Growing Fond of English Gardens

By Craig Webb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 13, 2007

For most visitors, England's Canterbury Cathedral is a place to stop, marvel and meditate. For me and my wife, it was the place to turn right, drive out of town and search for a nursery.

Bypassing a three-star Michelin site in favor of a place renowned for clematis might seem like folly, but that's been the norm for us during the three vacations we have taken in England these past four years. We organize our own garden tours, seeking out the smaller, personal places that often represent gardening's greatest achievements in a country that takes flowers very, very seriously.

My wife loves such trips because she's a gardening fanatic. I, on the other hand, lack the nose for scent, the eye for shape and the feel for dirt that distinguish even the budding plantsman. I'm lousy with colors and dangerous with a shovel. Nevertheless, I have found so much to enjoy from these trips that I would recommend you tour English gardens even if you think allium belongs in the periodic table.

The first non-gardening pleasure lies in getting to them. Most of the country's great small gardens are located in what at best qualify as hamlets, so finding them usually requires a cross-country treasure hunt. I spent much of the most recent trip relying on a table-size map scaled at just three miles to the inch, and to find one place I had to work off an even more detailed hiker's map -- and ask for directions. In such conditions, arriving becomes a reward in itself.

Second, on a garden tour you can enjoy nature without having to transform into Grizzly Adams. I enjoy being in a place that's driven by the seasonal calendar, not the political one, but I don't want to have to strap 50 pounds of provisions onto my back to do so. At gardens, you can dip your toe into nature, knowing there's always a WC, a tea room and a pub close by.

In addition, on an English garden tour you don't just encounter flowers: You also get to know -- and often meet -- the people who built the place or at least folks who learned directly from the creator. Unlike most art and architecture, great gardens are created from materials that, as Emily Dickinson put it, can be "covert in April, candid in May." This preternatural talent for crafting memorable spaces that look consistently great but are never the same from one day to the next is something that can awe even a non-gardener.

Finally, a gardening tour reveals a side of the English that you can't get from monuments. England is a place where plant shows air on prime-time TV and where the grounds of the Chelsea Garden Show are England's equivalent to the sidelines of a Los Angeles Lakers game. People here celebrate Be Nice to Nettles Week.

Our trips have occupied close to five weeks and covered several thousand miles of southern England. You're unlikely to have as much time in a single trip, so you'd be best off picking one section of the country and sticking to it. Here are some of my favorites, divided according to their location generally west or east of London, plus one in the city itself.

Cornwall and Somerset

Bumper stickers promoting Cornwall are as plentiful in England as the ones seen in the United States for the Outer Banks, although the residents of Nags Head aren't demanding independence from North Carolina the way some Cornish seek separation from England. Still, Cornwall shares with the Outer Banks a sense of being a place apart. Attitudes about time differ from those in the big city, such as what a Cornishman means when he says he'll get to the task "d'rectly." Said one frustrated London expatriate: " 'D'rectly' is Cornish for 'mañana.' "

It helps to have such an attitude when you're visiting gardens here at England's western tip. Trying to see them all in a single trip is folly; one guide lists more than 100 gardens open most of the year, and a dozen more that can be viewed on special days. In addition, most of Cornwall's roads are so narrow and winding you'll be lucky to top 30 mph half the time. All those twists and turns help create microclimates that, combined with temperatures that in some places never even dip to freezing, permit Cornish gardens to display semitropical plants that would have trouble surviving even next door in Devon.

Despite the travel limitations, it's still possible to see a couple of gardens per day and have time left over for a cream tea. We did that one day near the town of St. Austell. We began at Marsh Villa Gardens, located on a tidal creek that Daphne du Maurier made famous in her novel "House on the Strand." Gardeners, who tend to take a keen interest in dirt, will be impressed with what owner Judith Stephens has accomplished since 1988 by infilling a marshland with "waste soil of no great quality," as one local guide puts it. I was more impressed with the fact that I could meet Stephens, a thin, gray-haired woman with an unassuming manner, and get parking assistance from her husband.

It's a family operation as well at nearby Pine Lodge Gardens, where Shirley Clemo supervises a 30-acre site that has more than 6,000 different plants, husband Ray does odd jobs, Shirley's sister runs the fudge shop on-site and Ray's sister and brother work with plants and bookings. When I couldn't identify one plant, my wife and I approached Shirley and she marched with us back to the mystery. (It was a Jerusalem sage, a Mediterranean native normally not found in Washington.) We then chatted with Shirley about the pinetum that she was creating in a back garden, in which pine trees of all types stand 25 yards apart, like sentries in a field. They seem too far apart now, but Shirley was thinking about how they'd look decades from now, once the trees had matured.

I couldn't meet Charles Fox, the man responsible for creating Trebah Garden starting in 1831, but I could imagine him as he stood with a telescope and megaphone at his estate house, directing the planting of trees in the ravine below. Like Clemo, Fox also thought ahead; he would have his head gardener build a scaffold as tall as each tree would become, then use that tower as a guide to pick the perfect location. Today those trees are only part of the reason to enjoy this 26-acre site. My wife and I particularly liked strolling beneath the gunnera, whose leaves are bigger than golf umbrellas and whose prehistoric look makes you feel as if there's a T. rex around the corner. (One non-gardening note: Polgwidden Cove at Trebah's base is where 7,500 members of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division sailed from on June 1, 1944, to reach their staging area for the D-Day invasion.)

