Note from the editor
Of course, gardens do not make themselves, as Jane Brown makes clear in this chapter, and the gardening world has always boasted its fair share of eccentrics, charlatans, geniuses, artists, enthusiasts, loners, team players, workaholics, trendsetters and visionaries, whose influence both on their own gardens and other people’s has been substantial, if incalculable. In my opinion, the pleasure in reading The Garden lies as much in the accounts of the garden makers as the gardens themselves.
In recent years, the RHS has placed emphasis on its educational programme for schools, but the Society knows that much of the success of a school in inspiring its students to take up gardening depends on the enthusiasm and knowledge of individual teachers. Most inspirational, for me at least, is the story of the Writhlington School Orchid Project, the brainchild of a particularly energetic and dedicated physics teacher, Simon Pugh-Jones. With the co-operation of talented and committed pupils, he has made the school known across the world for its contribution to orchid conservation.
This chapter includes two short obituaries, such as appear regularly in a publication concerned with people who often become more distinguished the older they get, as well as a long and affectionate profile of Sir Harold Hillier, by his friend and colleague, Roy Lancaster. These all show what interesting lives many garden-lovers lead.
Also in this chapter is an article by a larger-than-life gardener, Sir Roy Strong, writing about re-inventing The Laskett 25 years on from making it with his late wife, as well as a letter by John Sales, one-time Gardens Advisor to the National Trust, concening his close friend and collaborator, Richard Ayres, which also shows the benefit of teamwork.
I could not resist ending with what I believe is the only poem ever included in the RHS’ publication, the ballad of a seed written by Alice Oswald–an erstwhile professional gardener–for the millennium issue of January 2000. The seed is both the end and the beginning.
URSULA BUCHAN, editor
Fashion Victims?
It somehow seems appropriate that Westminster, our seat of government, should mark the year 2000 with a ferris wheel, for we go around in circles all the time. Fashions in gardens used to revolve slowly with the measured tread of history’s taste-makers, from Islamic emperors to European monks, via English squires and Victorian villa values. For every century’s turn of the wheel there was a style, or at least a variation on the basic styles that nature allows, either a straight or a curvy edging to the flower bed; after that it is all a matter of degree. But we have accelerated the wheel of taste in the most recent 100 years and discovered how to run it backwards, allowing us to pluck whatever bauble we fancy from the supermarket shelves of history. As choice and crowding have dictated smaller and smaller gardens, so the supply of goods and ideas that we might put in them has multiplied. The ease of choice, hailed as a consumer’s right, has become overwhelming: the ability to choose is manifestly not so easy after all. What are we to do?
“…we have accelerated the wheel of taste in the most recent 100 years and discovered how to run it backwards, allowing us to pluck whatever bauble we fancy from the supermarket shelves of history”
Some 20 years ago, I wrote a book about the Edwardian gardening partnership of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. It was just as their revival bandwagon began to roll and, from a fairly safe distance, I have watched them lionised, Lutyens as a great, though expensive architect and the doyen of garden-seat designers, Jekyll reprinted, restored and recycled as the patroness of thousands of column inches on colour and planting design. ‘A Lutyens house with a Jekyll garden’, a catchphrase in their day, is a house agent’s dream in ours, with a premium attached: their best houses and gardens, perhaps 50 built from 1890–1914, finished and planted for a few thousand pounds then, now sell for equivalent millions. And here I am doing just what I deplore: in equating their extraordinary artistry with money, I feel we have missed the point.
They were the first to give design and planting ideas for medium-sized and smaller gardens, confounding the assumption of history that for a garden to be good, it also has to be enormous and preferably aristocratic. Lutyens and Jekyll did not deal much with the land-owning classes; their clients were self-made men, lawyers, businessmen, a lucky gambler or two, or women of independence (like Miss Jekyll herself) who chose to spend a high proportion of their income on gardens. It is so easy to confuse quality and scale, and in fact the majority of their gardens, including some of the very best–the courts of Folly Farm, the Deanery Garden at Sonning, the elegant and scented outdoor rooms that surround Les Bois des Moutiers near Dieppe were worked onto spaces ranging from one third of an acre to an ideal of three to four acres.
