A very special trip to Sainsbury’s

Woolbeding Gardens and West Dean Gardens in West Sussex

In this ‘Twixtmas’ period of short dark days with the promise of lengthening days around the corner, it’s a good time to reflect on garden visits this past year. Despite all good intentions, the number of blogs I write by no means reflects the number of gardens I visit. Inevitably some go unrecorded, save for a clutch of digital images, secured on the cloud but destined for obscurity unless I wrangle them into a blog such as that to follow here.

In late April I was on the road to West Sussex with a friend and colleague from Kew days, who is as comprehensive in her exploration of a new garden as am I. Not a plant or design detail goes unheeded or commented upon, meaning that visits take as long as necessary for us to feel we’ve not missed an important feature or tree! That’s not to say we don’t factor coffee, lunch and tea into the itinerary. These form an important part of the day and all the better if available in the garden to be visited.

We ambitiously plotted a course to two gardens near Midhurst, a stay in an Air BnB within a stone’s throw of Chichester Cathedral, and two gardens to the east of Chichester. In this and the next blog I’ll try to do justice to the gardens we explored. The first stop on the tour was the National Trust’s Woolbeding Gardens.

Because there is no parking at Woolbeding, a minibus picks you up in the car park of the Midhurst leisure centre. The jolly driver advised us that we were in good time for the opening of the glasshouse. As veterans of Kew’s visitor services team, and used to tracking the opening times of visitor attractions in the Gardens, we noted this and didn’t ask for further particulars. On having our membership cards scanned on arrival, we were again reminded of the glasshouse opening time and yet again in the cafe where we planned to orient ourselves over a coffee before setting off around the garden. We finally twigged that this wasn’t any old glasshouse, and that something rather special was about to happen. Trying not to be distracted by tempting borders to either side, we walked down to find a small cluster of people looking expectantly at a tall diamond-shaped glasshouse. Murmuring conversations petered away and above the sound of birdsong, we could hear a low mechanical hum whilst ten isosceles triangled panes of glass forming the upper section of the house slowly opened outwards, like the petals of a giant flower responding to the sun’s rays. After the process which took about three minutes in complete silence, it felt as though we’d taken part in some form of special ceremony.

Woolbeding is a curious blend of formal, landscape and contemporary gardens. At its heart is a C17 house which was leased to Simon Sainsbury in 1972, after being given to the National Trust in 1957 by the Lascelles family.

It is difficult to believe that the garden is barely 50 years old, especially the pleasure garden area called the Longwalk alongside the River Rother, which emulates the atmosphere and style of an C18 landscape garden, complete with ruined abbey, hermit’s hut, Chinese bridge, river god and gothic summerhouse. The abbey ruins were so authentic that it came as a shock to find they dated from the late 1990s! When I read the Longwalk was designed by Julian and Isabel Bannerman, I began to recognise their trademark theatricality, as exemplified in the Collector Earl’s garden at Arundel Castle. Yellow skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) and globeflower (Trollius europaeus) were echoed in the colour of the painted Chinese bridge. A gnarly rustic fountain in The Four Seasons garden stands within a flint edged circular pool fed by a deep rill whose banks are planted with ferns and primroses.

We doubled back to designer Lanning Roper’s formal garden rooms, several of which are created around water features. High yew and hornbeam hedging divide the rooms within the old walled garden. The Fountain Garden’s centrepiece is a Renaissance style octagonal fountain surmounted by a figure of Neptune and dolphins. The original C16 Italian statue is on loan to the V&A. Trellised trained fruit trees adorn a brick wall on one side of the Vegetable Garden. The topiary and abundant greenery in that garden give way to an austere symmetry in The Swimming Pool garden.

A striking polished steel sculpture/water feature designed by William Pye dominates the elevation of the house facing the formal garden rooms. Again, this reminded me of a garden elsewhere: the eight water sculptures in the Serpent Garden at Alnwick are the work of Pye. One of these, ‘Coanda’, resembles that at Woolbeding:

THIS SCULPTURE SHOWS THE COANDA EFFECT WHICH MAKES WATER CLING TO THE UNDERSIDE OF SMOOTH OVERHANGING SURFACES, APPEARING TO DEFY GRAVITY. THE COANDA EFFECT WAS DISCOVERED BY HENRI COANDA, A FAMOUS AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER WHO WENT ON TO DEVELOP A FLYING SAUCER. HE STUDIED SCULPTURE WITH RODIN AND ENGINEERING WITH ALEXANDRE EIFFEL.

