Читать книгу The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise - Antony Woodward - Страница 10

Even when German bombing signalled the start of the Battle of Britain and fear of invasion spread, the Gardens Scheme carried on…

A Nurturing Nature: The Story of the National Gardens Scheme, 2002

I could now think of little besides Tair-Ffynnon. All other matters seemed an annoying distraction. I’d taken to carrying a camera whenever out of town, snapping odd things—ferns on an old chimney-stack, yellow lichen on a slate roof, rusting machines in corners of farmyards. I’d also begun tearing pictures out of magazines and newspapers, images of lonely crofter’s cottages, Icelandic turf-roofed churches, old tin frontier buildings. Lots of new things had become interesting, from old farm buildings and dry-stone walls to trees and wild flowers. I edited these cuttings into a scrapbook, which I could spend almost indefinite periods leafing through, daydreaming contentedly, shoving it guiltily away like porn if I heard footsteps approaching the door.

So I suppose I was searching for an excuse to immerse myself in the place. The garden idea came about partly because of that. But it was partly, too, that we’d had it up to here with remarks masquerading as polite interest (‘How did you stumble on this place?’, ‘I can see it has great potential’) that we were perfectly aware translated as ‘What a dump!’ My father had made no secret of his bafflement, and Vez’s mum had watched with mortification as her daughter exchanged a successful career and a warm, clean house in London for a derelict shack up a mountain. True, some people ‘got’ it instantly, but many more did not. Why couldn’t they see it? Were its charms really so obscure? I’d recently visited Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness and been deeply impressed by the way he’d seen the beauty of that place, hitherto an isolated, little-known shingle headland in the shadow of a nuclear power station. Through his minute garden, hardly bigger than the fishing hut it adjoined, he’d shown that beauty to others too. It seemed to absorb its surrounding seascape and play it back in distilled form. Why couldn’t we try something similar at Tair-Ffynnon?

The idea was no doubt encouraged, as April turned to May, by the first tentative signs of spring’s arrival on the hill, in the form of a dishevelled swallow resting on the telephone wire. The following week, two dozen more had joined it, and the place had come alive with flitting, wheeling, diving, skimming birds playing tag around the house as they noisily nested in the barns. Our home, it seemed, was others’ too. A fortnight later the hedgerows on the lane turned white with May blossom and the shady verges exploded into a riot of bluebells, Lady’s Smock, violets, red campion, cow parsley, and a hundred other wild flowers I couldn’t identify. By this time the hills were echoing cacophonously with the joys of the season as lambs and their mothers bleated relentless inanities to one another.

The moment I latched onto the idea of a garden, it seemed right. It licensed me to spend as much time as I wanted thinking about the place, and it would force us into making a plan. This in turn would give us purpose and structure and provide a deadline. Maybe it would even help me understand why the place meant so much to me. Two further comments acted like rallying cries. One, from a visiting friend as he got out of the car: ‘God, there’s nothing that doesn’t need doing.’ The other, from Jonny, who when I mentioned the plan, hooted with derision: ‘A garden? What…at your place? You’re joking.’ Followed a few moments later by: ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ At a stroke, a half-baked idea graduated into a clear personal challenge.

I’d heard of the National Gardens Scheme’s ‘yellow book’ and was vaguely aware of the yellow ‘Garden Open Today’ signs that sprouted across the countryside from around the time the clocks went forwards. I’d even thought that, one day, visiting such gardens was something I might like to do. Now, with my own garden in mind, it seemed as good a place as any to begin my research into what might be achievable. Might we be able to get into the National Gardens Scheme? I bought a copy of the book: a fat yellow paperback entitled Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity. Its 500 pages were crammed with brisk little one-paragraph entries beneath addresses of scarcely believable quaintness: ‘Pikes Cottage, Hemyock’, ‘The Old Glebe, Eggesford’, ‘Mottisfont Abbey, Romsey’.^* It was a remarkable collection. Here they all were: the cream of Britain’s secret gardens. Thousands of them (3,542 to be exact) with directions and opening dates: precise instructions on how to see, at the best possible moment, the pride and passion of some of the world’s most dedicated gardeners. Scanning the descriptions at first glance revealed many to be disconcertingly grand (‘60-acre deer park’, ‘Tudor knot garden’, ‘pleached lime avenue’, ‘Victorian fernery’), though there was also evidence of more modest attainments (‘pot patio’). There was no sign of Derek Jarman’s garden in the index, though endless other famous names were there: Sissinghurst, Hidcote, Stourhead, Newby Hall, Nymans, Bodnant. Was this the kind of thing we had a hope of getting into? And how on earth had such a scheme come about?