Their secret weapon was their restraint: they stuck tenaciously to what Jekyll called the ‘sanity and sobriety’ and the straight lines of their Arts and Crafts movement context. Lutyens had a dictum that ‘there was no such thing as a free curve’ and everything he designed was formed by his obsession with geometry and his brilliant mathematician’s mind. He was a stickler for accuracy, there being no such thing as ‘about right’ either; it was right or not at all.
Jekyll had no truck with serpentine lines of beauty, classical porticos, or seas of grass, indeed little faith in anything of the 18th century. Her planting was all devised, through some 350 commissions, within a finite range of plants, which she loved and propagated in her garden nursery on Surrey sand. This controlled repertory of straight lines, pure geometry and sympathetic planting allowed them endless solutions to individual design problems, all in complete harmony with the tastes of their time.
The tastes of their time, but not ours. The use of English oak, two-inch bricks and finely crafted natural stone gave their gardens an essence of Edwardian luxury: but all that should have vanished with the First World War. Some of their best gardens belong in a museum with other works of art. Their day was over in the 1920s but we have allowed them to trespass down 80 years. We should have acquired their restraint and understanding of scale, but left almost everything else, and moved on. Jekyll’s plans were only ever ‘starter kits’ and moving on is what she intended her gardeners to do.
In the 1920s the world of domestic design adopted Modernism. The Moderns subscribed to contemporary solutions for modern lives, and their theories applied to gardens as well as houses. They were rebels in regard to scale but in love with materials: they rejected formal symmetry in favour of lop-sided abstractions, steel and plastics, and adored concrete, objets trouvés (rocks and pebbles, sea-washed timbers) and plants of spiky, sprawly, personable forms. In fact, they came to the rescue of people who hated herringbone-brick paths and straight lines: they recalled the 18th-century romantic picturesque that Jekyll had dismissed. In the cyclical nature of gardens the ‘modern’ must be the style for the 21st century.
Or is it possible that we have outgrown our need for labels, big-name designers and ‘styles’? In writing about gardens I find the analogy with the fashion industry is recurrent: couture creations that win catwalk applause have little relevance to real lives, which are lived in the High Street adaptations. Our affections are formed in feeling just right.
So the gardens that I love best are where our all-too-short tenancies on this earth have been celebrated with flowers, trees and dappled groves. Where others’ lives shine through what is merely a framework of restraint or ‘style’. Favourites which come to mind are: the E H ‘Chinese’ Wilson garden at Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire with so many of the plants he collected; Sir Frederick Gibberd’s modern, ‘selfish’ indulgence at Marsh Lane, Harlow; Derek Jarman’s Dungeness beach garden; and Nick Burton’s restoration of the flower walk at Kelmarsh Hall, which recalls the ghost of Norah Lindsay. Modern theorists have been praising gardens as the ‘people’s art’ for 50 years. Now is the time for all good men and women to make gardens of their own.
He Had a Dream
For a nurseryman keen to spread his wings, with a young family and a long-cherished dream of establishing a major collection of trees and shrubs from the cool temperate regions of the world, it was a tempting offer: ‘an attractive country residence with walled garden, glasshouses, bothy, garage and outbuildings surrounded by pasture and arable land, in all about 41 acres’. His wife had drawn his attention to the sale notice in the September 1951 issue of Country Life, and the more he considered it, the better he liked it. Further enquiries revealed that the property lay close to the London–Bournemouth road (A31), and the soil varied from London clay to Bagshot sand.
“In 1977, having assembled a woody-plant collection of world renown, Harold made a decision of huge significance and generosity…”
The residence in question was Jermyns House and the man who was determined to, and in fact did, purchase it was Harold Hillier, then aged 46 and head of the world-famous nursery firm Hillier and Sons of Winchester.
For some time Harold had been looking to move from his Winchester home, surrounded by chalkland, to a site with acidic soil where a wider range of his favourite plants might be grown, especially rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias. Given the poor state of the house and the improvements required to make it suitable, it was another two years before the family moved in, which they did on 3 June 1953, the morning after Coronation Day. One of the first trees planted by Harold, on a site close to the house, was a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), plants of which Hillier’s had raised from the first introduction of seed to Britain from China, via the Arnold Arboretum, in 1948.
