Millgate Gardens, Richmond, Yorks. July 2016

So what should a perfect garden look like? Is it the sweeping lawns and grand trees of a landscape? Is it the health and perfection of each plant and soil to be marveled at? Is it the array and colour of the beds with a huge variety of flowers squeezed in miraculously? Is it the austerity of shape as in Andy Sturgeon’s Chelsea garden this year, or the romance and power of Versailles with its formal beds and fountains to play in, controlling nature at every turn.  I think a perfect garden is all of these. It should make you dream, revel and lose yourself in the foliage and space as ones senses are captivated by the story of the place. A good garden should take you on an adventure irrespective of size.   Such a garden is the wonderful, romantic Millgate Gardens in Richmond, North Yorkshire; an amuse-bouche of delight.  

Just off the bustling market square of Richmond Town,  a small dark Yorkshire snicket leads to a shadowed space on a slope overlooking the rooftops of the town down to the River Swale.  Tim and Austin have an eye though; they must have seen in early 1980 the beautiful bone structures of a ravaged face of history. A town house built in the 1650s and aggrandized by the Georgians. An outdoor space with steps and pathways descending down a few levels so that the owners can turn and look up the beauty of the one of the town’s houses, Millgate House, with its wrought iron railings and balance of tall elegant windows.  Or turn and see the views across the walls or wait until the garden ends in the coach house at the bottom.

They have used these beautiful bones to create a rose garden of such romance and fancy that you lose yourself in its flowery arbours. The simple colour scheme of shades of pink and shades of blue are created by a careful blend of roses and clematis under planted with simple cottage plants and laced with spires of Adenophera, Ladybells in whites and blues.
What could take ten minutes with your senses closed, took an hour as I lost my self under
Rosa Garland, laced through a tree with a blue clematis. I stood next to my favourite rose of the moment, the fluttering peach beauty of Lark Ascending, by David Austin, and looked out over the roof tops to the water below burbling down Swaldale. For a few moments I saw myself not as a human but as a beautiful, natural rose arbour, entwined in pinks and blues and scented wonderfully.  Who hasn’t wanted to be as beautiful as a rose?  It was sublime until my group pulled me away.

The use of so many roses and clematis over the different descending levels have let Tim and Austin create more than just a garden. It reminds me of a stage set for romantic delight. Gentle Hermione, Gertrude Jekyll, the stripes old rose Ferdinand Pichard, Molineaux, Winchester Cathedral, all grow in corners or up pergolas, interlaced with Clematis such as the pale blue Prince Charles, or deeper blue Etoile Violette.

The garden has a style and form that belie any simplicity.  The control and hard work can be seen not only in hidden delights of Albertine growing over a doorway into the snicket which grows harmoniously along side the clematis etoile violette.
These two plants are seen as the visitor comes out of a dark gloom of twisted trunks of a wonderful magnolia. It is the way the gardens have captured the light and dark of such moments that makes it so clever in its use of small spaces. Into the dark passage, an adventure of green foliage with hostas and ferns almost smothering the stone passage way. Yet when you turn and look up through another door way it is the golden hop that casts a golden invitation to investigate further through the arch.  Light and dark play also around the hoary sophisticated leaves and twisted trunk of Hydrangea sargentiana.  It is these incidents that stop the garden being mere saccharine. The stone steps of grey and walls balance the green and shades of pink and the careful use of water allows what would be a dank garden to be filled with the charm of tinkling movement. Views are glimpsed, and wrought iron seats beckon invitingly to be sat on under shady covers.

The plantings show not only roses and hostas but hint at the hydrangeas, the alliums and the greater use of structure and shade when the roses die down or are pruned.  I am told the snow drops are a glory in their own right.  But of course all of this works only because of Tim and Austin’s careful understanding of the space of their small garden, those beautiful bones that they found all those years ago.  This garden has won the RHS garden of the year, and been mentioned as one of the best private gardens to visit by Allan Titmarsh. It’s B and B is also superlative. Come and be beguiled.

Just a note: the David Austin roses were perhaps struggling the most in the slightly darker and colder climes of Yorkshire. Beautiful as they are, when chillier than they like they are more prone to black spot and have less time to ripen to make their stems strong and shrub like. So roses, such as Constance Spry, are prone to droop, despite David Austin roses being bred explicitly for the shrubbery.  At Millgate she is allowed to droop over a descending bed, while at my own garden not far away, I have been inspired to pick her off the ground and grow her up a pergola.  Beautiful as they are David Austin roses need more heat and care and attention then perhaps people realise. Or he needs to breed a new range more suited to our colder Atlantic climate.

