First of all, let me tell you that after my weeks of roaming round the place trying to learn the plants, and sitting listening to the boys telling the history of the place, having read the book that describes the project from the beginning, I now knew a thing or two. I hadn't yet fully formulated all the ideas which would be needed to sort the problems out, and to make the property viable, but I now had sufficient background knowledge to make a few educated guesses.
An important thing to understand, and it took me a few years to grasp the extent to which it was true, was that management, right to the very top of the organisation, all had their doubts about the value of the property. It had been received as a legacy, and there was much wrangling and heart-searching required before they reluctantly agreed to accept it. This decision was made largely under pressure from the garden experts, who recognised, hidden beneath the run-down surface, the bones of an extremely well-designed garden and a fine example of its period. Those concerned with historic houses, on the other hand, had grave doubts, because not only was the building not authentic, being a not particularly well built piece of 20th century Georgian, but almost all the contents represented the collection of the last owner, and with a few exceptions did not portray any continuity of family history. Never mind that they constituted a very harmonious assemblage of fine and valuable pieces, all collected with a specific place in mind within the house, and thus formed an artistic as well as erudite whole. The period and style of the objects chosen was quite specific and they worked well together. The whole house had been lived in almost as a museum. This, however, was a time when a policy was starting to form wherein historic buildings were to be shown as lived-in units, hence the decision to take in occupants for this one. This was also supposed to relieve the financial pressure on a property which the pessimists were certain would fail to draw sufficient public interest to stand alone. To my way of viewing the situation, this was to deny the very essence of what the last owner had created, which was a quiet place in which he had lived amongst his carefully arranged furnishings, as if in a showpiece, and not in the chaos of a family home.
Anyway, my opinion was too lowly to have any validity, and I hadn't been around when the decisions had been made, so I had to live with what we had. This turned out to be extremely difficult, and lasted all my fifteen years there.
The low value ascribed to the property also had an effect on its status and funding. The legacy was only accepted on the basis that if it was not possible to make a go of it, it could be resold. In other words, it was taken on as an alienable property, and was definitely not guaranteed to be held in perpetuity for the benefit of the nation. This also involved ring-fencing the budgets. It would have no claim on regional funding, and whatever it made was what would be available to spend. For a property doing well, this was a blessing, because it would not have to share its profits with other poorer performing ones. If it was failing, though, the only way was down, and out. It became clear to me that my appointment was a last chance for the place, and if I failed, it would become a retirement home, or a golf course, both of which had been mooted as possibilities already. I'm not going to keep you in suspense. It was one of my proudest moments when a decade later, early in the new millennium, the house and gardens were declared inalienable, and could not be disposed of without government intervention. This was a direct result of the work of my team in the garden. We had managed to bring about a change in the management stance. I had been working towards this since I first began to understand what was going on.
Back then I was quite dynamic. Over the next couple of days, I shall attempt to show you some of the tasks we began to improve the appearance of the areas close to the house. You have to start somewhere. The first job was fairly simple. We had a bed of 'Iceberg' roses, which was looking rather insignificant. It consisted of two rows of roses underplanted with rampant groundsel. This is an illustration:
The bed can be seen on the right of the photograph. I'm afraid I am rather poor at taking 'befores' whereas I have many 'afters'. You must take my word for it that the general effect was uninspiring in the extreme. It was a narrow tunnel of repetitive white roses, badly weeded, in a starving lawn poorly edged. The first thing I did was to widen the border by only nine inches to allow for a third row of plants to give a fuller effect. We then double-dug and manured the bed and began planting 142 new 'Iceberg' roses:
With an understorey of Diascia rigescens, by the end of the summer, it looked like this:
And this:
Now there is no doubt that the design principles of the garden were sound. The last owner was a scholar with wide knowledge of English gardens and country houses. Indeed he had written authoritative books on both subjects. He had placed his design in his own period, a follow-on from some of the great gardens of the 20th century, and had managed to make an open and welcoming plan for his creation. This was something which not all of the earlier models had achieved, owing to restrictions of land ownership, or fundamentally misanthropic personalities which preferred to make compartments to shut out the outside, rather than welcome it in. Here, the old man had none of these handicaps. He was outgoing and popular locally, and owned almost all the land that could be seen from the house.
So what had gone wrong? Well, I gradually formed an opinion on that, and it became the basis of my philosophy. And that is that when we consider the artistic power of a garden, we focus far too much on the design, and not at all on its maintenance. However, the design is only the blueprint on which the work of art is based. It is a static, unchanging one-off. Then along comes time, accompanied by nature, growth and decay, and it all falls apart. The man who designed the garden did not have the knowledge and experience to factor in the appropriate maintenance to keep his vision functioning in the long term. It outgrew itself and began to die and collapse. Plants competed unfavourably with each other, and the problems weren't spotted till it was too late.
Those observations were the beginning of my new approach to the work. I was slowly coming to the conclusion that art in the garden didn't mean plonking a few sculptures on the lawn, or coming up with a brilliant design. The art was in the maintenance. It needed to be creative, instinctive, responsive. I began to look for ways to step out of the habits of the gardener and treat my workplace as my canvas, my block of stone, my stage. It would take much longer till all this was fully formed, but it was beginning here. Suddenly what I was doing was no longer just a pleasant job. It was truly demanding and stimulating. And endlessly creative.
No comments:
Post a Comment