Extract from the Alnwick Gardens website

Leaving the classical formality of the garden rooms, we crossed an expansive lawn dominated by an eye-catcher, the circular Tulip Folly atop a low mound.

The garden zones of the Silk Route garden emulate the habitats of the ancient trade route from Asia to Europe, taking in the Mediterranean climate of the Istanbul region, the alpine environment of the Anatolian Plateau, followed by Iran represented by old roses and onwards to the Himalayas. Then come plants typical of Central Asia before arriving in the Chinese temperate region. Varying substrates distinguish one zone from the next, with rocks and gravel reflecting the geology of the regions along the route. The planting and landscaping throughout the Silk Route garden appear resilient to climate change: good drainage to cope with heavy downpours and a choice of species that might withstand droughty conditions without additional irrigation. In concluding my current talk to garden clubs on the topic of resilient gardening, I suggest a few gardens to visit where this kind of gardening can be seen in practice. Naturally the Silk Route garden features in my list.

The Silk Route ‘s destination is China’s sub-tropical zone inside the Heatherwick Studio’s glasshouse, designed to resemble an Edwardian terrarium, its glass ‘sepals’ opening and closing to maintain the correct temperature and climatic conditions for plants such as bananas and tender gingers.

April showers somewhat marred the afternoon visit to West Dean Gardens, a garden that I visited frequently when my parents were alive, as it was easily accessible from Petersfield where they lived after retirement. It is beautifully set, with views across the River Rother to sheep-grazed meadows at the foot of the South Downs and the St Roche’s Arboretum beyond.

The imposing flint built mansion is home to the Sussex campus of the West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation. The extensive walled gardens contain many restored Victorian glasshouses as well as a cutting garden area planted with dozens of tulips. I was disappointed to find that the 100m plus long Edwardian pergola was undergoing restoration, but the water gardens welcomed the damp conditions and the woodland planting was as varied as I had remembered. There’s an excellent cafe and shop at West Dean and I confess we retreated there for an hour or so to escape the elements.

We arrived in Chichester in the rain to plan the next day’s garden touring. The apartment block we stayed in was beside the multi-storey where I always parked on trips to Chichester with my parents! The apartment itself overlooked the elegant spire of the cathedral and the Downs in the distance.

Kew, 28 December 2024

Winter Garden no.2

The winter garden I wrote about in my last blog post was planted over the course of the last couple of years. That at Osterley House and Garden is about 10 to 15 years old, but already has an air of maturity. In contrast to the symmetry of the layout of Mrs Child’s flower garden and the floral exuberance of the cutting garden, the winter garden feels more informal. The winter garden is located between the Long Walk (which skirts the gardens themselves and the perimeter of the park towards the lake) and the grassy slope opposite the American Border which is beginning to colour up at this time of year with hundreds of bulbs (narcissus, crocus and later on Camassia).

The wood chip surface path through Osterley’s winter garden is interrupted by a generous circular lawn in the sunniest part of this garden: a peaceful area to sit and listen to the birdsong and admire the winter flowering shrubs, colourful stemmed dogwoods and willows, and ground cover planting.

The season starts with the bright purple berries of the Beauty Berry (Callicarpa bodinieri) which complement the aqua tones of a Euphorbia. Scent arrives next in the clustered tubular flowers of Viburnum bodnantense Dawn and V. Charles Lamont and the delicate cream flowers of winter honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissima. My favourite plant in the winter garden is the large paper bush (Edgeworthia chrysantha) whose silky flower buds open in February into tiny trumpets each lined in vivid yellow, gathered into neat hemispheres suspended from the generously spreading branches of this graceful shrub.

Like so many winter flowering shrubs, Japanese quince flowers on bare stems, emphasising the purity of the form of the blooms. The elegant white form Chaenomeles speciosum Nivalis features repeatedly in the bed opposite the paper bush.

The loss of a large conifer in the last couple of years has created a space for new planting and we recently spent a morning, supervised by head gardener Andy Eddy, planting hellebores and witch hazel in one of the newly cleared areas. The planting scheme includes the striking combination of black Mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus Nigrescens) and snowdrops which also features in Kew’s Winter Mound.

