“There was a small valley at the back of the house which was a marvel of loveliness, bananas, daturas, and great Caladium esculentum bordering the stream, with the Ipomoea bona nox, passion-flower, and Tacsonia thunbergii over all the trees, giant fern-fronds as high as myself, and quantities of smaller ferns with young pink and copper-coloured leaves, as well as the gold and silver varieties.”

It’s 1871 and Marianne North, one of the British Empire’s great lady travelers has found the island of Jamaica.  “ I had long had the dream of going to some tropical country to paint its peculiar vegetation on the spot in natural abundant luxuriance.” A dream she realized on the first of 8 exuberant journeys, visiting 17 countries in 14 years. Her enthusiasm for nature was unbounded. She would wake at dawn and walk out with her tea to witness the world waking. Then she would write and paint. Paint was her passion. She describes the activity as “a vice like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one.” Marianne was a privileged and indomitable woman, and when her father died (she was 40 years old) and left her free and wealthy, she followed her heart and saw the world.

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By 1882, she’d amassed 848 paintings, of which 832 were given to Kew Botanical Gardens in London. Here she designed, and built, a small gallery to display them. This is where I discover Marianne, on a suitably dank spring morning while tromping through Kew looking for a place to escape the drizzle. The gallery is a small gem; it feels like a temple, the windows are up high to protect the paintings from sun and the walls are paneled with 246 different woods Marianne collected on her journeys. The paintings are arranged by country, packed tightly together, like an exotic stamp collection. Jamaica is my home, and I was thrilled to find an entire wall filled with paintings of the island’s natural wonders. I left Kew Gardens that afternoon with a gift shop purchase – “Recollections of a Happy Life”, the autobiography of Marianne North, tucked tightly under my arm.

I loved reading that Marianne did not travel the world with multiple trunks of clothes in which to socialize with the colonial societies she networked through, indeed, “a diminutive portmanteau contained Marianne’s scanty wardrobe…” She traveled instead, with what was for her, life’s necessitates – and that was Paint! 3 easels and boxes and boxes of all the paraphernalia a serious, dedicated Botanical Artist might want. Pleasure travel was a new concept, people were seeing the world in all it’s diversity for the first time and it was adventurers like Marianne who came back with recorded images. Marianne’s portraits were not only botanically academically correct, but inspired. The photographs people saw then were in black and white, color photography was yet to come. Marianne’s’ still life’s were painted with all the vibrancy of the Caribbean, colors people had never seen before.

Jamaica Welcomes Marianne

“In the West Indies at last! I landed entirely alone and friendless, but at once fell into kind helpful hands.” Marianne sailed into Kingston, where she began her tour of Jamaica. It did not take her long to escape the colony’s capital, with a social life, she deplored. “these unthinking croqueting-badminton young ladies always aggravated me and I could hardly be civil to them.” She needed to get into nature “natural abundant luxuriance” where she could paint.

She found a house that quite possibly once belonged to the renowned 18th century botanist, Hinton East in Gordon Town, barely 1000 ft. into Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. When the contents of East’s garden was officially catalogued in 1793 over 600 plants, most of which now create the island’s collective landscape, were listed with their scientific names, common names, countries of origin and the name of the person responsible for each introduction. The catalogue was entitled “Hortus Eastensis or a Catalogue of Exotic Plants Cultivated in the Botanic Garden in the Mountains of Liganea in the island of Jamaica”.  When East died in 1790, Spring Garden was deeded to his nephew who in turn sold the property to the Assembly of Jamaica.  100 years later, when Marianne, on a drive up the Newcastle Road found a house “hidden amongst the glorious foliage of the long deserted botanical gardens of the first settlers” she rented it, and took up residence hanging “a huge bunch of bananas, instead of a chandelier from the roof of the verandah.”   She hired an old black couple to look after her and professed in her journals to feeling as safe as she did back in London.

 The Gordon Town Trail

There is no trace of Spring Garden today, but Gordon Town is lively and I’m parked by the Police Station in the center of town, a landmark and a safe spot to leave the car. Gordon Town Square is as vibrant as a Marianne North painting, the landscape has changed, it’s a different kind of nature, but these are the indigenous colors of the Caribbean. I’m going to hike the old Newcastle Road, once a road, now a well-worn walking trail, used by ordinary citizens to Craighton, which is where Marianne visited the then Governor, Sir John Peter Grant. She enjoyed the Governors’ company, as he told her to come and go as she pleased; he would “curl himself up on the sofa amid a pile of books, kick off his shoes, and forget the existence of every one else, or he played a game of chess if he found a partner worth fighting. He is always my ideal of a ‘Governor’.”   And that is my ideal too of the perfect host I hope to find in the form of Chris Blackwell, at Strawberry Hill Resort, Garden and Spa, which is next door to Craighton, today the Japanese owned Ushima Blue Mountain Coffee Company.

