On my return to Bryan's Ground following a HORTUS garden tour in mid July I was momentarily disorientated, finding our 120-foot arrow-straight front drive dug to a depth of about two feet. Simon had been threatening to replace it with a canal for years and the mood took him as I and twenty-four subscribers trundled around south-west Sweden. It is an epic undertaking, although the initial digging-out (above) was a mere day's work for two men with bulldozer and dumper truck. A row of five apple trees – now safely re-established in the arboretum – was first removed from the orchard to one side of the drive, and the hard surface of the old drive trucked to the new site and tamped down by the bulldozer's heavy to-ings and fro-ings. The sub-soil was then dug to a depth of about twelve inches and is preserved in a giant mound for future use elsewhere. So far, so good. It just remains now (ha!) for the canal's serpentine design to be fashioned in concrete blocks and rendered with waterproofing mortar - no more than six months' hard labour, I'd say.
It will, of course, look ravishing, as all stretches of formal water do when correctly placed and engineered. And if future winters are ever cold enough for it to freeze, we might enjoy a few short, exhilarating ice-skating races . . .
From the Editor’s introduction to HORTUS 86
What message (to use an ugly political term) does it send to our young people to brutalise hedges the way farmers and local authorities do? Uttlesford District Council in Essex is reputed to have one of the most privileged living environments in the country. The Dunmow bypass today is like a horrible wound, its trees (they were never a hedge) smashed, splintered and torn, jagged white wood wrist-thick mangled by the tractor, minced branches in tangled heaps. The beauty of spring, the sacredness of nature totally trashed - to save ratepayers' money, as I’m sure the council would say.
Among the ‘services the council provides (with a profligacy that suggests spending other people's money gives it no pain) could it consider training young people with nothing special to do to use a saw and a billhook? Working with nature is learning to love her. The brutalised roadsides seem to express nothing but hate.
If spring has been uncertain here, it has been the same all over Europe, the moods of April testing gardeners’ nerves and creating memorable effects of sun and rain in the same picture.
Are you ever reluctant to test the reality of a cherished dream? That must be the reason we had left the Italian Lakes for so long unvisited. So long, in fact, that my mental pictures of them were mainly in black and white: memories of parents’ photographs of their honeymoons. Could such an innocent dreamland still exist?
It depends when you go. The Lakes are on Milan’s doorstep. In summer the coaches, I’m told, are bumper to bumper and the cafés round the boat-landings no fun at all. In early April, with trees just starting to green and little squalls corrugating the water, visitors are as tentative as flower buds. It is the magnolia moment and the camellia climax, and yet (at least on weekdays) a good proportion of them are born to blush unseen.
From ‘Tradescant’s Diary’ by Hugh Johnson, which begins a new life in HORTUS after appearing for more than thirty years in The Garden, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society.
The cover of this issue of HORTUS shows one of the most familiar, conspicuous and stately of all our native wild flowers. Honeysuckle - woodbine of the poets and popular song - is a welcome presence in hedgerows or on woodland edges and an enduring sensual image of sultry summer evenings, yet she lives in the shadow of her fellow climbers, the dog-roses, which also come flamboyantly into flower as the hawthorn and cow parsley fade. But even after the end of July, once the soft pink rose petals have fallen from mid-summer hedges, honeysuckle endures, with patches flowering often right through until early autumn. Honeysuckle is, too, considerably more catholic in its ecological preferences and in the west, for example, extends into coastal heaths and cliff vegetation. And, of course, the richly scented honeysuckle is always queen of evening and night. She is a part of us all.
From ‘Hail to Honeysuckle’ by John Akeroyd
I have been immersed in indigo for almost a quarter of a century. Even allowing for personal bias, however, indigo must surely rank among the most important and extraordinary of all plant products. It has had a continuous impact worldwide for almost five millennia, not only on textile dyeing but also on art and medicine.
Since the mid nineteenth century, when synthetic dyes began to oust organic products, coloured clothing and textiles have been taken for granted. Until then nature supplied every dyestuff. The glory of Oriental carpets, Imperial robes or Renaissance tapestries lies in their vivid scarlet and terracotta colours offset by a range of blues. How different they would look had indigo not existed in plants.
