My mother's Egyptian garden made its bow to Robinson by way of a wild and shady water garden with bamboos, papyri, rushes, irises, arum lilies. There was a pergola walk, a lily pond with a weeping willow, a formal avenue of clipped conical evergreens. But there were also geometrical arrangements of beds near to the house, with roses and seasonal plantings. The garden was much admired and considered quintessentially English. My mother even succeeded in growing daffodils, which do not take kindly to north Africa.
By the time the addiction got to me, standards had slumped. The first garden of my married life was behind a Swansea semi-detached. Neither Jack nor I had suspected a dormant gardening gene, but in fact we both had it, and property ownership set it rampant. We fell upon our rectangle of sour turf, matted beds and overgrown shrubs. It was very early spring. All over the place were tender, little rosettes of brilliant green, springing from the decay of winter: certainly something to be cherished. We cleared out a derelict bed and carefully transplanted them, one by one. A few weeks later my grandmother came to visit. She surveyed our treasured territory with barely concealed dismay. ‘I think that if ever I had just a pocket-handkerchief garden I would grow just one thing – really well,’ she reflected. Then she turned her attention to our green rosettes. Her dismay was replaced by interested amazement: ‘Why have you planted out all that willowherb?’
We learned, over the years and in subsequent gardens. But we were never more than semi-literate, in terms of serious gardening. There was too much else going on, for both of us: gardens were an essential interest and diversion but could never be a central concern. If I were to have my time again, I would be a real gardener.
Today, my daughter is creating the heir of the Golsoncott garden, the descendant of her great-grandmother's enterprise. Downsized, once again. It is the garden of the cottage that my grandfather built in 1929, just along the lane, as a home for the Golsoncott gardener. The Reeds lived here; another photo shows Margaret and me swinging on the five-barred entrance gate that is still in situ. This is where our family retains a toe-hold in west Somerset, all set for another hundred years, I hope.
Gardening style, eighty years on, in a small country garden for the twenty-first century: the emphasis is on structure and planting. A clever design of curved beds, circular lawns in a figure of eight and embryonic yew hedges divides up a wedge-shaped plot, creates interesting discrete areas and makes the whole thing seem larger. There are a little orchard, gravel paths, planting in swathes of colour – the warm yellows and oranges, the cool blue-and-silver bit. Dramatic use of sculptural plants at focal points – stipa and miscanthus grasses, acanthus. A number of the plants would have been unknown at Golsoncott – all of them popular garden-centre items today and a demonstration of the traditional interdependence of gardening fashion and commercial enterprise. There is Alchemilla mollis in abundance, which my grandmother would have relished but apparently did not know. There are euphorbias, hostas, alliums, dicentra, ceanothus – favourites today, though several also feature frequently in Jekyll designs but somehow never reached Golsoncott. The elements of continuity between the two gardens are the aquilegias, self-seeding all over the place, hardy fuchsias, buddleias, hydrangeas, valerian, and the white seat that originated in the St Albans garden and is now nearly a hundred years old. And Erigeron karvinskianus, showering from the base of the ‘New Dawn’ rose over the porch, fingering its way up between cracks in the slate paving.
Like the house, the Golsoncott garden as it once was exists now only in the head. But I can still conjure it up and move around, from space to space, from plant to plant. I can see it, but I now also hear it – as a global mnemonic system. Here we are in west Somerset – lavish green growth, the grey skies from which washes down all that useful rain, the rich pink earth – but much of the rest of the world is here too: the mountains of China and India, Japan, Mexico, South America, Greece, Turkey… The garden is both then and now, here and there.
An immense and old wisteria embraced much of the house. It was probably W. sinensis, a native of China whose ubiquitous presence in this country is owed to a tea inspector for the East India Company called John Reeves, who sent it back from Canton in 1816. The Chinese effect on English gardens is pervasive. Golsoncott's Chinese acquisitions, along with the wisteria, included the great pink camellia, the regale lilies banked up against the terrace wall of the rose garden, hydrangeas, iris varieties, acers, Clematis montana var. rubens, the Rosa moyesii bush that cascaded down in the midst of the grassy shrub-rose walk in the kitchen garden. Subtract all of these and the place would have been denuded, would have lost essential character and flavour.