Once begun, planting of trees and shrubs proceeded at an ever-increasing pace, first in peripheral areas then on newly acquired neighbouring land. In 1961 the 4ha (10 acre) ‘parkland’ that Harold initially planted as a nursery ceased production. More land became available and remaining trees formed the centre of an ambitious arboretum. This was consolidated with gifts from like-minded friends and nursery contacts and eventually by introductions from his travels in North America, Mexico, Europe and the Far East.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the arboretum became a magnet to dendrologists and woody-plant enthusiasts who came to study and admire the botanical and ornamental ‘treasures’ that found a ‘home from home’ in this verdant slice of Hampshire.
In 1964 Hillier Nurseries celebrated its centenary with a press day at the arboretum, during which an earnest young journalist asked Harold for his thoughts on the newly fashionable subject of conservation. ‘While others are talking about it, I’m doing it,’ he replied, ‘putting roots in the ground.’
In 1977, having assembled a woody-plant collection of world renown, Harold made a decision of huge significance and generosity, forming a charitable trust and offering his arboretum to Hampshire County Council, accepted on their behalf on a glorious day in May the following year by the late Queen Mother.
In 1983, Harold Hillier received a richly deserved knighthood, only the second nurseryman after Sir Harry Veitch in 1912 to have been so honoured. Then just two years later the horticultural world was saddened by news of his death, aged 80.
Today, the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, as the property is now known, covers an area of 73 ha (180 acres) and is promoted as a ‘garden for all seasons’ boasting a collection of 42,000 plants from the world’s temperate regions including 11 National Plant Collections. It also runs an ambitious educational programme for all age groups. Beyond the statistics, impressive though they are, there lies a simple fact that from one man’s dream a world of plants grew.
On a warm, sunny day the week before Easter this year I had occasion to visit the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens with friends. We found it busy with visitors old and young, and families relaxing on the grass. At one point we passed a group of youngsters contemplating a tree labelled Tilia ‘Harold Hillier’. ‘Who was Harold Hillier?’ asked one of the children. ‘He was the man who created these gardens,’ their teacher replied. ‘He must have been pleased,’ the child observed.
From Tiny Protocorms…
It may have become something of a cliché, but ‘catch their interest when they are young’ remains a truism. Quite how far a spark of inspiration can be developed depends largely on the skill and enthusiasm of individual teachers. In this respect, many of the pupils who attend Writhlington School, a rural comprehensive in north Somerset, seem well aware they are fortunate to count Head of Physics, Simon Pugh-Jones, among the staff.
“Flower show rosettes and certificates cover a blackboard in Simon’s classroom”
During the past 10 years, Simon has developed an after-school Greenhouse Club from a small nursery growing bedding plants into a programme that has taken his pupils as far afield as the Brazilian cloud forests, seen them mount displays at local and national orchid shows, raise their own hybrids, and grow wild orchid species from seed for re-introduction at home and abroad.
Simon’s involvement in extra-curricular horticulture at Writhlington began in 1990 when he agreed to take on the glasshouse at the school. He began Greenhouse Club for interested pupils to raise bedding plants, freesias and to plant up hanging baskets. Orchids, for which he has had a passion since childhood, first arrived as a cymbidium collection donated by a pupil’s grandmother.
Like Simon, some of the club members were quickly smitten by their exotic new charges, and more orchids soon followed, many donated by Wiltshire and Somerset orchid societies and specialist nurseries, until they had elbowed aside all the other plants.
The main glasshouse now accommodates four temperature ranges, and each member of the club has responsibility for a different genus. Greenhouse Club has convinced Simon it is important for his students to learn quickly about orchids as he finds their success and enthusiasm is fired by their expertise. Giving each pupil real responsibility in caring for the plants of a selected genus or two encourages them to learn more.
Life skills
The discipline of regular care (the pupils often start in school at 8am), preparing and sowing plants, and dealing with the public’s questions, help develop pupils’ confidence and improves key skills like communication. The club is open to students of all abilities, and Simon believes working with orchids has prevented several pupils from being suspended or expelled, while opening new career paths and aspirations to many more. ‘A lot of students now know they are going to university to do botany or plant science, and they will often be the first generation of their family to do so,’ he says proudly.
