Country diary: Orchids, plums and pine cones – all bursting out of cathedral walls | Nic Wilson

St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire: The chapel here is a wonderful curiosity, thanks to its restoration by a green-fingered Victorian sculptor

All’s quiet in the Lady Chapel, sheltered from the bustle of the city by thick limestone walls of Totternhoe clunch, quarried just a few miles north-west in Bedfordshire. But though I’m aware of being alone in a vast vaulted space, when I look at the stonework, I feel surrounded by the echoes of women who’ve stood here before me and left their legacy on the chapel walls.

By the late 19th century, the Lady Chapel was dilapidated, the 14th-century ornamental stonework almost all obliterated, and an extensive restoration project was under way. John Baker, a London-based ecclesiastical sculptor, was commissioned to recreate the decorative capitals, bosses and corbels on the arches. Baker, known for his naturalistic masonry work, asked the ladies of the parish to bring in plants as models, perhaps to help him replace botanical carvings from the original medieval stonework.

Walking round the chapel, I’m entranced by the foliage, flowers and fruit on the arches: tiny rounded elm samaras, waving polypody ferns, coiled passion flower tendrils and the voluptuous spathes of cuckoo pint, alongside plums, pears, pomegranates and peaches from Hertfordshire’s thriving orchards. I’m also drawn to the Himalayan and South American orchids – Coelogyne cristata, Odontoglossum vexillarium and Cattleya mendelii – the last a floral wind god with closed upper-petal eyes, blowing a storm through his ruffled lip-of-a-mouth. All three would have been grown in St Albans at the time by Frederick Sander, “the Orchid King” and royal orchid grower to Queen Victoria.

What an exhilarating place the Lady Chapel would have been during this period, filled with people and the sights and scents of more than a hundred plant species. And therein lies the beauty and significance of the carvings for me – as a record of the city’s flora collected by local women and set in local stone. I’m still thinking about the importance of nearby nature as I leave, passing under a veteran cedar of Lebanon planted outside the Chapter House in 1803. It reminds me of Baker’s carving of two cones tucked into a nest of cedar needles. I’d love to know if he modelled it on a specimen collected from this very tree.

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