Western plant collectors had their eye on China from the point at which accounts of Chinese gardens began to filter back to Europe by way of Jesuit missionaries. After 1755, foreigners were not allowed to travel into the interior, but plants and seeds still found their way to the West. The camellia arrived in England, along with chrysanthemums, the tree peony and Hydrangea macrophylla. Employees of the East India Company like Reeves, based at Canton, Macao and other ports, were crucial in the acquisition process, persuading the captains of tea clippers to find space for plants in tubs and cases. A financial incentive might well have been on offer and, in favoured instances, a naming opportunity, as in the case of Captain Rawes of the Warren Hastings immortalized by way of Camellia reticulata‘Captain Rawes’. Collectors were indeed driven by the spirit of scientific inquiry, but commercial enterprise was rampant. There was a burgeoning market for cultivated garden rarities and the nurserymen were on to it.
That said, in the early modern period of plant collection (one must remember that introductions had been taking place for hundreds of years) it is the Horticultural Society that leads the way. The group that set up the Society in 1804 – meeting in a room above Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly – included John Wedgwood, son of Josiah and uncle of Charles Darwin, and the great botanist and discoverer Sir Joseph Banks, by then middle-aged, his circumnavigation of the globe with Captain Cook a distant memory. By 1822 the Society had acquired thirty-three acres at Chiswick on which to establish its own experimental garden. It also set about the dispatch of gardener-collectors around the globe, most significantly to China after 1842, when the treaty ending the Opium Wars between Britain and China meant that the country was at last re-opened to foreigners. Businesslike and entrepreneurial from the outset, the Society would come to dominate the gardening world as the Royal Horticultural Society and, nearly 200 years later, it successfully brings much of central London's traffic to a standstill for the Chelsea Flower Show.
The Horticultural Society sent Robert Fortune to China in 1842 at the suggestion of John Reeves. The existing system of consigning plants back to England in the frequently unreliable hands of tea-clipper captains was unsatisfactory. On a six-month voyage busy seamen had more pressing matters on their minds than watering plants and protecting them against the weather. More plants perished than arrived safely. Clearly, the supervision of skilled gardeners was required. Fortune was a thirty-year-old Scotsman who had recently got the job of superintendent of hothouses at the Society's Chiswick site. He was offered the chance of the China venture and seized it, despite the fact that he had no experience of either voyaging or collecting, and despite the Society's conditions of employment, which were both stringent and miserly. He was to spend a year collecting, with the emphasis on hardy plants and with an eye out in particular for blue peonies and yellow camellias, among other exotica. All that he gathered was to be the property of the Society, though he might acquire some specimens for his own use so long as this was not at the expense of the Society's time. Lest he should run into any difficulties, he was provided with firearms – a fowling piece and pistols – though it had been initially decided that a life-preserver (a lead-weighted stick) would be quite adequate. He would be paid £100 per annum and when he asked for a rise a year later he was told that ‘the mere pecuniary returns of your mission ought to be but a secondary co
nsideration to you’.
In the event, Fortune nearly died in the cause of the blue peony (which he never did find, and nor has anyone else) and the firearms proved to be essential baggage. One particularly demanding episode of his travels found him going upriver in a junk which came under attack from five pirate junks, energetically firing broadsides. Fortune coolly held his fire until the pirates came within twenty yards and then let fly (with the fowling piece, one supposes), to devastating effect. He had to repeat this manoeuvre several times more before finally shaking off the enemy. And all this while suffering from a high fever.
There were many further tribulations. He was mugged by angry crowds – foreigners were anathema in China. He barely survived a perilous crossing to the Chusan Islands. He was robbed, mobbed and endured appalling conditions of travel. In one remote spot he very nearly fell into a pit for catching wild boar, from which he would not have been able to extricate himself, thus almost repeating the awful fate of David Douglas, his compatriot collector, who in Hawaii ten years earlier had fallen into a pit and been trampled to death by a wild bullock already trapped there.