A little research revealed that the National Gardens Scheme was an institution that could have evolved nowhere but Britain. The inspiration arrived in 1926 at a committee meeting of the Queen’s Nursing Institute. In those pre-NHS days, the QNI was a charity that raised money to pay for district nurses and to provide for the retirement of existing ones. Ideas for fundraising were being batted to and fro before the steely gaze of the committee chairman, the Duke of Portland, when one of the committee members, a Miss Elsie Wagg, piped up. What a shame it was, she said, that Britain had so many marvellous gardens, yet most were seen by nobody except their owners and a few friends. Why not ask those owners to open for the appeal one day next year?

It was genius. If the idea could be implemented, here was a way to tap into one of Britain’s great hidden resources. But it was a big ‘if’, for the idea was presumptuous, impertinent, socially revolutionary even. Post-war Britain was still class bound. Garden-visiting was common enough, but only among a tiny minority. The thought of asking owners of large private houses to fling wide their wrought-iron gates to, well, anyone was outrageous. It smacked of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism or any of the otherisms which had been filling the papers recently. However, and this was the real genius, because the idea was to raise money for charity, and because it was approved by a duke, it looked mean-spirited to refuse. So suddenly, whether you were interested in gardens or just wanted a snoop behind the park wall, an irresistible opportunity presented itself. The Scheme licensed nosiness. It also sanctioned repressed British amateur gardeners to show off their efforts.

But what a feat of organisation. The idea lived or died by the contacts and persuasive powers of those setting up the Scheme. So, to be on the safe side, the first chairman of the new ‘National Gardens Scheme’ was a duchess (of Richmond and Gordon), who recruited a committee of well-connected county ladies, all with suitably fat little black books. And so was born the County Organiser: an imperious, horticultural version of the Pony Club’s District Commissioner.

As I read on about the history of the Scheme, a picture began to emerge of a type. A handful of retired senior servicemen notwithstanding, most were women with names like Daphne or Phyllida or Veronica, who soon became the grandes dames of the gardening world. The County Organiser tended to be someone who’d grown up within, and now kept, a large walled garden, the kind whose obituary—and County Organisers, it became clear, were the kind of people who got obituaries—said things like ‘could be impatient’, ‘fearsomely smocked and gaitered’, or ‘had a knack for engineering spectacular fallings-out, a process she thoroughly enjoyed’. She needed no reassurance about her place in the world, and had little time to spend reassuring those who did. As virtues, energy, efficiency and effectiveness took precedence over charm and humour; as a result, County Organisers were entirely immune to the latter. But in an imperial, ancien régime way, she Got Things Done. She was, in fact, my mother.

In 2002, to celebrate its seventy-fifth birthday, the NGS published a short history of the Scheme. There, on page 28, clustered around the Queen Mother on a staircase at St James’s Palace, fifty-four of these Lady Bracknells stare out from beneath their hats, with gimlet eyes and don’t-mess-with-me smiles—fifty-four iterations of the woman I knew best.

Under the organisation of these forces of nature, the Scheme triumphed from the start. In the summer of 1927 a printed list was included free with Country Life, detailing 349 gardens that would open in June ‘between the hours of 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ for ‘a shilling a head’. The ‘Women’s National Committee’ responsible had done their work well. The list included the King’s gardens at Sandringham, the Duke of Marlborough’s at Blenheim Palace, those of such contemporary gardening giants as Norah Lindsay, and William Robinson’s Gravetye Manor, not to mention ‘the best of modern gardening’ such as Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll’s garden at Hestercombe. Such was the success of that first June opening that the Scheme was continued into September, by which time 609 gardens had opened, visited by more than 164,000 people. The hitherto undreamt-of sum of £8,191 was raised for district nursing. Indeed, the Scheme was such a triumph that King George V wrote to the Gardens Subcommittee of the Queen’s Nursing Institute requesting the event should become a permanent way of raising money.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, hardly a great garden hadn’t been recruited. Chatsworth, Hatfield, Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote, Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst—they were all there. So, too, were the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George’s garden Bron-y-de, and Winston Churchill’s Chartwell, and even the Welsh garden where Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. In 1949 the guide acquired its distinctive yellow livery, and the NGS found its mascot. In no time, the slightly cumbrous Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity had become affectionately known as ‘the yellow book’.