The hike from Gordon Town to Craighton, on what is now named the Gordon Town Trail, is a comfortable 2-hours. The clear narrow trail follows the Hope River, across bridges, past waterfalls through little communities, lost in time. We greet children in pastel school uniforms with formal “good afternoons”, stray goats scurry, we listen to river babble and bird song, slowly climbing to almost 3,000 ft. above sea level to where true Blue Mountain Coffee starts to be cultivated.

Strawberry Hill           

At the top of the trail, it is a 10 minute walk to Strawberry Hill Hotel, Spa and Gardens,  which is indeed another hill one must reach the top of, but the views are worth it, as well as the garden and the heavenly 4-poster beds. From Strawberry Hill vantage, it is not at all hard to imagine colonial life on a small coffee estate in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, in the late 19th century, which is exactly what Strawberry Hill was once. I enjoy the gardens, as Marianne would have, at dawn’s first light, also the best time to see the birds. The Doctor Bird, red billed, with his long black streamer-tails, the Banana Quit and the adorable Tody, are three of Jamaica’s endemics Marianne found in the Blue Mountains and often seen in the hotel’s lovely garden.

 Climbing Higher, Newcastle and Blue Mountain Air

“The air was something worth living for, to breathe was a true pleasure.”   Fresh Blue Mountain air is thrilling and it’s only going to get better the higher you climb.

Newcastle at 4, 500 ft. is still there – a ghost of the 1840’s military base built for the British soldiers, who were dying at an alarming rate, from rampant yellow fever and malaria. Newcastle today is used as a training camp for the Jamaica Defense Force. We sight the red roofs of the old camp and the white washed crosses of its’ crumbling cemetery as we drive up the mountain.   We reach the Parade Grounds at Newcastle while young cadets are being drilled – a commander shouts precise commands and the troops jump. At a back security gate we receive permission to pass through the old camp, we are on our way to Clifton Mount Coffee Estate

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“5000 feet above the sea, beyond the lovely Fern Walk,” Marianne found Clifton Lodge “in the midst of the finest and oldest coffee plantations in Jamaica.  It was a charming little well furnished house surrounded by a garden full of large whit arums, geraniums, roses, fuchsia fulgens in great bunches, sweet violets, hibiscus, great pink and blue lilies, orange flowers, sweet verbena, gardenias, heliotrope, and every sweet thing one could wish for.” And today Clifton Mount is still a charming well-furnished coffee house surrounded by a garden full of flowers. From Newcastle you can hike the very same trail Marianne would have followed to reach Clifton Mount, it’s a gentle ascent 400 more feet along a trail that hugs the mountain ending at Catherine’s Peak, the 5th highest mountain peak in the Blue Mountain range. This is the only way you could actually reach the estate until as late a date as 1986. The present owners, the Sharp family, Laurence and sons Richard and Jason are responsible for a road in to the estate, and for restoring Clifton Mount to its current position as ‘finest and oldest’, as well as largest privately owned exporter of Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee. 

Clifton Mount           

We walk under a dense canopy of green trees and ferns, with occasional views all the way to Kingston and beyond to Port Royal and open sea. We’ve meandered for an hour, when the birds seem to announce our arrival. “it almost took away my breath with its lovely fairy-like beauty; the very mist which always seemed to hang among the trees and plants there made it the more mysterious.” Finding Clifton Mount is a kin to finding Brigadoon, through the mist a single charmed house, on a mountain top, in the middle of a garden, surrounded by a magnificent Blue Mountain Coffee estate, the silence is clear and overwhelming, everything I see is beautiful.

The garden is draped in flowers, deep red impatience as large as my fist, pink and purple tassels of fuchsia, the weeping bottle brush awhirl in humming birds, a peacock preening, pink and blue hydrangea bouquets, garlands of green ivy, saucer sized hibiscus in candy colors, day lilies dance under orange and yellow Japanese hats, a rare pink Allamanda climbs, pom poms of Amaryllis, every variety of green fern, English wild flowers and coffee galore    “It was a wonderful little house: I found plate, linen, knives, a clock (ticking), telescope, piano, and a nice tidy woman and family in the yard to get all I wonted.”   The house has been opened for us; we will have a cup of the best coffee in the world, with a biscuit, and sit on the balcony to marvel at the views.

“Did I not wander and wonder and paint!”   Marianne is my heroine.