Simon has also found that the school’s recent high profile in the media, including appearances on BBC TV’s Blue Peter and the news coverage of pupils supplying orchids to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street have important effects. ‘It shows the students that they can be amongst the best in their field, and this has had huge knock-on effects for the aspirations of the whole school,’ says Simon.
He also believes that the club is important in helping its members challenge stereotypes in their appreciation of such ‘uncool’ (to their peers) factors as flowers and perfume. There is a certain amount of ‘stick’ from other pupils, but this does not seem to bother the club members. The breadth and depth of their knowledge, their pride in the school’s collection (and their own plants in particular) is obvious.
Simon says the 12–14 year olds in the group have ‘lab skills at undergraduate standard, putting them in a position to develop some fascinating projects over the next few years’.
Flower show rosettes and certificates cover a blackboard in Simon’s classroom. The school’s most recent exhibit, at the European Orchid Show in London, received a silver-gilt award from the RHS, plus the trophy for the Best Small Exhibit. Several specimen plants were given much-coveted Certificates of Cultural Commendation (CCCs). ‘It’s so much better for a judge to acknowledge formally that a pupil has done well than just a teacher saying it,’ says Simon.
“…the school’s impressively well-equipped orchid-raising laboratory contains shelf-space for more than 2,000 flasks…”
The show was also a notable event for 15-year-old Chris Ashman, one of Simon’s keenest students, who joined the British Orchid Council’s judging panel [as a] Trainee Judge. His speciality is Dendrobium and one of his charges gained a well-deserved CCC.
If growing for showing can be regarded as part of the National Curriculum’s ‘Vocational Science’, the project work Writhlington’s higher science pupils undertake at post-16 is much more applied. Often, it involves them with an increasingly wide range of partnership organisations and co-operative ventures.
Central to most of these is the school’s impressively well-equipped orchid-raising laboratory, set up with the help of Greenaway Orchids, Bristol Zoo and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (among others). It contains laminar-flow cabinets for sowing seed, sterilising facilities and shelf-space for more than 2,000 flasks–most of them showing signs of seedling life, or at least a thin film of newly-germinated green protocorms.
Each higher-science student studies applied genetics by making a cross with plants of their own choosing, researches the parents’ origins, and attempts to grow-on their own seedlings to flowering.
Not all projects take place within the UK; in April 2000, having raised nearly £12,000 from a variety of sources including the Merlin Trust, Writhlington mounted an expedition to Mata Atlantica, 1,800m (6,000ft) up in Brazil’s cloud forests. Hosted by the Rio Atlantic Forest Trust, over three weeks pupils investigated the relationships between specific orchid species, their habitats and pollinators, and carried out a ‘rescue’ operation to move a vulnerable Masdevallia infracta colony to more secure sites.
Fund raising for a similar trip in 2005 has already begun, but in the meantime Simon is forging links to set up ex situ conservation projects in Brazil, together with Costa Rica’s Lankester Botanic Garden and communities in Sikkim, northern India. The aim is that local people harvest seed from their native orchid species and send it to Writhlington, where it is flask-grown, then the seedlings are sent back to be grown and sold by the locals, giving them a source of income without having to wild-harvest plants.
Simon’s latest partnership is with the Eden Project in Cornwall. ‘We will be establishing deflasked seedlings from appropriately-collected seed in some quantity, on pieces of wood to be attached to trees in Eden’s tropical biome, to grow as epiphytes as they would in the wild.’
Writhlington has become closely involved in the conservation of the Mendip Hills’ own hardy-orchid species. Simon suggested changing the management of the school’s rugby field in 1994, effectively turning it into a hay meadow during the closed-season summer months, and only cutting it at the end of August. In 1999, Ophrys apifera (bee orchid) began to flower there, quickly developing into a colony, recently joined by Anacamptis pyramidalis (pyramidal orchid).
The school’s micropropagation laboratory is now raising native hardy orchids with the aim of re-introducing plants into nearby areas. Several projects are under way, focused on increasing the success of re-introductions. This also forms the basis of the Master of Philosophy thesis that Simon is somehow finding time to prepare.