Bute is in the Eye of the Beholder

Winterbourne House and Garden is a favourite destination when I go to Birmingham. Located near Birmingham University’s campus in leafy Edgbaston, Winterbourne is the university’s botanic garden. Beyond the house built in 1903 for John Nettlefold, stands a garden billowing at this time of year with exuberant herbaceous planting.

When I was there ten days ago the star attraction was the bed just beyond the terrace containing the National Collection of Anthemis, a spectacular blend of soft yellow and white cultivars of this dainty member of the daisy (Compositae) family.

We were there to meet Ruth, a friend of Cathie, my hostess. They had been classmates on the RHS Level 2 Diploma course. Ruth now volunteers at the nearby Birmingham Botanical Gardens. One of the many joys of studying and working in horticulture is meeting other gardeners and hearing about their routes into the industry, their current activities and projects, as well as benefiting from their expertise. When I admired a velvety dark burgundy regal Pelargonium, its petals rimmed in a lighter pink, Ruth identified it as P. Lord Bute.

*Pelargonium* Lord Bute, displayed on the right hand side with vivid *Osteospermum*

Whilst the plant wasn’t immediately familiar, the name was. I had read about Lord Bute as the courtier who in the mid eighteenth century advised George III’s mother Princess Augusta on the creation of a collection of exotic plants on the site of what evolved into the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Contemporary gossip speculated that their close relationship went beyond the botanical, but whatever the truth, it is known that John Stuart, third earl of Bute (1713-1792) and briefly prime minister in 1762/3, introduced the Old Lion trees to Kew from the Duke of Argyll’s estate in Twickenham. These are among the oldest trees in Kew and include an oriental plane tree (Platanus orientalis), a sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) and a maidenhair tree (Gingko biloba). The latter is planted not far from the northern end of the Princess of Wales Conservatory which was named after Princess Augusta and not after Diana, Princess of Wales, which I had understood until I went to work at Kew.

Gardeners are generous souls, and I was very touched when later that day Ruth deposited three perfect rooted cuttings of the plant I admired on the doorstep. The little Lord Butes were carefully protected for transportation in a cut off plastic water bottle, a brilliant recycling hack. With the cuttings were two packets of seeds: the first those of the kangaroo apple (Solanum laciniatum). Only the day before I had used my phone’s plant identifier app to identify a tall and somewhat unusual shrub growing in a container in Cathie’s garden. Its mauve flowers were recognisable as belonging to the potato family (Solanaceae) but it was the leaves that attracted me. About 10 inches long and deeply lobed, they resemble pin oak leaves. Ruth treats this tender plant as an annual, raising it from seed each year, and she had given Cathie a young plant a few months ago. It struck me that it is rather like the castor oil plant (Ricinus communis) in its ability to produce so much vegetative growth in one season, and I wonder if, like that plant, it could be used as a focal point in an exotic border of tender plants such as Dahlias.

The other seeds belong to Hibiscus cameronii which I read is a native of Madagascar with large white and pink flowers with red-purple spots at the base of each petal. This is very tender and will be a challenge to grow, but I shall have a go using the heated propagator. I shall also ask the team at Osterley if they might be interested, perhaps for display in the Garden House, along with the citrus trees and other tender specimens. The David Cameron for whom this plant was named was not our erstwhile prime minister, but the first curator of Birmingham Botanical Garden, whose stewardship ran from 1831-1837.

Although I shall have to wait until next year to see the seeds germinate and mature, I hope to enjoy P Lord Bute later this summer. I shall plant them alongside a container planted with other dark red flowers including some Dianthus which are about to flower, having been raised from seedlings I was given early in 2020 when a colleague and I were pricking out a variety of seedlings one very rainy afternoon just before the first lockdown.

Speaking of plants not named after British prime ministers I have been doing some digging to find out whether the Pelargonium was named for Princess Augusta’s Lord Bute or for one of his descendants. In a 2010 Kew magazine article Kew’s Richard Wilford posited that because the plant was first raised by a plant nursery in Cardiff, Messrs S Treseder & Son, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the name Lord Bute was chosen because of the proximity of the nursery to Cardiff Castle, home to the Bute family from 1766 to 1947. So is it a generic aristocratic Bute being commemorated rather than our friend from the early days of Kew?