Sweet Pea Week at Easton Walled Gardens. July 2016

Easton Walled Gardens, are the dream child of Ursula Cholmeley. The tudor house was demolished in 1951, leaving only the tudor walls of the park in need of repair, stables crumbling down, some terraces running down to the River Witham and a Yew walk way hundreds of years old. The proximity of the A1 must have made the 12 acre site a daunting prospect alone. The owners could have walked away, rented out the land for grazing and forgotten about this little corner.

Ursula Cholmeley has sensibly not let that disease of “gardeners ego” (from which we all suffer) to take over. She has avoided the mistake of trying to revive such a site and restore it in the grand tradition of the Lost Gardens of Heligan. Money and labour in the 21^st century are all in short supply, and the arrogance of showing off ones wealth and power in the garden is frowned upon, unless done by committee in the name of The People, (pace, National Botanic Gardens of Wales)

Easton Walled Gardens are a revival and a reinterpretation of a landscape for the modern egalitarian era. Intimate spaces in The Pickery, vegetable areas and alpine beds make it accessible and easy to understand for all. The identification with the British nation’s beloved sweet peas is a genius attempt at being both down to earth, and still claiming the grandeur of a “Sweet Pea Week”. It is this careful  balance of trying to attract the paying public to a memorable garden without shouting about it that makes Easton Wall an art form in marketing a modern garden for modern times.  The intimate spaces are balanced against the wider meadows and terraces of the old formal gardens. There are snow drop weeks, photography competitions, and the ubiquitous tea rooms and tasteful shop. Helpful notes point out that snowdrops will only be seen in the early year, should visitors need guidance, but the tea rooms are always open.  The politics of running a garden are legion when they have to pay for themselves.

Instead of reinstating glorious but labour intensive borders, fountains, formal rose walks, and all that a grand old garden would have, the Easton Walled Gardens  have tried to use sustainable meadows, wild life friendly planting and long views to capture the visitors eye. Innovative attempts at a Rose Meadow must be applauded although the bulbs are being swamped by overly strong grass, and the use of David Austin roses only was perhaps more for a marketing exercise than because they truly make the best roses for such an experiment. Black spot is a very real problem on some of the plants and David Austin roses are beautiful but do need more looking after than a wild meadow of grass interspersed with semi wild rose bushes habitat will give them.

Its a good idea, a clever attempt of how to use space in a more natural way, balancing gardening with landscaping, but the execution needs to be tighter.  A useful lesson to us all that neither meadows nor roses can be left to their own devices. The brochures also push wild flower meadows, different wildlife habitats and wildlife sanctuaries too, but I wonder if this is just a short hand for “areas we can let go a bit”, rather than truly integrated into the whole vision.

The sweet peas themselves were well arranged. The small flowered historical varieties growing up individual towers and the cordons of more modern ones were lovely. From a gardeners perspective I couldn’t help notice that the soil looked a bit tired and lower yellowing leaves suggested a greater need to focus on plant health, rather like the roses. But with time and money always an object, I sympathise and identify with these problems that all of us have to manage. I will feed my own sweet peas more, a sea weed drench perhaps and mulch. One can never mulch too much.

I did wonder if other ways of using sweet peas would make the festival of sweet peas a bit more varied. Sweet pea tunnels in the veg patch, a focus on scent, or different ways of growing them. I would be interested to see if cordon grown sweet peas, with the sides picked out like tomatoes, as the prize winners in my village do so assiduously, produce hugely different plants to the lazier scrambling peas in my cutting fields.  But there was no sign of different growing techniques. My knowledge was not increased other than in what seeds I could order from the shop. Fair enough I suppose.

Another area where Ursula should be applauded for trying something different but now needs a rethink is on the terraces running down to the magnificent formal bridge over the River Witham.  Supposedly a set of wild flower terraces in a formal setting. It doesn’t quite work.  The hairiness of the grass is off balance with the formality of the steps and topiary domes. The domes themselves are over crowded and every other one now needs to be thinned and the whole aspect would do with better symmetry when looking back up to the site of the old house.

Mowing grass regularly is sometimes an expense worth paying for and plain green on sharp lines here would bring a cohesive join between the intimate borders up by the buildings and the long border, which is a joy to see, running along side the valley bottom.