So much for plant-collecting as a genteel and leisurely pastime. The great collectors seem to have shared qualities of youth, tenacity and vigour, along with horticultural skills. Fortune brought 250 plants back from his first Chinese trip, of which a high number survived. He was one of the first collectors to be equipped with Wardian cases, glazed boxes in which plants were kept moist by their own expiration. English gardens owe to him such essential furnishings as winter-flowering jasmine, forsythia (a mixed blessing, given that pervasive yellow rash in spring), weigela, Viburnum plicatum and a host of camellias, tree peonies and rhododendrons. All of these carry an invisible freight of another time and another place – mid nineteenth-century China, mysterious, implacable, impenetrable. Rivers hurtle through huge tree-lined gorges. Robert Fortune, wearing Chinese disguise, shares a packed junk with flea-ridden passengers.
In high summer the Golsoncott rose garden was heady with the scent of regale lilies – great stands of them against the terrace wall, with Erigeron karvinskianus sparkling away as a backdrop. Lilium regale is another native of China, collected by Ernest Wilson at the end of the century. Where Fortune is the early Victorian derring-do explorer, Wilson is the robust Edwardian gentleman traveller. By the time he got to China – aged twenty-three, in 1899 – conditions had improved. He was able to maintain good relations with the Chinese, had no need to resort to disguise, and moved around with an entourage of twenty-five to thirty coolies and two sedan chairs (essential as an indication of status). Nevertheless, the price paid for L. regale was high. In 1910, on his fourth trip to China, Wilson travelled to the Min Valley, in the heart of the country, a place of violent climatic extremes, where the lily flourished ‘not in twos or threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands… for a brief season this Lily transforms a lonely, semi-desert region into a veritable fairyland’. He planned to mark out the site of 6,000 bulbs, to be lifted later in the year, and to this end was negotiating a narrow trail, carried in his sedan chair. Suddenly, there was a rock fall from the precipice above. Wilson leapt from the chair, which was struck by a boulder and sent hurtling down to the river below. He ran for the shelter of an overhanging cliff, where his chair-bearers were already huddled, but failed to make it before he was hit and felled by rocks. His leg was broken in two places. In great pain, he instructed his bearers to make a splint from his camera tripod. During the course of this exercise, a train of mules appeared; since it was impossible to put them into reverse, they had to step over the prostrate Wilson, one by one: ‘Then it was that I realized the size of the mule's hoof.’ The regale lily, too, takes on a further resonance.
On this trip, Wilson had been sponsored by Professor Sargent of Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, but his first Chinese venture had been the project of Sir Harry Veitch, of the famous Veitch Nurseries at Coombe Wood. Central to Wilson's brief was the search for Davidia involucrata – the handkerchief tree. So many of these expeditions are in pursuit of some botanical holy grail – blue peonies, blue poppies, yellow camellias, white wisteria, the monkey-puzzle tree. Some were found – unfortunately, in the case of the monkey-puzzle, one may think – others never were. The twenty-three-year-old Wilson set out on the davidia hunt armed with a sketch map covering 20,000 square miles, on which was marked the site of a tree spotted some years earlier by a Scottish medical officer posted to the interior. Amazingly, Wilson located it – but reduced to a stump, having been cut down for the building of a house. But his luck turned and soon after he found many hundreds of specimens and was able to secure seeds which were successfully germinated at the Veitch Nurseries. The davidia became one of the gardening trophies of the early twentieth century.
Robert Fortune had introduced 190 species and varieties, the products of his nineteen years of oriental travel. On his later voyages he had shaken off the yoke of the Horticultural Society and was collecting on the side in the service of the East India Company, his principal interest being tea plants. Ernest Wilson eclipses him by a long way, chalking up over 1,000 species: Clematis armandii, Acer griseum, Viburnum davidii, Magnolia sinensis, Clematis montana, rhododendrons, lilies, peonies, roses, primulas… He has furnished the gardens of the nation.