I would argue that it’s the latter given his fervent interest in horticulture and botany. Indeed he was a botanical scholar as well as a politician: he produced a limited edition ‘flora’ containing specially commissioned botanical images from artists such as Margaret Meen. And as well as advising Princess Augusta on the introduction of several venerable trees to Kew, he supervised garden alterations and is believed to have commissioned Sir William Chambers to design buildings such as The Orangery and the Pagoda. In order to fulfil his role at Kew, he leased Cambridge Cottage on Kew Green near the main entrance to the Gardens, now known as Elizabeth Gate. Cottage is a misleading description for a really quite grand three storey house. He is understood to have extended the house to accommodate his botanical library. Cambridge Cottage is now a wedding venue with offices on the upper floors. In fact for the first three years I worked at Kew Gardens, the Visitor Information team was located on the first floor of Cambridge Cottage in a room with a view across the Green to the cricket pitch and St Anne’s Church. I’d like to think that more than 250 years ago, Lord Bute might have looked out of the same window!

A cabinet containing a copy of Lord Bute’s botanical tables is held by the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle

Cambridge Cottage photographed on a rather murky morning

In the Dock

Last Friday, after an absence of 127 days, I returned to volunteer in the garden at Osterley House. My last session was in early March when we spent the day in the sunshine clearing brambles from the margin of the Middle Lake.

In the photographs I took that day I see that the rosemary in the borders at the rear of the house was in full bloom, the grey green foliage complementing the clear blue flowers with their prominent lower petals. In the Cutting Garden I photographed the Anemone coronaria ‘St Brigid’s Series’ against a chrome yellow backdrop of daffodils. Little did I know when I took these images it would be four months until I was in the garden again.

*Anemone coronaria* ‘St Brigid’s Series’

It felt so good to be back, another step nearer normality in the gradual easing of lockdown. Naturally a new normal has had to be established. Flasks of tea brewed at home replace the lunchtime teapot ritual and the tool handles have to be disinfected when we finish for the day. Two of the five volunteers weeded in the Tudor Walled Garden and planted several new additions in one of the potager style beds. One of these plants was Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulgare). Thankfully its appearance belies the slightly sinister sounding common name, the spires of rosemary blue flowers being a magnet for bees and other pollinators.

The rest of us trimmed the edges of the four rectangular beds in that area, moving via the Magnolia borders to work our way along the paths in Mrs Child’s Flower Garden, our razor sharp shears guided by the metal edging strips to create that crisp finish which instantly neatens a lawn. Head gardener Andy Eddy was mowing the lawns in ‘Mrs Child’s’ and stopped for a catch up. During lockdown he and his partner maintained the garden, enjoying the temporary lull from fewer planes heading to Heathrow and the vastly reduced traffic on the M4 which borders the parkland surrounding the garden. There was also the novelty of the presence of the neighbouring farmer’s Charollais cattle herd on the field immediately in front of the house.

We sat outside the bothy to eat lunch, the reduced number in the team making social distancing easy to achieve. Afterwards we worked in the cutting garden, keeping the bark topped paths clear of weeds and transplanting stray self-seeders such as geraniums into the relevant sections of the garden. I found that the portion of the border beside the wall where I was working was choked with docks (Rumex obtusifolius) and as I worried away at this patch with first a hand fork and then a border fork I realised that I haven’t had to clear these before and had no idea how difficult they are to tackle. To find out more about what I had hitherto assumed were innocuous weeds with the benefit of calming nettle stung skin, I consulted the RHS website which states ‘They are often difficult to eradicate as their deep tap root can regrow from the top section and they produce large amounts of seed.The tap root can be up to 90cm (3ft) in length.‘ A 3ft tap root: no wonder I struggled!

I did manage to clear a section of roughly a couple of feet square but confess that, with the permission of gardener Graham, I had to cut several of the most persistent plants down to ground level rather than rooting them up. It felt appropriate that almost my first task as a ‘re-opening volunteer’ was the clearance of stubborn weeds, just as that last pre-lockdown session had involved bramble eradication. Despite my emphasis in this post on weeds and weeding, the gardens at Osterley are looking stunning as the following photos attest.