Last week I completed a placement at Gravetye Manor,
the home and garden of William Robinson near to East Grinstead in West Sussex. William Robinson was an incorrigible old stickler
infamous for starting trouble and ranting on about his specific tastes and
interests, such as with the pruning of holly trees; ‘Men who trim with shears
or knife so fine a tree as holly are dead to beauty of form, and cannot surely
have seen how fine in form old holly trees are’, he once trumpeted! This kind
of passion for the wild, natural form typified an outspoken man who lived by a
personal motto to ‘love flowers and everything that grows’, and who was rallying
against the dreary and contrived system of Victorian bedding. Robinson peered
into the pool of Victorian gardening and recognised that nothing worthwhile could
possibly be landed in such stagnant waters; he pooh-poohed the system of
bedding out tender plants and pursued his target with a revolutionary zeal! One
of his most legendary and well-known tales occurred when Robinson was 22 and
working as foreman at the Ballykilcavan estate in Ireland. Our hero was distinctly
unhappy working at this garden, and the situation climaxed one winter’s day with
a quarrel between himself and his gaffer. Legend has it that Robinson resigned
his position that same evening by fleeing on foot to Dublin, but not before
letting out the fires of the hothouse boilers to allow bench after bench of
tender plants to perish in the frost! Bedding plants were his rallying cry but
Robinson was against all of the vulgarities of Victorian gardening. He fought
desperately to bring about a shift to a more natural approach, taking the
cottage garden as his muse; ‘there is nothing prettier than the English cottage
garden, and they often teach lessons that ‘great’ gardeners should learn’. Robinson’s
ideas were radical for the time, but he established them through his books and
through the gardening periodicals and journals he founded and edited; experimenting
with those same ideas in his garden at Gravetye. Alpine gardening, the
herbaceous border, the shrub garden and woodland gardens all owe their
popularisation to Robinson. The idea of ‘wild’ gardening was pioneered by him,
using natural groupings of plants and hardy perennials in place of carpet
bedding. ‘Have no patience with bare ground’, he once said, and he filled the
ground at Gravetye with hardy bulbs, perennials and climbers; both native and
non-native. Robinson’s activities and perseverance at the end of the 1800s
opened the door for a new style of gardening that still prevails today, with practitioners
such as Major Johnston at Hidcote taking up the mantle at the turn of the
century. Lawrence
was celebrated by the likes of Vita Sackville-West and others that followed him
for mastering a style of natural and informal planting, but this was a method of gardening made possible and acceptable by the work of W. Robinson.
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| The original entrance to the house peers out over the
Alpine Meadow, which slopes away to the south and provides a haven for insects
and grass snakes |
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| Scenes of abundance to behold in the Flower Garden!
The whole garden slopes to the south, so here where it has been levelled the
garden ends with a terrace and a ten foot drop to where the Alpine Meadow
begins |
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| ‘Have no patience with bare ground!’ The wooden arbour
to the rear was recently restored, and will eventually be clothed in Wisteria |
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| Some detail in the Flower Garden, with the pink fluff
of Sanguisorba obtusa, the Larkspur; Consolida ‘Sublime Azure Blue’ and
floating above the heads of Cynara cardunculus |
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| By the manor the golden spray of Stipa gigantea and
the glorious ivory white spires of Verbascum ‘Spica’ |
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| Massed planting, with the umbel and foliage plant Selinum
wallichianum, the shocking pink of Lychnis coronaria and more spires of
Verbascum ‘Spica’ |
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| The prominence of long grass areas in the garden mean
all of the meadow butterflies come crashing in, such as this here Gatekeeper
catching the last of the evening rays on a Cardoon leaf |
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| Frothy umbels of Ammi majus, the familiar beauty of
Verbena bonariensis, and splashes of pink and white from Nicotiana mutabilis |
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| Echinacea purpurea ‘Prairie Splendor’ |
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| Plectranthus argentatus, a salvia-looking blighter that
is definitely worthy of further investigation |
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| