Now, I'm a gardener. In the kind of places I work, I'm responsible for preserving relics of class oppression, and these relics continue to be managed on the basis of the old order, the old-boy network, where the people who still live in these places are intimately connected with the highest management responsible for preserving them by virtue of old school connections. Yet this is so ingrained in the fabric of our society as to fail to excite any curiosity.
Well, I know about public schools, having spent the most miserable years of my life in one, after unwittingly receiving an unwanted scholarship to attend one, on account of brains, not moneyed birthright. I know how the system works. I've been at the receiving end of it, and I didn't like it.
So what was I doing here, upholding it? The answer is, I wasn't. I was a fly in their ointment. I've already told you that I refused right from the start to consider employment in private service. I've outlined my commitment to public parks. After all, I started my career in one of the most important of all, Birkenhead Park. If you don't know why it was important, look it up. What I was doing here was an extension of that. The house was no longer in private ownership. It was being held for the benefit of the nation. That was my undertaking - to get more people interested, to make it more accessible, and I was doing it against an undercurrent of old-boy alliances. The way to get there was through gardening. This was an interest that spanned all classes and all abilities. I had an access point and something to share. I wouldn't say I was political, but in my small way, I was fighting elitism, injustice.
I once tried to tell a member of the management board that what the property needed was to be free from the restrictions demanded by occupancy, with its need to accommodate the minority privacy requirements of private individuals, and that we ought to be promoting greater public access. That was, after all, the reason the last owner had left it to us in the first place. He was a generous man with no descendants. He wanted to share his legacy. The illustrious manager laughed at me and said 'it will never happen'. But it did, and we made it happen. We grew the property, till it outgrew my ability to cope with all the demands of both the garden and the daily management, and the occupants moved out. They left one week after I moved on to pastures new, and the property was at last able to be what it needed to be - a public asset. We had got it there. And my vow at the start not to let myself be driven out by the situation had been vindicated.
But much of that lay in the future. What of my first months in the job? There was still a lot of groundwork that we did before the house and gardens opened in April for my first visitor season. Some of that work was not too exciting visually. Like the concrete compost area we had constructed. £1700 I think it cost, and was built by two guys loading a small mixer by hand. No lorryloads for us. Here is a picture of the finished article:
It had two large bays, one for us to make our own product, and one that would hold two 40 cubic metre loads of mushroom compost for mulching.
We had replanted the rose bed as described yesterday, and in addition I had also been provided with a plan for the replanting of two failed beds on the south side of the garden. Old photographs show this as a fairly unsuccessful area in terms of colour and growth. A lot of plants had died out over the years and it was a hotch-potch of ill-matched hues. This next photo goes back to 1980, and doesn't look too bad in colour terms, if a little uninspired, but there are already considerable bare patches and a distinct lack of height:
As in my previous job, I had been given a plan to work to, and it had been drawn up by the same gardens adviser I had worked with for a different authority nearly five hundred miles away in my first Head Gardener role. We had both come south in search of the big bucks. Some hopes. We were gardeners. This was the last plan I was ever required to work to. The first job was to double dig and manure the area, two matching rectangles either side of the central staircase:
These two pictures show the early stages of the replanting. The idea was to go for a subtle scheme of silvers , pinks, purples and lime greens, to update, yet tie in with the overall pastel tones of the garden (more on that tomorrow). The effect in the first summer was like this, and looked ok, but young and immature:
By the following year it had grown to this:
Unfortunately, it was becoming clear that the cold, wet soil was not helping the plants that had been chosen, and over a period we began to lose many of the silver-foliaged plants and the substantial selection of Alliums began to rot off each winter. We gradually tweaked the planting over the next few years, but somehow it never looked quite as full as I would have liked. Here it is, five years on:
Ten years on there had been little progress, except in a backwards direction:
It was at this point that I had a change of heart, and decided that if the long-term plantings struggled with the conditions, perhaps it was time to treat the area differently and use more tender plants that we would either lift or propagate for the following year, rather than suffocating or drowning plants in the heavy, cold soil each winter. I began to build up a collection of tender Salvias which we grew in this area from then on. The first season it looked like this:
To my mind this was a considerable improvement, giving a much fuller impression. It also greatly increased the plant interest for the visitors, and gave us a reputation for having a superb late-season display, with these areas flowering well into late October with their plantings of Salvias and Dahlias. Tomorrow I will put the use of these plants into the context of an essentially pastel garden.
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