Beyond the heating bill for glasshouses and laboratory, orchid growing takes nothing out of the school’s coffers, and is largely self-financing through selling plants, gaining outside sponsorship and grants and fund raising (another of Simon’s specialities).
The school has recently been awarded Business and Enterprise status as a centre for business studies, and the Year 10 growers are perhaps best-placed to capitalise, as they already have their own Young Enterprise company, Stem Labs. Again, their pride in the cymbidium seedlings that are their major product is palpable, for these are plants into which each of the students has already made considerable personal investment.
The breadth, international scope and sheer volume of work undertaken at Writhlington School is frankly astonishing, and shows just how far it is possible to take children once they have been bitten by the growing ‘bug’–provided they are motivated by an exceptional teacher. The respect with which Greenhouse Club members treat ‘Sir’ speaks tellingly of their appreciation for his commitment to them.
Simon is justifiably proud of his pupils’ achievements, but modestly cites the support of the school’s head, Marie Getheridge, as ‘crucial; a teacher without support can’t make things happen’. His enthusiasm was recognised, however, with the 2001 award for Teacher of the Year for the west of England. [He was awarded an MBE in 2013.]
When pressed as to why he commits so much of his own time to the projects he juggles, he confides ‘my job isn’t like work–I enjoy it so much. Seeing the interest and successes of the students is just brilliant.’
Obituary of Princess Sturdza
Princess Greta Sturdza, who died aged 94 on 30 November 2009, was a gardener and plantswoman of international repute. Her garden Le Vasterival, near Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, became a magnet for gardeners seeking to learn skills and gardening know-how.
“…she grew up without a garden but with a keen interest in natural history”
A passionate, hands-on gardener, she was once described as a woman of demonic energy, regularly rising at 6am to work all day in her garden which, from the original 3ha (7.5 acres), expanded to the present 12ha (30 acres).
Born Grete Kvaal on 30 April 1915 in Oslo, Norway she grew up without a garden but with a keen interest in natural history. She studied English at Oxford where she met Prince Georges Sturdza of Moldavia whom she married in 1936. In Moldavia during the Second World War she cared for orphans and was involved with the Red Cross, later becoming its President. At the end of the war she and her family fled to Norway, then to France where, in 1955, they bought Le Vasterival.
Here her interest in gardening really took off, clearing scrub and draining marshland before beginning an ambitious planting scheme. She was a member of the International Dendrology Society, serving as President from 1997–2002. In 1992 she was made an Honorary Life Member and President Emeritus. A long-term member of the RHS, she was awarded its Gold Veitch Memorial Medal in 1987 and became a Vice President in 1992.
She published two books: Le Jardin d’une Passion (1997) and Le Vasterival–The Four-Season Garden (2006). In 2008 she was awarded the Worshipful Company of Gardeners’ trophy for her contribution to Courson Flower Show, near Paris.
Obituary of Mavis Batey MBE, VMH
Mavis Batey, who died aged 92 on 12 November 2013, was a garden historian, author and former President of the Garden History Society. She was also a codebreaker during the Second World War.
Born Mavis Lever on 5 May 1921, she studied German in London and became an interpreter at Bletchley Park when war broke out. She broke a code that enabled the Royal Navy to defeat a convoy of Italian destroyers at Cape Matapan off the Greek coast.
In 1942 she married Keith Batey, with whom she had three children, and later began to research 18th-century garden history. Mavis served as Secretary and President of the Garden History Society, and was a Vice President until her death. She was involved with the restoration of the Royal Pavilion Brighton gardens, and lobbied [successfully] for the formation of the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
In 1985 Mavis was awarded an RHS Veitch Memorial Medal and in 1987 received an MBE. She wrote a several books, including Oxford Gardens (1982).