Then, in the mid-eighties, Britain went gardening crazy, and a strange thing happened. Where the County Organisers had traditionally had to plead, persuade or order grudging friends, relations, earls, spiky industrialists and absent-minded bishops to do their duty, suddenly they found themselves inundated with applications. From worthy institution, the National Gardens Scheme overnight became an elite club, to which a new class of Capability Browns, Smiths and Joneses all wanted admission. At last there was a formal goal towards which the ambitious amateur gardener could aspire. And as the only official horticultural yardstick available, the Yellow Book naturally became the gold standard. Applications tripled and the County Organisers found themselves in the eminently more in-character role of laying down the law. Numbers of gardens in the Scheme more than doubled between 1980 and 1990 (from 1,400 to 3,000^*) and, for the first time, formal selection—and rejection—criteria had to be laid down. Getting into the Yellow Book became a whole lot harder, whether you lived in the Home Counties or on top of a Welsh mountain.

To be considered for the National Gardens Scheme, a garden must:

1 Offer ‘45 minutes of interest’.

2 Be a good example of its type (cottage, alpine, herb, etc.)—if it is a type.

3 Have something of special interest (the view, a water feature, a national collection of plants, etc.).

This information was heartening. Forty-five minutes wasn’t so long. The type of garden? Well, there was plenty of time to figure that out. As for having something of special interest, Tair-Ffynnon’s setting and views must be as good as anywhere’s. Yes, on the whole there was room for optimism. All I had to do was learn how to garden.

There was, of course, one other small matter. Would anything grow so high up? But here again, I was inclined to optimism. We already had evidence that potatoes, mangelwurzels and hay had been grown on Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky policies, as that’s what many of its previous inhabitants had lived on. If they could survive, no doubt other things could too. Derek Jarman had coaxed life out of shingle, by the sea, with all that that implied in terms of wind and salt.^* Stuff must grow on mountains, too; it was just a matter of finding out what. In fact, in the circumstances, my course of action was obvious: ask Uncle William.

Uncle William was the great gardener of the family, and my mother’s half-brother. He and my Aunt Jeanette lived in a secluded nook of the Dorset Downs not far from Sherborne. Ranged around a seventeenth-century chalk and flint cottage (its thatched roof pulled well down over its eyebrows, at home in any book of idyllic English country cottages) was a garden that even I couldn’t fail to notice was a plantsman’s delight. The last time I was there, one August, summer was in its dusty and desiccated last gasp. Yet in Uncle William’s garden greenery, foliage and flowers were positively clawing their way out of the ground. Apart from a lawn behind the house, there was hardly a square inch of space that wasn’t bursting with trees, shrubs, climbers, pergolas and pots. In his extensive fruit and vegetable garden, the runner beans, raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes were so bowed down with the weight of provender they gave the impression that, however fast anything was picked, there was not the slightest chance of keeping pace with the output. The place had what I would learn was a hallmark of a plantsman at work: narrow paths rendered almost impassable due to the rainforest density of vegetation spilling from either side. Should you dare level a criticism at Uncle William’s garden, it was that you couldn’t see the garden for the plants.

If green fingers existed, Uncle William’s were of the most livid, fluorescent, Martian hue, and chlorophyll coursed through his veins. It was known far and wide that he had only to be handed a plant for it to perk up. Gardening rows between my parents concerning any matter of practical plant husbandry—where a particular plant was best placed, why it wasn’t doing well, what the best treatment should be—invariably ended with a defiant, pursed-lipped: ‘Well. We’ll ask William.’