Landscape by Charlse Jencks, Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

I think back to the modern landscape designers in Scotland such as Charles Jencks, whose sharp lines open up the land and let the visitors eye travel with ease over the green terraces. Easton has a ready made symmetry of elegant steps and bridge and yew tunnel beyond and this needs to be made more of. In a 400 year old setting the historical grandeur should be reclaimed not ignored in the search for trendy wildlife havens and insect palaces.

Some ideas will fail as the modern owner struggles with simple solutions to large spaces while keeping the historical integrity of the place together.  After all without its tudor past the land would be all natural landscape and no garden at all. The sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts. A lovely garden of innovation, intimacy, and accessibility despite its grand historical setting. Well worth a visit.

Roy Strong’s The Laskett,

Fleur writes of a garden with a testicular mania for topiary and tries to work out if the National Trust was right to turn it down as unimportant.

Over the past few years the garden which has perhaps been causing the greatest controversy (the obscene waste of £88 million pounds at the National Garden of Wales aside) and the greatest divide of opinion is The Laskett, or perhaps more to the point, Roy Strong’s The Laskett. The National Trust turned it down as not good enough, despite the millions of pounds endowment he was offering, while Chris Young in The Garden hailed it as one of the best and most exciting of gardens of its generation. Luckily it has been taken on by that impressive charity “Perennial” which specialises in late 20^th century gardens (they now have three) and raises funds for indigent gardeners.

So who is right and who wrong or do they all miss the point. It is Roy Strong’s garden, (and his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman). It has to be seen in the context of the man, not as a garden in its own right. The National Trust rather missed the point by only analysing The Laskett for its horticultural perfections, rather than as a space exploring modern garden fetishisms.  And is Roy Strong important enough? Well that is a question the NT never even considered, but they did buy a small terraced house just because one of the Beatles lived there for a short time.  And Roy Strong came from equally humble origins if they are trying to be more “of the people and for the people”.

It is useful to remember that Roy Strong is a designer, head curator at the V and A, a man who has spent his life making us think and consider objects, an egoist to be sure but a man also who has a sense of humour as well as a love of the beautiful. Even better he has shown again and again a willingness to mock the humourless world of immaculate good taste, and the agreed elitism of good taste, imposed on us all by an educated elite.

His garden is like a window in to his mind. He is a hoarder, a museum collector who never learned the lesson of less is more. To collect obsessively and gather together all the things he enjoys. Shapes, forms, and design influences abound in the garden, collected and grabbed almost greedily as they tickled Roy’s fancy. Topiary balls, long walks, Italian Renaissance style, Greek temples, finials and twiddly bits and a memory of lots and lots of balls. Everywhere. The struggle and low pay of his early years is in evidence in some of the cheaper finishes and concrete slabs, as he proudly points out in his audio pack. It is a poverty that a lot of ordinary people share, but still want a Greek temple in their own gardens, or a raised bed, or a cloud pruned topiary box.  The faults of the garden are clear, on the other hand it is packed full of the fun, the beautiful and the accessible, and gives us all permission to do what we want in our own gardens, despite the elitist horticultural fashionistas.

Testicular mania for a moment fills the eye and I quickly read the guide for reassurance, “and the traditions of Tudor and Stuart England”. Knot gardens of such intricacy my memory cannot untangle them, statues of heraldic figures, Britannia herself sitting serenely. Other influences fling themselves at the wanderer in the mayhem. I look back at the words. “The revivalist gardens of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras” proclaims the guide. Well that explains all the rooms which seem to have grown with as much planning as houses in a slum dwelling, higgledy piggledy where ever a new idea could be squeezed in.

Were Roy and his wife into theatre design? I can’t remember if that was one of their activities, but the rooms have a theatrical quality, a stage set for whatever idea is top of their creativity at that time.  Perhaps what the garden committee on the National Trust found most difficult was the lack of a planting scheme to hold each idea together. Are plants necessary in a garden at all would be a useful debate. The incidental use of shrubs and herbaceous perennials and bulbs in the garden goes against all planting rules. Colours clash, bare bits of earth abound, and there is no harmony in the planting. A magnolia stands, a beautiful specimen somewhere near the Hilliard Garden and the 50^th Birthday garden. But what is its purpose, why is it there behind a hedge in a bit of dead man’s ground between rooms?  The Orchard works as a sense of space with a purpose, and the cross roads in the middle leads the visitor out, but not to another sense of adventure but to indigestion before they try to find the way into the Elizabethan Tudor Walk.

