Every year we open the garden to a small number of organised tour groups, some of which come from as far afield as Australia, Argentina and the United States. These visits must be carefully planned and orchestrated. We have precious little on-site parking and our single track lane, which is winding and high-sided, wends precipitously downhill from the main road above us. Last year the transport provider for a tour operator failed to heed our carefully worded advice regarding access and managed to wedge a 48 seater coach on the way down. It was a hot July day and the visitors had to clamber through the hedges to get out of the bus. The driver was red in the face with anger at having to scrape the bus out of its jam and then continue a further hair-raising two miles down the lane before reaching a more suitable road. Our policy now is to encourage groups to first pay a visit to Derry Watkins’ Special Plants Nursery, a crow’s flight away, and then ferry visitors down here in people carriers. A visit to Derry’s wonderful nursery never disappoints and is a win-win for everybody.
Sharing the garden in this limited way feels important to us, now that our efforts are beginning to chime. This is a place that we have evolved over time. We have deliberately not rushed and the slow burn, the importance of taking time to look before acting, has allowed us to gauge the right moves and measure our resources and energies. It took six years here before we started the garden proper. Repairing hedges, planting orchards, woodland and field trees and oversowing the pastures to convert them to meadow all took precedence. The trial garden I put in place to test what worked here during that time was a luxury in many ways and certainly not something I could do for a client, but it allowed me to see what did well here and what felt right and in context.
The setting is everything here and the aim of the garden and how we are managing the land is all about the betterment of the place. For the biodiversity of both the flora and the fauna that share the hillside with us and for the joy in nurturing what were once heavily grazed fields back into something richer and more dynamic. It is good to share the journey and this on-going experiment with people. The things that have worked and the things that haven’t and the test bed of understanding how to adapt to a place and make what you do work for you.
Preparing for the visits requires a push which gets us to a place that acts as a measure. It is an aspiration for how good the garden can be, but not necessarily how it really is day to day, with its woollier edges, but the uplift is always a good thing to head for, like cramming for an exam you really want to pass. In the run up, we look harder at the holes in the beds and why they have developed and make the extra effort to plug the gaps with pot grown annuals and last minute additions. We will be rewarded later in the summer for the half hour tying in the sweet peas so that they soar to the tops of their supports rather than slump like socks around ankles.
We usually have four or five visits a year and this week Jimi Blake’s tour of the West Country was our first of the season. Twenty eight people arrived in the afternoon straight from Bristol airport (no time to stop at Special Plants), the coach having parked in the layby on the main road above us. The fifteen minute walk down the hill is good to provide context, off the windy high ground and down into the comparative shelter of our sun-drenched hollow. The first lesson in understanding why our land grows what it does and how we are hunkered into the hillside.
I always find it grounding to have to explain myself and to look at what we have done here through other people’s eyes and not just mine, which mostly see what needs doing. I introduce the place by talking about how we have swept the meadows up to the garden before leading the group in single file through the orchids that have begun to naturalise in the meadow above the house. We threw down strewings from Great Dixter here that I like to think are where these orchids came from, but even those that may have seeded in on the wind are here because we have fostered the conditions they need to thrive. They have returned to land that was grazed hard by cattle and are now allowed to seed before a late hay cut in August, not the more usual mid-July cut that the farmers favour for hay. I explain the beneficial contribution of the yellow rattle in the meadows and its parasitic effect on the grasses, which creates space for the floral element in the sward. It is interesting with every year that goes by how much better the meadows become and also how much more informed the visitors are about their importance and protection.
Several of the group have visited before from Ireland and, being in Jimi’s party, they were all keen plantspeople and hands on gardeners, real enthuisiasts armed with notebooks and phones and not afraid to ask questions, so there was plenty of opportunity to go deep into whys and wherefores and to show them the newly developing parts of the garden. The young sand garden, in its first and second summer after planting, and the banks above it which are still only partly planted. Garden people understand a piece of bare ground, its raw potential and the fact that a garden is always evolving. Different every year and in this case extended as far as I dare without making a big rod for my own back. People were amused by my explanation of the stock fence that surrounds the garden, that it is as much a necessity to keep the sheep out as it is me from claiming more ground.
Looking at gardens is a good education, and it is always encouraging to hear why you may have found a niche for something that other people are struggling with. Conversely, you may discover that you will have to watch a newcomer, which someone else has more experience of and comes with an educated warning. So, we learn both ways and always finish our days with the feeling that we are on the right track and not as obsessed as we worry we might be. And that the Linum narbonense, which this week is the star of the show, has lifted everyone’s spirits as much as it has ours.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 8 June 2024
