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CHAPTER FOUR

Sharpening Her Art 1970s

It would be awful not to be wanted.

AS IS TRUE of any personal garden, Rosemary’s would evolve over time. At the start of the 1970s, the core of her garden was in place and maturing, but Rosemary would add some of its most distinctive features over the next decade, sharpening and refining her art. Drawing from her personal library of old herbals and garden books and her strong interest in garden history, she decided to add a knot garden, followed by an herb garden, and finally her influential potager. Each of these creations benefited from her love of geometrical patterns and was enriched by her deepening knowledge of plants.

When her house was built in 1697, formal gardens would have been in fashion and she felt, quite rightly, it was historically correct to design formal gardens to compliment the architecture of the house. Knot gardens, popular in Elizabethean times, had an interlacing of clipped herbs or shrubs within a square or rectangular framework. They were often planted in the shape of heraldic designs or made to mimic the patterns created by embroidery or oriental carpets. Ideally, the viewer would look down to “admire their knot gardens from a mount or a raised wall.”¹ Rosemary was fascinated by the geometric possibilities of these designs and decided to create one at Barnsley.

In her library, she turned to Gervase Markham’s The Countrie Farm (1616) as well as to The Compleat Gardeners Practice by Stephen Blake (1664) for ideas. She found examples in each book that could be copied on a small scale, and her mathematical skills allowed her to follow Gervase Markham’s advice: “First make your design on paper and then superimpose grid lines. Using cord and pegs, stretch out this grid on the ground and copy the knot over it with a trail of dry sand.” She sited her own knot garden just off the verandah on the western side of the house with its crenellated porch.