Reinventing Your Garden
I’ve just reached 77 (not that that’s saying anything), but it has made me reflect on one aspect about gardening and old age. What is it that happens to gardeners as they get older? We all know about the burden of the work, and ailing and failing limbs, but people seem to get stuck. Somehow after 60, mummification sets in, along with an inability to look at their garden with a critical editorial eye. I often visit the gardens of friends who are more or less in the same age range as myself. I will look at a tree and say ‘Why don’t you take that out, it’s awful?’ It may have had a purpose 30 years ago when it was little more than 1 m (39 in) high, but now it is 15m (50ft) or more. It is sucking nutrients from the soil. It dominates the garden and blocks views. At least, I say, try limbing it up.
The recipients of this advice look stunned as though I’d uttered some appalling blasphemy. ‘But we planted it,’ they protest as though that absolved them from the horror it has become. It doesn’t. Instead it reveals them as failing to understand one of the basics of horticulture: that gardens are about change, about perpetually adjusting a picture, which will never be finished.
“What is it that happens to gardeners as they get older?”
Such a reappraisal is particularly true after a garden is more than 25 years old. It will be littered with planting mistakes of your own making and garden styles will have moved on, offering exciting new possibilities. Moreover, many of your garden’s most cherished features will have attained maturity, calling for reassessment and setting off to best advantage. But I notice that on the whole a blindness sets in.
In my own garden [The Laskett, Herefordshire] I’m at the end of such a radical re-editing. If one quick-growing conifer has gone so have 50 others. The light suddenly pours in, calling for new planting, and the topiary–lovingly sculpted for more than 20 years–stands revealed as never before in all its glory. Hedges are lowered and recut, providing new vistas. Ornament is resited to advantage. It is exciting. The Laskett Gardens are now open to visiting groups who tend also to be of that certain age. Time and again I tell them that the current message from this garden is ‘Go home, chop something down, and start again’.
Winter Walk
In 1996 [as Chief Gardens Advisor], I designed the Winter Walk at Anglesey Abbey with Richard Ayres, then Head Gardener. The design arose in response to the need for a winter feature leading from the car park.
The garden at Anglesey Abbey consists of a series of bold strokes across flat landscape, recalling transitional formal layouts of the early 18th century, still geometric in overall structure, while also incorporating semi-natural features within it.
The challenge for the Winter Walk was to produce an original scheme, considering the first Lord Fairhaven’s bold and clear-cut approach, but incorporating opportunities for developing a series of effective winter-plant combinations. I remember drawing a wiggly line for the path in my notebook and showing it to Lord Fairhaven and Richard Ayres. With their approval we developed the scheme on the lines you see today.
“I remember drawing a wiggly line for the path in my notebook and showing it to Lord Fairhaven and Richard Ayres”
The presence of a gardener like Richard to guide the process on site is indispensable to the continuing success of any complex layout of this kind. Their attention is vital: garden-making is a creative process, demanding imaginative and perceptive input at every stage. The process never stops.
Ballad of a Seed
This is a poem about a seed–that physical emblem of beginnings–to mark the new millennium. Some people say the year 2000 is no different from any other year; and perhaps that is particularly true for gardeners. Plants keep their own time.
“Some people say the year 2000 is no different from any other year; and perhaps that is particularly true for gardeners. Plants keep their own time”
So this poem, while celebrating beginnings, is not really about their befores and afters. It is not about what a seed, or a millennium, becomes, but what it is already.
That’s why, instead of using conventional ballad form, it uses the sounds of a ballad but breaks them out of their verses. In ballad form, the verse is a kind of time-keeper to push the story forwards. In this broken ballad, you do not move beyond the seed’s first phase.
In the final image, the seed is seen not as the progenitor of the plant, but as something in itself monumental and mysterious–like a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth or Peter Randall-Page.
I was born bewildered
at dawn, when the rain ends;
uniquely no-one in particular, a pauper in a shack of a flower.
At dawn, when the rain ends,
things drift about seeking shape.
I saw pollen pass through trees
in no rush,
possessing nothing, not even weight.
I set out, taking my whole world with me,
wrapping myself round in my own identity as thin as a soap-film,
and all that day I was a wind-borne eye.
I couldn’t put myself
at rest, not even for one second:
increasingly unfocused, spinning
through the disintegrating kingdom of a garden,
and going nowhere
and seeing myself at all angles;
and I was huge,
like you would make a stone guitar,
a cryptic shape of spheres and wires.
