Cranbrook Gardens: Water, Water, Everywhere

You’re never far from water at Cranbrook. Even when you can’t see water, the sound of it is everywhere. Not surprising, since the Cranbrook Flower Forest is bounded by two rivers, both of which rise on the property. These rivers tumble down the St Ann hillside, chuckling or roaring at different points in their descent to the Caribbean Sea, sparkling on the other side of the north coast highway between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay.

You turn off the bustle and occasional madness of that highway and ascend into quiet through a tunnel of trees that deposits you at the start of the Cranbrook Flower Forest: a walkway of 40 or so yards between towering royal palms to a circular pavilion large enough to accommodate a wedding or a dinner party. The gazebo is surrounded by manicured lawns and stately palms, across from a restored sugar mill that houses a bookshop; above that is a cafeteria; and above that, perched in a tall star-apple tree, is a large peacock, whose screeching call breaks the quiet, but whose lordly presence adds just the right note of seigneurial style.

By now you’ve begun to appreciate why this is called a “flower forest”: flowers are everywhere, from shrimp plants and begonias to orchids and red gingers. True, they’re in unforestlike beds and rows, but they jump at you anyway with the colourful ebullience of happy children.

But the gardens are only part of the attraction. Cranbrook also boasts a “River Head Adventure Trail”. The river head is the source not only of the property’s water, but also of its joie de vivre. But you have to walk a mile to get there — “an hour’s leisurely walking”, round trip, says the brochure.

The guides — there are five of them — are considerate, cheerful, and knowledgeable. You begin easily enough, strolling past mesh-covered greenhouses and beds of seedlings, some of them planted around “coppers”, the old cast iron pots that sugar used to be boiled in when Cranbrook was a sugar estate. You notice the expansiveness of the grounds, and how much space is set aside for people to enjoy themselves in simple, everyday ways: volleyball nets, basketball hoops, soccer goalposts, all with the space around them to enjoy those sports. There’s a tarpaulin-covered stand, complete with oil-drum barbeques, fronting a large lawn scattered with tables and benches; in fact benches are everywhere on the property, under large trees or tucked into floral corners, for just sitting and immersing yourself in the surroundings.

Eventually, following your guide, you leave the fields and benches behind and enter the flower forest proper. The sound of rushing water accompanies you, whether you see it or not; most times you can, because the pathway never strays far from the river. And you can easily, among the profusion of torch gingers, elephant ears, and tree ferns, the heliconias and the lilies, and the giant cotton and flame-of-the-forest trees, develop the sense of being lost in the jungle — in a wild, primordial place.

That is the illusion Ivan Linton, the proprietor and horticultural eminence of Cranbrook, wants you to enjoy. In fact, practically every square yard of the publicly accessible property was designed and planted for just that effect. Well known across Jamaica as a farmer and horticulturist, and as a lay preacher, Linton brought his decades of experience to the development of the 130-acre property that he and his wife Faith have called home since 1983; 40 of those acres comprise the flower forest.

When they took it over, Cranbrook was a working farm, with cattle, pimento, a lime factory, and a copra house for a coconut grove so productive that it was known locally as Never Done — “you couldn’t stop reaping coconuts,” says Linton with a chuckle, “it never done.” But lethal yellowing swept through Cranbrook shortly after, on its way to destroying the entire island’s crop of tall trees. The soil is good for pimento, and there’s still some grown on the property. But the yield is not all garnered by the Lintons: those who would reap what they do not sow are active in pursuit of their own interests. “Jamaica has changed somewhat,” says Ivan sadly.

Cranbrook is still a cattle farm in some respects, but even the large Jamaican ranches, such as the one next door whose cattle come down to the shared river to drink, are having a hard time competing against low-cost imports from the US and Central America. “You can sell two cows to buy a goat,” says Linton laconically.

From the beginning, also, Cranbrook had been a place where Linton, a former president of the St Ann Horticultural Society, grew plants commercially: orchids, foliage, decorative shrubs, whatever was in demand; there are still greenhouses and nurseries that supply that part of the business. The portion of the farm that became the flower forest was “very poor scrub land,” he says, “poor pasture.” So he went about improving it, and creating his dream.

An ardent environmentalist, he did it the responsible way. “No bulldozer was used,” he says proudly of the process of clearing the land. “The natural contours were followed, and soil type determined what was planted. And no artificial fertiliser was applied — a lot of compost from the farm.”

Look carefully as you go further up the trail to the river head and you will see occasional indications of the hand of man — some of the plants originally placed in rows, pieces of lumber and stones arranged over rivulets. But the overwhelming impression, reinforced by the river’s constant laughing and quarrelling beside you, is of nature’s profusion, of its own abundance.

The development of what became the Cranbrook attraction began soon after the Lintons acquired the property. It is a work of 19 years of love and respect, not only by Ivan but by a team of gardeners and other support staff who currently number 20 — and who, he says, “run the place better than I do” when the Lintons take their annual fortnight’s vacation in September. You do indeed always feel in the care of capable hands, even when you’re alone wandering this large, friendly property.

Cranbrook is a work in progress: the planting continues, and the planning. Eventually, there will be cottages — not a large number, and not the sprawling villas that decorate the hillsides and comprise the upper echelon of Jamaica’s all-inclusive product. And an auditorium, as a gathering place for the numerous groups who want to and do meet at Cranbrook, and as shelter from the sudden tropical rains that descend without warning.

“We’ll use bamboo and thatch as much as possible,” says Linton. He won’t have to look far for raw materials. The bamboo stands, towering over parts of the path to the river head like cathedral arches, predate the Lintons’ stewardship, and are plentiful.

A river head is where a river appears; usually from just one place in the ground, or from a rock face. The Laughlands Great River — called, with typically Jamaican ironic inversion, the “Little River” — can have up to four “heads,” depending on the seasonal rains. The main head, the constant source, murmurs out of the rock face at the foot of a towering escarpment of trees and shrubs and into a green-blue pool that can be swum in (there are trained lifeguards).

From other fissures in the rocks, the river explodes with a roar of release, as though it has been held captive inside the mountain, and goes tumbling down to freedom over boulders and tree stumps. You stand — or sit, or swim — at the apotheosis of Ivan Linton’s dream for you: to enjoy and respect nature, and to participate in its splendour.