Significantly, it is commercial enterprise that lies behind Wilson's productivity. By the time Sir Harry Veitch targeted the young trainee the Veitch dynasty and their nurseries had dominated British horticulture for nearly a century, regularly employing and dispatching trained plant collectors around the world. They had competitors, but were undoubted market leaders until the demise of the firm. Their handsome catalogues are a chart to the contents of Victorian and Edwardian gardens.
The concept of the garden is ancient and compelling – the recognition that nature is beautiful but to be manipulated, that it can benefit from human intervention. Gardening is probably the most widespread form of creativity – subject of course to the winds of fashion and the dictates of commerce – a way in which innumerable people display their particular taste and choice. Gardening is a private and personal activity, but gardens can be public, portentous and expressions of social standing in the same way as architecture. Lancelot Brown's wholesale reconstructions of landscape in the eighteenth century are a far cry from the individualities of the twentieth-century back garden, but there is a flicker of the same spirit at work – the notion that the status quo might be improved upon. But equally as powerful as someone's contribution is the invisible baggage that any garden carries, all those directives from elsewhere. What we plant and how we plant it are up to us, but much has already been decided, not just by soil and climate, but by what has been done at other times, by people of whom we know little or nothing.
Below the Golsoncott veranda and above the rose garden were two long beds. Here, my grandmother clung to the outdated practice of bedding out. These were the dahlia gardens: tall, staked cactus dahlias at the back, the smaller free-flowering varieties in front, both single and pom-pom. I doubt if she had ever heard of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, and Mexico was not high on her agenda of interests, but it is from there that Humboldt sent back dahlia seed in 1804. And Mexico fingered her garden again a few paces on, as you went through the low wrought-iron gate at the end of the dahlia-border path and down the little flight of steps on to the terrace between the canal garden, hidden behind its high yew hedges, and the further steps down on to the tennis lawn. Nearby were huge old choisya bushes, their leaves smelling of orange when you crushed them, smothered in white flowers in spring.
Turning your back on the choisya bushes, you looked down into the Japanese-maple garden, an enclosed grassy area divided from the rose garden by another wrought-iron gate and shaded by several fine acers planted when the garden was laid out. I don't know which species these were but I remember one with leaves pouring to the ground, like a feathered scarlet mantle, and the effect of sunlight sifting down thro
ugh a canopy of green, bronze and gold. Both Fortune and Wilson were active in Japan as well as in China. Japanese flora was as renowned as that of China and equally inaccessible for centuries, but by the first half of the nineteenth century Japanese plants were filtering back to Europe – bamboos, lilies, azaleas, camellias and hydrangeas (including H. paniculata, a particular pride and joy of my grandmother's amid her great sweep of hydrangeas in front of the house). Wilson went to Japan with the collection of cherries as his main objective, but it is to Sir James Veitch – last of the nurseries dynasty – that we owe the (mixed) blessing of the omnipresent double-flowered cherries that send a pink tide across every suburb in spring. Like the forsythia, they can be too much with us.
Once through the maple garden, the grass terrace below the rose garden was to your left, reaching away to the cedar summer house fronted by huge bushes of old English lavender (something native, at last), with climbing and rambling roses all over the wall. To the right was the high hedge around the tennis lawn and in front was the lawn itself, sloping gently down to the ha-ha. The cedar of Lebanon dominated here. Obvious enough where that comes from, and in fact it has a long history in this country, listed in Sir Thomas Hanmer's Garden Book of 1659, though it may not have been widely known until later. This magnificent tree was a William Robinson favourite, ‘perhaps the finest evergreen tree ever brought to our country and as hardy as our own trees. If we use evergreen trees they ought to be the noblest and the hardiest.’ He advocated planting cedars ‘massed in groups’, as they grow in their native land, thus protected against wind. A nice idea but one that supposes a considerable acreage – I can see why my grandmother restricted herself to a single specimen, which occupied much of the lawn in its prime. Visiting children traditionally climbed it, and equally traditionally got stuck and had to be rescued with ladders.