The Glory of the Garden

The azaleas were ablaze, the apple trees blossoming and the woods carpeted with bluebells. This was England in May and we were visiting a private garden where Anne, the owner, was showing us the hidden corners, including a wild flower meadow with buttercups, meadowsweet, oxslips and wood anemones.

She certainly didn’t have time for sitting in, or out of, the shade. he garden had originally been designed by Gertrude Jekyll, a legendary garden designer in the early 20^th century, who, clad in black bombazine and little black boots, transformed English gardening. Departing from classical formality and sweeping 18^th century “landscape” designs (think Capability Brown), she introduced informality with swaths of color in loosely planted borders. She said that if she had not been a gardener she would have been a painter.

Unfortunately, as our careful coach driver went down the drive and squeezed through the narrow stone pillared gateway – very, very slowly – there was a horrible crunching sound. One of the coach’s big windows had caught the hinge of the gate and shattered. The glass shards were not sharp, more like little pebbles, but we were all a bit shocked and the driver distraught. Luckily we were near the local pub, where we had a restorative glass of cider, or a nip of something stronger, and a comforting plate of fish and chips. The poor driver spent the hour calling his boss and getting a relief coach.

After the gate episode all went smoothly. We drove over the glorious rolling Sussex Downs to West Dean, where courses are run for all sorts of arts and crafts, including gardening. There was a 100-yard rose pergola, just breaking into bloom, interspersed with clematis and honeysuckle, with borders running alongside. At the end of the pergola was a little pavilion with a floor paved in flint and horse’s teeth! (I didn’t ask).

This is chalk country, so no blazing banks of rhododendrons like the ones we saw at Exbury. Here, as well as the pergola and sunken garden with a deep pond, pride of place is taken by the 2.5-acre Victorian walled kitchen garden. Kitchen gardens boring? How wrong can you be? “Crinkle-crankle” walls are covered with trained fruit trees – 200 varieties of apples, pears and plums – and box hedges surround the mundane, but perfectly regimented, carrots, cabbages, beetroot and lettuces.

Even the handwritten labels were things of beauty. Flowers to cut for the house were in a double border down the center. The real treasures are the 16 Victorian glasshouses with “beaver tailed” glass tiles, to stop rainwater rotting the wooden frames. Peaches to peppers, cucumbers to coleus and aubergines to orchids were all thriving under the glass.

Sissinghurst garden is so famous we feared a disappointment, but of all our visits it was the most romantic. Set among remains of Tudor buildings, it was created by that odd but affectionate couple, Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. Vita wanted to combine her exuberance of planting with Harold’s formality of design. Hedges and walls divide the garden into separate quite different areas. As you enter through the arched gateway the first sight is of a herbaceous border with a great brick wall behind, festooned with roses and clematis. The white garden is coolly formal and the cottage garden an unrestrained riot of hot colors. We climbed the Tudor tower to see the study where Vita wrote her gardening articles for The Observer. She described how, as an experiment, she had bought a cheap packet of mixed annual seeds from Woolworth: She later had to report that this was a failure.

My favorite garden

However, I personally gave pride of place to Hever Castle gardens. The moated 14^th-century castle was formerly the home of King Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. William Waldorf Astor bought it in 1903, altering and restoring the castle so he could live there comfortably. He then created the most wonderful garden: yew topiary, including a set of chess pieces; masses of roses; a lake; and, most beautiful of all, an Italian garden. Lord Astor had a fine collection of classical sculptures, including a Roman well head with frolicking Maenads, carved capitals, urns and sarcophagi, all displayed against a background of shrubs and herbaceous borders. There is a stone arcade planted with roses, vines and wisteria, with camellias trained against the wall. This is just heavenly.

On our way back to London, we stopped for a visit to Hampton Court Palace. Back to Henry VIII again: He confiscated the palace from his puffed up chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. It remains a royal palace, though only “grace and favor” apartments, gifts of the Queen to the great and good, are inhabited.

Behind the palace there is a great walled rose garden, a maze, ornate formal French-style parterres and a “real” tennis court. Tennis was played in ancient days in castle courtyards – it was something like squash – but the castle walls had buttresses and indentations, so the indoor court replicates these hazards.

Quite the best part of the gardens is the Privy Garden, created at the end of the 17^th century and superbly restored in 1995. Elaborate formal patterns of grass, box hedges, pyramidal trees and statues are enclosed by the intricately worked wrought iron screens made by Jean Tijou, a 17^th-century Huguenot craftsman.

After six days on the road, we were ready for the famous Chelsea Flower Show, held on the huge site which is normally the grounds of the Royal Hospital. Do not confuse this with a medical institution. Founded by King Charles II as an asylum for old or disabled soldiers, it was built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1691. The Chelsea Pensioners, as they are known, still wear uniforms dating from 1700; dark blue in winter, scarlet in summer.

At the show massive marquees hold displays of flowers, both in and out of season: tulips, yellow, red, striped and parrot; roses, rugosa, tea, and floribunda; delphiniums, gladioli, potted plants, cyclamen, hyacinths. For the last week television programs have been showing growers trying to force late flowering plants to flower early or holding back the ones that wanted to flower in April.

Garden designers have been flat out building the show gardens from scratch with water features, decking, walls and quite large trees, as well as flowering plants. They work into the small hours and sometimes through the night, particularly just before the show opens, knowing that everything has to be dismantled at the end of the week. “Sitting in the shade” is not an option.

“So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray

For the glory of the garden, that it may not pass away.”