With most organic dye colours it is a case of 'what you see is what you get'. Take the primary colours, yellow and red. Innumerable plants yield yellow dyes; many of them, such as weld (Reseda luteola) or dyers' broom (Genista tinctoria), have golden flowers; similarly, the dye wood of fustic (Cotinus coggygria and Maclura tinctoria), or turmeric and saffron dye spices, are vivid gold. Reds, meanwhile, come from red-coloured roots and wood (notably madder, morinda and sandalwood) as well as scarlet insects (cochineal, kermes and lac). But what about blue, the other primary colour? Incredibly, the only source of natural blue dye is indigo-bearing plants, but the plant in its natural state shows no hint of its hidden colour. Only when the leaves are processed by various means does their wonderful dyestuff appear. Throughout history this has supplied hues ranging from sky blue to deepest midnight shades, and in combination with other dyes furnished greens, purples, and non-corrosive blacks. Plant indigo was so hard to synthesise that its synthetic version only reached commerce in the early twentieth century. Up to then vast quantities of organic indigo, produced as described below, were traded between nations and consumed in the textile industry.
From ‘It’s in the Jeans: Indigo’ by Jenny Balfour Paul
In the very first issue of HORTUS the late Rosemary Verey wrote about the small courtyard gardens of Charleston, USA. In the spring of this year I had the pleasure of attending the House and Garden Festival organised by the Historic Charleston Foundation. Among the exciting events on offer, which included Plantation Picnics, Oyster Roasts and an Antiques Festival, by far my favourites were the garden tours.
Some one hundred and sixty private gardens open their doors to the public: you simply buy your ticket, receive a colour-coded wristband and a map, and set off at your own pace to explore the dozen or so gardens in the street or area you've chosen. At the end, wine and lemonade are served in the large garden of the Nathaniel Russell House, one of HCF's historic house museums. A flag is hung outside each participating property and volunteers - easily identifiable men in blazers and women in big hats - stand on street corners to shepherd you into the right doorways.
Of Charleston gardens Mrs Verey wrote, ‘Behind fine doorways, white porticos and balconies with slender, elegant columns and the wrought iron gateways individually designed, lie small gardens, carefully planned, inviting in their half mystery . . .’ In the past, in this hospitable part of the world, a gate left open in Charleston meant that anyone was welcome to enter; shut, it signalled that privacy was required. Now with the increase of visitors, this tradition is on the wane, so it is reassuring to have the welcome that these tours ensure.
From ‘Charleston Revisited’ by Patricia Cleveland-Peck
Mount Usher – the name – is misleading. Like Mount Jerome (of all Dublin's cemetaries, one of the most sought-after, if you know what I mean), Mount Stewart (the fine garden in County Down), Mount Congreve (County Waterford), and indeed Mount Isabel, the fictional demesne in Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September (1929), the name is a sort of verbal fanfare rather than a literal expression of the topography. As often as not there is no 'mount' to speak of, unless it be in the sense of a socially elevated spot. The second half of these names was originally proprietorial, denoting the family of the people whose place stood there. So the first half was a topographical fiction and the second a kind of flag. In the case of Mount Usher, the geography and the name are even more misleading than usual: the Ushers – whoever they were – have long, long gone (and anyway the garden was made after them by successional generations of a family called Walpole, and not by Ushers at all). And the site is certainly not elevated: it is a valley bottom. There are bracing hills all around, and steep, wooded cliffs along the Devil’s Glen only a little further up the valley, but you don’t see much of that in or from the garden. What you do notice – cannot possibly miss – is a lovely trout-lazy, sky-reflecting stream that in flood can be quite busy, but is generally pretty easy-going. It gurgles and murmurs its way down through the garden over a succession of seven low weirs on its way to the sea two miles away. Its name is the Vartry.
From ‘In an Irish Garden: Mount Usher’ by Peter Dale
Back in the early 1900s, when America seemed to be producing millionaires at an exponential rate, one man stood head and shoulders above the rest. Born to an enormously wealthy family whose fortune was built on fur trading, real estate and opium, William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919) was brought into this world with his life already mapped out. After suffering the traumatic experience of being sent away to Europe for his education he later returned to America to study law, although this wasn’t to be his chosen career. Once graduated, he took over the running of his father's considerable estates, and following in the family tradition also became a successful financier and statesman.