As a child, I’d found Uncle William slightly intimidating.^* He was a naval captain and had a deep, husky voice that exuded peremptory command. I always imagined the huskiness had come from roaring orders across the wind and spray-swept flight deck of HMS Ark Royal, of which he’d been second-in-command in the 1970s, not that I’d ever heard him raise his voice or even seen him in his naval role (though he was wearing his uniform, holding an umbrella over them, in my parents’ wedding photographs). It was a voice that implied that, once a task was stated, it might be regarded as done. I couldn’t imagine any member of the plant kingdom defying it. He was a pillar of the local establishment and churchwarden in his local parish. I was sure he must open his garden to the public, and, on a hunch, looked him up in the Yellow Book. Sure enough, there was his garden: ‘Planted over many yrs to provide pleasure from month to month the whole yr through.’

If anyone knew what would grow on a windswept hill-side 1,300 feet up, it was Uncle William. I hadn’t spoken to him for years and was summoning the courage to make the call when, out of the blue, he called us. He gathered we’d bought an unlikely property in the hills and had ideas about making a garden. (Clearly, word had spread of our offbeat acquisition, though I did wonder how my father had described Tair-Ffynnon to trigger quite such prompt interest.) As it happened, he said, he and Aunty Jeanette were visiting a garden near Usk in a few weeks time as part of the local gardens society (I later asked him about his role in this: ‘Chairman, for my sins’), and he suggested coming on to see us.

Which was how, one Saturday a few weeks later, Uncle William came to be pottering about Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky and bracken-invaded acres. He seemed amused by the whole enterprise, as he poked cheerfully about with a stick. ‘Well, your soil’s alright,’ he said, jabbing at the thick clump of nettles growing round the wood pile. ‘Nettles only grow in rich soil.’ The hundreds of molehills he thought were a good sign, too. ‘Excellent potting soil if you collect it up. If you put bottles in the vegetable garden the sound of the wind in the glass discourages them.’ We took him up to the gully where the spring ran. More jabs with the stick. ‘You can increase the sound of the running water by adding stones,’ he said. I’d briefed him about my Yellow Book plan as we progressed around the place, hovering behind him hopefully, biro and notebook at the ready for any suggestions about what we should plant. However, little apart from these general comments had so far emerged. Looking up and down the gully now, his gaze alighted on the stands of foxgloves. ‘Foxgloves,’ he said. ‘There you are. You can grow foxgloves.’

‘But foxgloves…foxgloves grow everywhere.’

Uncle William shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can only grow what will grow. You need to look around you and see what’s growing naturally.’ He looked around again, taking in the clumps of gorse, the encroaching bracken. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘you could have a very fine bracken garden.’ He dissolved into chuckles. ‘The first bracken garden in Britain.’

I wasn’t convinced Uncle William was taking me as a gardener, or the project, seriously. After lunch, however, he opened the back of his car and revealed a boot crammed with treasures. He’d brought with him dozens of trees: crab-apples and holm oaks, birches and sessile oaks and limes. Best of all, there was a yew, and yews, we knew, grew on the hillside, because many cottages had one (often calling themselves, imaginatively, ‘Yew Tree Cottage’ or ‘Ty’r-ywen’: ‘the house by the yew’). ‘The yew,’ began Uncle William. ‘D’you remember the yew at Rookwoods? Perhaps you were too young?’

‘I remember it.’

‘Well, this is its grandchild. When Granny left, I took a cutting and planted it in the garden. This is from a cutting from my tree.’

The idea of having a genuine piece of Rookwoods, of the garden in my head, growing in my own real garden…well, I need hardly say, the thought gave me goose bumps.

A week or two later, Uncle William emailed me. His advice boiled down to:

1 Get the place fenced. You can’t do anything until that’s done.

2 Look at what grows naturally around you.

3 Visit other Yellow Book gardens at a similar height and aspect.

4 Go to the Botanic Gardens of Wales, Edinburgh and the Lake District.

5 Consult your mother’s books. She was a botanist, after all. Her shelves must be full of useful information.

As for getting into the Yellow Book, he said he could only speak from experience in Dorset, but he suspected they were ‘far too stuffy’ to take on such an unusual place. Which I presumed was his polite way of saying, ‘Forget it.’