and press delete. It turns out it was a full stop, and now the mark is gone. Then it dawns on me: now the full stop is gone, the crumb is gone too. It brings me to another question: If Adam read his own comic strip, would he be reading a comic strip about a garden with no gardener in it? Adam is the garden and the garden is Adam. By digging the earth and planting the plants, he creates himself: a static perforation of a body, eternally dancing and spinning around mortality. Adam comes from the compost of pandas walking in circles around invisible bamboo. He comes from the melancholic smell of a wilted flower with a redundant bee circling like a plane that will never land. He comes from the red rake in a golf bunker that has self-rusted from too many daydreams of rainy beach holidays. He comes from everywhere and nowhere and is now everywhere and nowhere, where he will remain. Adam is not only Swamp Thing of the allotment, but he is the allotment of the line. The vein inside the fabric of every connecting river of ink that flows from one element to another, consolidating everything that the page and panel contain, bubbling outward from each mark like a sitooterie growing from a house.
The text at the top of the strip interrupts tangent flights, reminding us that time exists in this space. Adam’s interventions into nature disrupt and disturb what could be natural as we witness a controlled lifecycle. As he moves as if cryogenically frozen in a new position in each and every panel, everything around him is subjected to birth, death, and the living bits in between, by his methods. He can be encouraging and kind to some plants, and can be cruel and destructive to others, all in the name of maintaining the garden.
Last night I accidentally boiled a caterpillar. Seeing Adam purposefully paint and gouge at a tree to annihilate the insects that may roam there, shows another side to the garden. The garden must prevail no matter what. Nothing will destroy the garden and to make a garden we must destroy.
At the back of the book Cowell and Adams offer designs for your garden. These plans offer a finite space where specific plants and vegetables can grow within your organized landscape. In the strip, we only ever see sections of Adam’s garden. We join all of these panels together in our heads, which allows each reader to have their own garden to explore.
I am still imagining what this comic strip is. And as I imagine, I picture dozens of gardens from above, all containing a gardener, who are taking a break and thinking about Adam. They each get up and leave their garden, coming back with a glass of water. They pour the glass of water into the flower beds and take a step back. They have just given Adam a drink.
The post R&R: A Glass of Water for Adam the Gardener appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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