However, his life took an unexpected turn when in 1882 he was appointed Minister to Italy by US President Chester A. Arthur. This was a position that required William Astor once again to leave his home land, and spend the next three years of his life in Rome. It was during this time that he developed a passion for ancient Roman history, a passion that became an obsession after a visit to the ruined city of Pompeii. Destroyed and buried during a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii had remained lost and buried for nearly 1700 years, until its accidental rediscovery in 1748.
It was the intoxicating nature of this place that touched William Astor's heart, a mixture of unavoidable tragedy balanced seductively with the haunting beauty of a civilisation frozen in time. Inspired by what he saw, he developed an almost compulsive desire to obtain anything that reflected his feelings for the place. It was here, surrounded by the outstanding beauty of classical architecture, that his plan for the perfect pleasure garden was conceived. But there was just one problem; he had nowhere to build it . . .
From ‘Pompeii, Hever Castle and the World's Richest Man’ by Simon Eade
I never used to worry much about wind. In my experience an occasional ruined umbrella or an eyeful of dust was about the worst of it. I’ve been on the edge of a typhoon without too much discomfiture and I faintly remember a tornado passing through southern Michigan when I was seven or eight, but on the whole I don’t harbour many negative feelings about a good sharp breeze. After all, I enjoy flying kites and sailing dinghies, neither of which occupations (whatever else you may think of them) are in the least entertaining in a flat calm. The storms this year, however, have given me pause.
Our old stone house in the Welsh Marches is on a rising ridge line facing south-west. Between us and the Bristol Channel is nothing but air – a few inadequate hills and the odd copse do practically nothing to break the flow that funnels up the estuary towards us. To the north-east the land falls away too, but on this side there is a small piece of woodland belonging to a neighbour and containing a number of big ash trees. In theory, these trees should shelter us when the wind comes from that direction, but in reality they simply sway alarmingly and behave as though they are getting ready to topple directly across the lane and onto our garden. (Or onto the house – I haven't worked out their exact height yet. I don't really want to know.)
But it is from the south-west that the wind truly counts. Eighty per cent of the time it blows from that direction, generally following one of those doom-laden weather predictions on the ten o'clock news filled with isobars and loose talk of the Beaufort Scale. What you notice first is a deep soughing noise, then an increasingly hysterical shriek as the gusts pick up speed and seem to batter the house. The hullabaloo is frightening, to be honest. If the wind is accompanied by rain – and it usually is – the battering is literal: a sharp rattle like bullets against (and sometimes through) the windows. This is the time to put on rain gear and go out and move the car out of the way of the half-dozen large firs growing just beyond the parking area.
From ‘Wild West Wind’ by Charles Elliott
It is certainly fortuitous when one good thing leads to another. A first introduction to the works of E. A. Bowles led me to those of Henry Ellacombe, and if I had not read Henry Ellacombe I would not have discovered Forbes Watson, Henry Bright and Frances Jane Hope. Now all but forgotten, these three were prominent in the Victorian gardening world, dedicated plant lovers, yet totally different from each other. Their books make fascinating reading.
In a tragically short life Dr Forbes Watson (1840–69) accomplished much: a brilliant student of St Thomas's Hospital, he became a surgeon at the age of twenty-one. He also gardened, studied and wrote about and painted plants, the last earning him the warm appreciation of Ruskin.
As we know there was then a wholesale and long-lasting fashion for carpet bedding and ribbon borders. Watson became alive to the dangers of so limited a palette of plants and in his book Flowers and Gardens (1862) gave voice to his concern – the first whisper of conservation? In the second edition, published posthumously in 1901, Canon Ellacombe wrote the preface. He declared Watson the most important help in the destruction of the tyranny of bedding-out gardening. He wrote, ‘what a tyranny was then, few can now realise; to have hinted a doubt that bedding out was the perfection of artistic taste was to be ranked a philistine heretic.’ Watson enthused about cottage gardens as a refuge for banished treasures, ‘where ever and again you fell upon some quaint strange plant which has been expelled from the modern border, which seemed to fill your mind, especially in childhood, with a sense of wonder and mysterious awe. He singled out dog-tooth violets, nigella, henbane, rue, mullein, sunflower, acanthus, southernwood and giant umbellifers, and foxgloves too, all then stigmatised as weeds . . .