Gunnera also abound in the "jungle" area at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, where some of the rhododendrons are more than 150 years old and some garden features date from the late 18th century. But Heligan -- "found" as a result of digging and research by Tim Smit and a team in the late 1990s -- also does an exceptional job of restoring a vegetable garden of the late Victorian era, where walls were curved to help focus the sun and pits were excavated and then filled with manure to grow pineapples. (No wonder pineapples were a sign of hospitality: It took so much work to raise them.) It also has a few new touches, such as two pieces of "earth art" shaped like a sleeping woman and a man's head.

Things are much more civilized at Bosvigo, a 1780s-era manor house overlooking the town of Truro and its cathedral. Instead of a jungle you'll find a place where a magnolia has been trained to climb the home's front walls, you pay your admission into a box with the hand-labeled request to "take change if necessary," and you have to ring a hand bell if you want to buy a plant. The gardens surrounding the house resemble a series of rooms with distinct personalities.

At Somerset's East Lambrook Manor Gardens, a framed page from a 1985 edition of Country Life magazine tells of how the manor's owner, Margery Fish, was staying with relatives when the Somerset fire brigade telephoned to say that one of her outbuildings was on fire. "Let the inside of the building burn," she said. "But spray water over all the walls to save the climbing plants."

Such priorities befit the woman most responsible for popularizing the idea of the cottage garden. Her revolutionary ideas started in an atmosphere of oppression: When she first came to the then-derelict manor house in 1938, her husband dictated construction of a garden with straight lines, concrete paths and nothing allowed to run free. Fish had to wait until after her husband's death in 1947 before she could create the painterly, seemingly carefree mix of colors and plants that won her fame. Though Fish died in 1969, East Lambrook retains the sense of being a personal, lovingly tended creation. On our visit, we were captivated by a tiny girl wearing green Wellingtons decorated with frogs. She resolutely sniffed plant after plant, finally declaring she enjoyed the pinks.

Essex, Sussex and Kent

"I can tell by your accent you're not from here," a white-haired woman wearing sturdy outdoor clothes and a management mien said as we bid her good morning at Goodnestone Park Gardens, near Canterbury in Kent. She was standing in an antique barn-like shed that had been glassed in, plastered with local artists' paintings and converted to a tearoom in which none of the teacups matched.

It turned out that the lady in question was one, in fact -- Margaret, Lady FitzWalter, manager of Goodnestone (technically pronounced "GOOD-nes-tone," though it often gets shortened to "Gun-stone" or "Gunston") and possessor of the third-oldest noble title in England. Goodnestone's manor house dates from 1704 and can count Jane Austen among its visitors; Austen's eldest brother, Edward, married into the family. The plants have nowhere near such lineage, but some walls holding up massive vines (one wisteria is at least 50 yards long) date from the 17th century.

The lineage of the manor house at Great Dixter, located nearby in East Sussex, dates from the late Middle Ages, but the garden today is pretty much the brainchild of one man: Christopher Lloyd, who spent his entire life at the place and died there Jan. 27 at the age of 84. Lloyd enjoyed flouting many conventions of a previous generation of garden experts, such as when he ripped out his father's rose garden and replaced it with a quite un-English menagerie of colorful cannas and dahlias, verbena and even a hardy Japanese variety of banana. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, Great Dixter's gardens were so crowded and messy I had a hard time understanding what was going on or why. But somehow it makes sense -- and it's utterly original.

Some of the most beautiful gardens in England today had rotten childhoods. A prime example can be found northeast of London, just outside the ancient Roman town of Colchester, where in 1960 a woman named Beth Chatto began working in the driest part of England on an overgrown wasteland where the soil alternated between gravel and muck.

Today the Beth Chatto Gardens offer up showpieces in several settings. One garden is set in gravel and features drought-tolerant plants. Another, set along a string of five ponds, offers unexpected sights at just about every turn. At one point I practically stumbled over a plank bench set under a bamboo stand, hidden from but within earshot of a babbling water race set between two of the ponds. A third part of the garden delivers a kaleidoscope of colors in a woodland setting.

London

In contrast, one of my favorite gardens in the whole trip makes no pretense about looking good. Since its founding in 1673, the Chelsea Physic Garden along the Thames in central London has been all about collecting and studying plants, and thus its plantings are set in soldierly ranks rather than in any artistic melange.

But what plants! Chelsea Physic helped finance the collection and study of plants from around the world, including trips throughout the American colonies by John Bartram to find such oddities at the time as the magnolia grandiflora and balsam fir. Chelsea gardeners repaid the favor by sending to the Georgia colony a potentially interesting plant called cotton. (They also helped introduce tea to India.) Chelsea is home to Europe's first heated glasshouse and its first man-made rock garden. If you've ever seen a forsythia or spotted in a plant's Latin name the words banksia or fortunei, you're looking at a plant linked in some way to someone from Chelsea Physic.

We reached Chelsea Physic by driving into London from the east, passing along the way both the Tower of London and Westminster. Michelin might call them three-star sites, but we never thought to stop at either place.

Craig Webb is a writer and editor who lives in Washington.