My Garden Story

It is spring in the Highlands, a tulip festival, prunus flowering in the streets, my fairy magnolia hedge in bloom and bit of green emerging. It has been a wonderful winter for camellias and apart from the fairy magnolia hedge, disastrous one for my magnolias; they have been magnificent every year, but this year, struggling to produce four flowers. The Manchurian pear is coming into flower, to me, quite the most disgusting scent in the garden. I remember other springs with nostalgia.

 

There is a small village called Rydal west of the Blue Mountains where the train only stops on request. Every year they have an Annual Show, a big feature on the calendar and unchanged for a hundred years at least. I had friends who lived at Rydal, they had a lovely house and garden and would always ask me to stay for the show weekend. My hostess Katharine and I would put entries into the show, although I protested that I was not a local I was told it didn’t matter, the more entries they had the better. So, I would bake; a boiled fruit cake, date scones (first prize), sometimes I brought jam. Katharine would have huge bunches of herbs, eggs I dozen (brown), a plate of raspberries and whatever else she could find in the garden that morning. The show had all the usual events, children on fat ponies, dogs, poultry, a wood chopping contest, a judge the weight of the steer competition, a Miss Showgirl contest, and there were three wooden sheds. The smallest housed the fruit, veg (the heaviest cabbage),basket of apples, a plate of six beans and a dozen eggs, and was watched over and judged by serious elderly men. The next biggest was the lunch venue, long trestle tables with benches, white buttered bread in plastic boxes on the table, there was a beef casserole with mash, or a ham salad. And something with custard to follow. Tea. The largest tent was my province, a long table held the cakes, pies, sausage rolls, scones and jams. Round the walls were displays of knitting, sewing, art and photography, and at one end the flower section. Shelves from the top down held milk bottles holding a single gladiolus, there was a table of herbs, a table for flower arrangements and a table for children's exhibits. By far the most popular were the miniature gardens, always with a mirror for a pond and then very small flowers or weeds and maybe a plastic tree. The competition was fierce, and parents hovered. Children love very small things, and so do I.

 

It may seem in a garden as big as mine, a bit daft to have a lot of VST but to quote Abbie Jury, she likes “a highly detailed garden” and I think that’s what I’m striving for.  So, there are lots of little things tucked under other things. I know that they are there, and I enjoy them in flower and point them out to visitors. The most obvious are the several clumps of miniature narcissus dotted about which all flower at once. I have three or four different varieties and the splashes of colour year after year are a joy. Violets are everywhere in late winter, purple large and small, pink and a strange pale blue - I have no idea where I got that.  I have previously mentioned the Lily of the valley, and following the white theme, a patch of autumn snowdrops, an almost invisible Saxifraga stolonifera under an azalea, and white oxalis under a tree which I would dearly love to spread further. There are Galanthus naturalised under a deciduous maple and much later, ordinary snowflakes in clumps here and there that need to be divided as they are flopping under their own weight. I have struggled to grow Alchemilla mollis in different places around the garden and every time it faltered, I assumed it was the wrong place so I moved it again. It finally came to rest in the shade of the bird bath where it has found a home and stands up well to the competition from Rozanne, the blue geranium which rather takes over in the summer. There are miniature cyclamen under trees, a patch of brunnera the false forget-me-not which returns reliably but refuses to spread, and then there are fritillaries, or fritillarias as we call them.

 

I first saw these enchanting bells growing wild beside a river near Oxford, then again cultivated in the long border at Sissinghurst. When I returned from that trip I searched every nursery catalogue in vain, until one day I found a mail order nursery in Tasmania, Hill View Rare Plants, and they had several listed. I rang up immediately and the owner, Marcus Harvey answered the phone. We talked, he asked about my climate and said they should grow, how deep to plant them and to cover with a layer of fine gravel which, he said, I’d probably find beside a road. He sent six little bulbs of fritillaria persica. I planted them as instructed and they all came up. Too easy I thought. For five years they returned, tall spires of pale green bells all down the stem. I sent for other varieties, fritillaria pudica which is yellow, and the checkered snake’s head purple and white, fritillaria meleagris. All came up and flowered, then the yellow disappeared, the snake’s heads moved about and then disappeared, as did the persica, never to be seen again. Stupidly, I didn’t think to photograph these, another lesson learned the hard way. I knew they were a wild species, but I didn’t know how long-lived or how they multiplied. I assumed I was doing something wrong, so I gave them a rest for several years. This year I decided to try again. By now a few mainland nurseries had them listed in their catalogues, and I felt more confident, so I sent for fifteen snake’s head in purple and white. I divided them between three pots and placed them in different locations. To my delight, they have all come up and several are about to flower. I will be more careful this time.

Marcus Harvey was a renowned wild plant hunter, he wrote a book about his travels and ramblings over Crete, Greece and Turkey hunting for rare plants in particular crocus and fritillaries.  He sadly died in 2016 and there is a crocus named after him. Hill View is now closed.

 

Next time I might take a break from the garden and write about the five or six gardeners I’ve had over twenty years, their knowledge and foibles and whether they helped or hindered or even understood what I was trying to do.