From ‘Looking Back: Three Victorian Gardening Scribes’ by Irene Feesey
The sun is rising, and so am I, and the day looks too good to waste. In Herefordshire there are at least seventeen words for green, over and above mere shades. There is long grass, mown grass, new yew, cut yew, pondweed and its leprous cousin blanket weed, moss, clubmoss, hound’s-tongue, hart’s-tongue, polypody and all the other ferns with no name that grow in that wall with no mortar. There is fresh early summer, and leathery late summer. There are envy, nausea, inexperience and hope. And there is the frog motivating across the flagstones towards the pond, and the emerald on the gnarled hand of 'The Duchess' as she digs out a dock in the glaucous shade of the Himalayan whitebeam. Though of course The Duchess will not be up for some time yet.
Oh, yes, this is the forest primeval, hovering on the edge of being completely out of control.
I know how it feels.
It is six o'clock, and the birds are still at it like choristers at war. No hum of traffic disturbs the scene. Away they go, echoing down the rides and glades of the Park Wood; of which we are almost a part.
Some people’s gardens are like crates full of plants, plonked in landscapes to which they bear no relation. Ardfin, for instance, on the Isle of Jura - a huge stone box sitting on a wild, heathery slope heading uphill from the Sea of the Hebrides. Outside, all is heroic and blasted. Inside, luxe, calme, volupté prevail in a delicate jungle of tender plants, and a small marquee of ancient cut dispenses high-grade tea and cake.
Here at the Hope we do not go in for boxes. The idea is for the traveller to be hacking his way through the tangled brakes of the Park Wood, swamped with birdsong and frowning severely at grey squirrels. Gradually, the plant life begins to change. Manna ash replaces ordinary ash. Surely a beneficent nature cannot have planted this grove of 150 walnuts? On the port bow, a dog rose. On the starboard bow, hauling itself through an elder in a spiky mushroom cloud, ‘Kiftsgate’. The shoes are soaking wet, and so are the trousers, and the world smells of angelica and woodbine. But suddenly the grass is uncannily short. Dear me, what a lovely morning.
From: ‘Two Summer Sunrises’ by Sam Llewellyn
David Wheeler is more than usually responsible for setting the wheels of this article in motion. When I told him I’d become interested in writing something about Mrs Francis King, he asked me if I had read Buckner Hollingsworth's account of her, which forms one chapter in a whole book devoted to ‘famous women gardeners’. Somewhat miffed, I had to confess that not only had I not read the chapter, I had never heard either of the book (called Her Garden Was Her Delight, published by Macmillan in America in 1962) or of Buckner Hollingsworth. A few days later David's copy dropped through my letterbox.
Once I had read it – about women, many of whom were in fact anything but famous: indeed, hardly remembered until Buckner Hollingsworth wrote about them – I knew I wanted to read whatever else such a quietly elegant (and sometimes quietly acid) writer had produced. ‘By her friends and acquaintances shall you know her’: the charmingly detailed Notes and Acknowledgements at the back of the book included several revealing names. For example, Donald Culross Peattie is thanked for drawing her attention to Maria Martin, illustrator of Audubon. The acknowledgements for the chapter on Miss Martin also include ‘Miss Amy Clampitt, Librarian, National Audubon Society, New York’ – who was also, of course, Amy Clampitt the poet. And ‘Mrs E. B. White’ – that is, Katharine White, author of Onward and Upward in the Garden - is thanked for lending ‘a pair of friendly eyes’ and reading the chapter on Gertrude Jekyll.
From ‘Personal and Pleasing: Buckner Hollingsworth: Tomboy Gardener, Chronicler of Gardens and Gardeners’ by Tim Longville
On a cool, blustery evening in the Chelsea Physic Garden early last summer I watched Lucinda Lambton being presented to members of the Garden History Society as its prospective new President, and was impressed by her (apparently) cheerful willingness to clamber onto the seat of a non-too solid looking kitchen chair and to remain there, teetering slightly in her peep-toed, wedge-heeled sandals and flimsy frock, smiling bravely down on us all while the Society’s new Chairman delivered his own speech at not inconsiderable length, and the wind whipped at her ankles.
