June 2023
June saw a posse of 20 heading off to visit several gardens in four counties. This birds eye view is from Sally on her inaugural EAGG outing
Twenty of us set off from Lavenham in the middle of June, to visit six gardens in three days spread over four counties. I was not entirely sure what to expect, having not been on an EAGG holiday before, but Erica had promised me that I would not be Billy No-Mates eating my dinner by myself, and I was eager to see the gardens. Indeed, going away in June was a novelty, since I normally holiday in September when it is easier to leave my own garden, and I was hungry for roses.
Our first stop was Malverleys near Newbury. Readers of Gardens Illustrated will have seen the articles by head gardener Mat Reese. He has a long stint at Great Dixter under his belt, and Malverleys sounded worth seeing. It is a garden of rooms, with high quality unobtrusive hard landscaping, and the emphasis on the planting, mostly created within the past decade under his supervision and with the benefit of large amounts of enthusiasm and money from the owners. The rooms open out onto a sweeping lawn, separated from the rolling landscape beyond by a ha-ha which the money and enthusiasm had allowed to be moved as part of the grand redesign. Mat took us on an initial tour, assuring us that we would have time afterwards to wander around and could go anywhere that we liked. There was a garden room with a rill and water jets in the style of the Alhambra, a hot garden, a cool garden, a white garden, wildflower lawns with topiary showing the Dixter influence, a truly magnificent chicken house, and a border running the full length of the terrace in front of the house. I took Mat at his word and returned to this border after the tour, though I was careful to keep my gaze on the border and the view so that I should not appear to be peering in through the owners’ windows. The planting was excellent, with full use of foliage texture and form as well as flowers, and despite Mat’s comments about the ‘June gap’ there was a lot in flower, with summer flowering shrubs and annuals planted out the previous autumn compensating for the fact that, as Mat Reese said, many of the summer perennials had not really started. I shall be putting in a seed order for corncockles this autumn. Anybody starting a garden from scratch would be heartened by how mature Malverleys looked after only ten years, though I did notice a fair amount of irrigation going on.
Thence to Cadenham Manor, a tranquil stone-built manor house where the present owner continues the formal Italianate garden created by her grandmother over a span of more than fifty years. The remains of a medieval moat show where once the previous manor stood. In keeping with the times Cadenham is becoming more relaxed than of yore, so the thousands of begonias that were once laboriously planted out each year have given way to a soft coloured planting by James Alexander-Sinclair, and a beautiful large, flat stone vase now presides over unmown grass studded with wildflowers instead of formal parterres. A sunken garden occupies what it belatedly occurred to me was probably once part of the moat, and the grass felt deliciously soft to the feet after a month or more without rain. A wisteria with stems considerably thicker than my upper arm twined through the stone balustrade along one side of the sunken garden and had broken some of the supports into pieces. Wisteria is a destructive beast, given time. The walls of the sunken garden were lined to their full height with narrow box hedges, and I thought how restrained a choice that was and how it made the space seem calm and cool: given that expanse of wall to play with I would be planting one of everything I could fit in that needed the protection of a wall. Sadly, with the many diseases now facing box, Cadenham and many other formal gardens are facing difficult choices. We were given tea under the welcome shade of a tree by the owner, who was utterly charming, and I left thinking that I had been to a delightful place.
Mapperton was our first stop the next day, another Italianate garden attached to a seventeenth century house, in Mapperton’s case grade I listed. The garden runs down a small valley, with yew topiary flanking a series of pools, and leading to a small arboretum with some good trees. I had been to Mapperton before, liked it then, and was delighted to see it again. I know that some of our party were slightly disappointed by the quality of the planting, but I still found the atmosphere of Mapperton enchanting, with its still ponds, restrained fountains and trickles of water, Erigeron karvinskianus growing in the cracks of the paving and making itself at home on the fountain head, and great number of birds. As I sat in the cool of a shaded pavilion, looking back across the lawn to the house, the sound of fluttering above my head made me look up, and there were two swallows perched on a beam, with their nest tucked up in the corner of the roof. I was afraid they would not go up to feed their young while I was there, so moved on while trying to look particularly unthreatening. Mapperton is still in private family ownership, and I read an interview recently with Vicountess Hinchingbrooke, about how dire Covid had been for them as all weddings and other bookings had to be cancelled, so I was pleased that Mapperton had survived and was still there to be visited, and of course the garden must compete for funds with the need to heat and maintain the historic house.