The greatest folly perhaps, in terms of a garden of plants, is where Julia had her vegetable garden. I remember reading an article by Roy soon after her death in which he peers at her kingdom in the vegetable garden, full of growing things, rows with a planting schemes, and seasonal change. He is bewildered by the vegetable garden and its need for so much gardening. When we visit in 2016 I notice the whole thing has been ripped out and the Colonnade Court put up in its place, in honour of his wife. It is designed to be seen from the house so that Roy can look up to his wife’s memory from his front door. A charming idea full of tenderness to his wife, a bit clumsily executed in detail, with a Greek temple to suit any poolside in surrey. But not a garden designer’s solution. I do wonder how Julia would have felt about it.

This is the central point of the debate. Roy Strong, whatever he claims, is not a garden designer nor plants man.  He is a character of the late 20^th century, proud of his humble back ground and wanting to share his thrill of beauty and space with all.  He is not elitist and has rejected the good taste of the fashionistas with his gaudy flowery shirts and cravats. The dancing bears in the formal Italianate garden, the rickety viewing platform, and the multiple layers of topiary hedges using all sorts of plants in a mishmash of knot garden, temples, statuary, wild areas and long walks. All there because Roy and his wife liked them before they moved on to the next creative idea. It is a smorgasboard of a garden, an uncontrolled feast that the specialist chefs at the Hilton, or the Savoy would rebel against, as much as the trained horticultural world has done, as untrained, unruly, lacking in balance and not enough structure in the planting.  

The National Trust with its experts, so carefully trained in all subjects are technically correct that it is not a garden with balance, form and structure between shapes and plants. That it fails in achieving a harmony based on design principles. But I think they missed the point of Roy Strong’s lifelong message that beauty and fun can be killed by good taste. That all of us can do what we like in our own spaces and call it beautiful.

And who are the National Trust to say what is right and wrong in gardening or right in what is beautiful. Visit it yourself and have fun, but take some indigestion pills if you are a garden fashionista.  My husband, a non gardener, loved it. I got indigestion.

Painswick Roccoco Gardens, nr Stroud

A little valley of delights, a small light piece of humour. All shapes and structure with vistas and surprises.  Painswick is a beautifully restored 18^th century gardens of the short lived style, Roccoco.  The sense of amusement lingers in the name, even as serious plant lovers will huff and puff at the nonsense of a valley given over to follies, avenues, trees and views.  It is not a big place, but the orchard of immaculately pruned apple trees, standing in half an acre of wild meadow, and intersected with a long avenue up to the gothic folly of the red house on the hill were wonderful.  We wandered above the valley, through the bluebell wood.  Like alot of the such named places it is more romantically named than the reality as the bluebells struggled to grow in the mass that one hoped for. Perhaps it was all a recent plan, and the bulbs had not yet spread.

The rest of the valley is made up of a crown of white confection in the white gothic trellis at the top, sitting like a crown above a series of tulip beds and running down to the more serious apple espaliers which surround another half acre of vegetables, sitting in the manner of a grand French potager on the valley slopes, across from the orchard. The feet of the valley end in a muddy pool before the visitor can wander in the woods below on the wood chip tracks, invited to explore the nature trail.  For those of us used to more rigorous country side, we declined, instead admiring the plunge pool and grotto to our left before heading for the pigonnier, the only building that was still extant before the restoration. As we walked round, not only glimpses of the lovely Painswick House could be seen sitting in splendour to one side of the valley, but the farms and houses of the neighbouring Gloucestershire houses were all to be included as joys of golden stone set in the valleys and hills beyond where the rolling countryside could join the vistas of the more formals amuse boufe (?) of the Roccoco gardens.

Designed and painted by Thomas Robins in the eighteenth century, the ladies and gents of the day were clearly meant to wander and chase, flirt and flutter at each other. You can almost hear the giggling laughter of an eighteenth century game of kiss chase among the paths, as the young frolicked ahead, while their elders and betters drank tea in one of the follies.

And for my garden I will take away the desire for at least one grotto, and to not be afraid of neighbour’s houses as part of my views.  If they have a lovely tree, rather than screen it off to protect my garden, it needs to be incorporated it as if it were all part of my grand view.

If you are passing on the M5, or visiting Stroud, it is well worth a visit.