Lucinda Lambton’s name is possibly not the first to spring to mind in the context of gardens, yet in 2006 she had delivered a lecture cheekily entitled A Compendium of Architectural Delights - with a Garden or Two Thrown In to the Royal Horticultural Society, no less. Perhaps it was this talk that had attracted the attention of the GHS, who were on the hunt for a star performer to take over the role of President from Sir Roy Strong. And if her rousing speech to us that evening is anything to go by, it looks as though the Society has found itself a modern-day Boudicca prepared to lead her troops from the front against the enemy, in defence of our beleaguered heritage. In the faint hope of capturing Lucinda's inimitable delivery on the page, the italics in the following extract from her opening salvo are mine:
. . . if I may, with this first talk to you all, [I will] throw my hat into the ring by making a plea that we put cemeteries particularly high on our list of areas in need of our nurturing and care. For, throughout the cities of the world, and so often amidst the grimmest surroundings, there are these enclaves of nineteenth-century Elysian Fields. Great tracts of planting at its most picturesque; landscapes that set off to perfection an architectural Utopia in miniature - with classical temples and columns, domes, canopies and obelisks, gothic pinnacles and gables, all presenting a showpiece of the architect's, sculptor's, stonemason's and letterer's art; in other words, Nineteenth-century cemeteries are places of breathtaking beauty and interest, that are so often bewilderingly neglected today
Time and again I am bashed in the head with bewilderment, when driving through some densely built-up area, and suddenly spotting, through a gateway, a swathe of landscaped grounds, filled with sculptural splendours, with locals walking by, harassed by urban life, and seemingly unaware that the Garden of Eden is but mere feet away. Yes, cemeteries, situated as they so often are, amidst dire surroundings, are greatly in need of our help.
Thank God they have not yet been designated as brownfield sites – as far as I know, that is – although even that may only be a matter of time. We will be on to it with a vengence if they do.
Captivated, I wrote to Lucinda begging for an interview and my request triggered a phone call challenging me to tell her why, pray, she had never heard of HORTUS, but full of the news that now her husband, the distinguished journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, was alert to its existence he had only the other day spotted fellow members of the Garrick Club poring over it, so that was good, wasn’t it? And yes, let’s make a date to meet at her home in Buckinghamshire.
From Diana Ross’s interview with Lucinda Lambton
For a few years after the Second World War my mother Janet and father painter and wood-engraver Reynolds Stone rented Greenleaze, a remote gamekeeper's cottage in Dorset, within earshot of the roaring shingle of the Chesil Beach. One day, on their way home to Bucklebury in Berkshire, they visited the church at Litton Cheney, on the farther side of the Bride Valley, and found themselves looking down on the late-Georgian rectory, lying empty. The garden, wooded dell and stream bowled them over.
In 1953, after a year of protracted negotiations with the church authorities, the Stone family moved in. They had roots in the county, and ever since childhood holidays spent in a relation's house near Bridport and prep school in Purbeck, Reynolds had yearned to live in Dorset. Once there he spent the first few months with his face buried in his hands wondering if he would ever get any more work – yet not only did the work continue to flow in, but the wild garden soon became its chief inspiration. In fact, it became his whole world. Reynolds never felt the need to travel, seeing a thousand designs in a small area and, like Samuel Palmer, in the dense foliage a mystery that nourished his spiritual nature. He once said he would be content to paint there for the rest of his life.
The garden is five acres of mature beech trees, and until the 1970s towering elms descended steeply into a ravine where a pond is fed by an eternal spring. The chalk exposure that runs across southern England is here close to its western extremity, meeting the outcrops of greensand and clay below it. The proximity to the sea creates a micro-climate of mild air in winter. Palm trees grow in the dell beside a rushing stream. Primulas, camellias and harts-tongue ferns flourish in the shade of the tall trees. A heart-beating 'ram' pumps the pure water up to the house.
From ‘Reynolds Stone and the Old Rectory Garden at Litton Cheyney’ by Humphrey Stone
Book reviews:
Travels in China by Roy Lancaster
Frank Kingdon Ward and the Tsangpo Gorges edited by Kenneth Cox
In Search of Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham
Gardens of Portugal by Helena Attlee
Garden Plants for Scotland by Kenneth Cox and Raoul Curtis-Machin
