28 May 2015
Cultivated Islands
by R J Thomas
The pavilions are coming down in front of the Royal Chelsea Hospital, and the display gardens on which so much time (and money) was spent and which looked so tastefully permanent have been loaded back on trucks to return to all corners of the Kingdom. The 2015 Chelsea Flower Show is over and has been, as it always is, a major success. What Royal Ascot is to horseracing and the Cup Final at Wembley to football, the Chelsea Flower Show is to gardening, the nation’s favourite pastime.
If aliens should land in search of ideas for beautifying a distant planet, they would be very well advised to arrive in the week of the Chelsea Flower Show. Not only does the weather almost invariably turn out magnificently that week, but once they have staggered away from the gates of the Royal Hospital satiated with blooms and perfumes and with agonisingly sore feet, they will be able to make a tour of the gardens of the British Isles certain in the knowledge that most gardens are then at their best. A little early for the roses perhaps, and certainly so for the municipal style of planting (though somehow it seems unlikely that aliens would really go for quite so much regimentation), but ideal for the wild spring gardens which are perhaps the finest example of horticulture to be found in the British Isles.
For this we have to thank several generations of great Victorian gardeners – not just those who dug and pruned and manured but also those who dreamed and planned and financed. Many of our greatest gardens were begun in the second half of the C19th, when the great fortunes then been made and the early plant hunting expeditions on the edge of empire came together. The greatest centre of all the gardening activity was in Cornwall, with a micro climate which was perfect for Himalayan plants, and newly accessible through the Great Western Railway. And the best place to be in Cornwall was on the Helford River or in one of the deep river valleys nearby, where that warm wet summer climate created enormous plant fecundity but the deep valleys offered frost free shelter from the winter gales.
One hundred and fifty years later many of these gardens are at their peak. The plants which the plant hunters brought back and propagated have grown to great sizes, and the shelter belts of exotic and native trees are now enormous. In fact, the gardens are beginning to face the fact that plants, like all things, have a life span, and that many of the plants and especially the trees in these extraordinary gardens are nearing the end of their lives.
Some gardens are in private ownership, some still in the possession of the descendants of their original owners such as the Williams at Caerhays (five generations of camellia breeders extraordinaire), others rescued by new owners such as that of Trebah by Tony Hibbert, a former wine merchant; and a very large group belong to the National Trust which runs them in its inimitable style.
If it is all that time permits, go and see three. Three with a remarkable common heritage but with very different approaches to maintaining a great garden in the C21st. In the mid C19th the Fox family of Falmouth – Quakers, bankers, merchants, ship owners – produced three brothers who had an enormous passion for gardening. They bought three small estates, Glendurgan, Trebah, and Penjerrick, on the Helford River, two adjoining and the third nearby, each with its deep valley, the first two reaching down to the sea, Penjerrick higher up but with views across the Channel. They became, over a hundred years, amongst the most famous gardens in Britain, noted for their fine plants and breeding of new cultivars. Then the Second World War and high taxation seemed to spell the end, and each of them suffered the inevitable results of tight budgets and reduced maintenance. Trebah was sold; Glendurgan given to the National Trust; Penjerrick remaining owned and managed by Fox descendants but almost forgotten.
Then in the 1980’s, with a new spirit around in Britain and with easier money for the first time for forty years, a revival began. Tony Hibbert bought Trebah for his retirement and found to his surprise that he was in possession of one of the most important gardens in England. A new passion for gardening took him, and over thirty years he carried out one of the most impressive restorations of any great garden, although and inevitably with a commercialisation that the Fox’s would perhaps have frowned on but hopefully guarantees the long term future of the garden.
At Glendurgan next door the National Trust is also undertaking a long-term renewal of the garden, and have built a new shop, a tea room, and a much larger car park. Glendurgan now is a major show piece for the Trust and benefits enormously in visitor numbers from the huge marketing budget which the Trust deploys in Cornwall.
And Penjerrick? If you seek the spirit of the Fox’s and of all those great planter-gardeners of the C19th right across Britain, go to Penjerrick. It has no tea room, no shop, no plant nursery, not even a car park or attendant. There is just an honesty box for the grateful visitor to slip his appreciation into. But it is a magnificent wild garden, overgrown, half lost, huge rare plants hanging over and indeed into ponds and lakes, the paths part gravel and mostly mud, with its shrubs and trees all left to grow as they would have done naturally had they been in some wild Himalayan valley. Indeed, it is a wild Himalayan valley, just happening to be in Cornwall. Put on your boots, take a flask of coffee, enter through the concealed gate, and for a glorious afternoon be lost in paradise.