From Mapperton we went to the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, paradise for lovers of big leaves and bamboo. I love that kind of thing, and it grows so much better in a sheltered Dorset valley with natural running water on the Jurassic coast than it does at my home on the Clacton coastal strip. Native woodland has been used as cover to plant a wide range of Himalayan and Asiatic species, with little red lacquer bridges over the stream adding to the effect, and a Burmese rope bridge for those of an adventurous disposition, though it was only suspended a foot above the pond that it crossed. The land at Abbotsbury slopes steeply upwards towards the sea, and a grassy ride has been carved through the sheltering belt of trees, so for a stiff walk up the hill some of us were rewarded with spectacular views out across the English Channel and down on to Chesil beach. This walk had been closed to visitors on my previous visit because it was a windy day and I think the management were afraid that we might blow off the cliff. The plant centre at Abbotsbury was very tempting, and many bags of Colocasia vanished into the hold of the coach. I, having sworn that after last summer I was going to reduce the number of pots, bought a tender fern.
Our last day began in my case with a walk into Shaftesbury where we were staying, to see Gold Hill, immortalized in the Hovis advertisement and now so much part of the lexicon that it was referenced in a Guardian interview with Wes Streeting! Our first garden of the day was Mottisfont, with its famous collection of old roses, now in the keeping of the National Trust. There are other parts to the garden, but apart from noticing the huge boles of some splendid ancient trees as I walked back to the coach, I used my entire allotted time to look at the roses. The effect of so many massed together was almost overwhelming, and moderately educational as some but not all were labelled. It being a sunny day in peak rose season the garden was crowded, though not to the point where people were elbowing into each other to get their desired selfies, which was my experience on my one trip to Sissinghurst. The roses were wonderful: I have wanted to see Mottisfont for many years, enjoyed my visit, and am happy that I have been, but it is difficult to preserve the magic of a garden under such a weight of visitors. Also, unless you are forming a collection for historic or reference purposes, some roses are not terribly garden worthy. Rose ‘Kathleen Harrop’, the pale pink sport of ‘Zephirine Drouhin’, made a miserable skinny specimen, just along the wall from a vigorous and blackspot free pink rambler ‘Mortimer Sackville’. Poor Kathleen was equally disappointing in my garden, so why bother with her? And attempts to extend the season of interest of a rose garden can backfire if the underplanting has already gone over and is looking tatty at just the point when the roses are hitting their peak.
Our final garden was perfect. The Old Rectory at Farnborough in Berkshire, former home of John Betjemen, has been opening for the NGS for over fifty years under the same owner. A Georgian house, which must have been old fashioned even when it was built, presided over a lawn with a carefully framed view of the fields beyond. Double herbaceous border, generous in depth though not very long, invited us towards the shaded seat at the end. Behind the house was a small wildflower lawn with not just ox eye daisies but orchids, an interesting collection of trees, fruit and vegetable patches filled with produce and protected from birds by generous cages big enough to walk about properly, and some excellent and unusual flowering shrubs, including the largest and healthiest Calycanthus x raulstonii ‘Hartlage Wine’ I have ever seen and a good specimen of Cornus kousa ‘Miss Satomi’. All the plants looked happy, healthy and though they wanted to be there, and there was an air of generous abundance. By the swimming pool a Cytisus battandieri had sprawled forward to block the paving on one side of the pool: instead of cutting back the shrub people were left to walk the other side of the pool, while roses sprawled over railings or were propped up allowing us to pass under them, and climbers bulged up the front of the house, while a huge glaucous leafed rose ‘Wickwar’ was advancing up a large tree like a breaking wave. It was a masterpiece. The biscuits at teatime were extremely nice as well, and the church just across the road had a window in memory of John Betjemen designed by his friend John Piper.
Thanks are due to Maggie, for choosing the gardens, and to Erica, for organizing and booking everything, also to Dee from Kings Coaches for navigating her way along some tiny lanes and through some very tight gateways. Extra thanks in my case are due to my husband, for doing an epic amount of watering while I was away.
Sally Hepher
June 2023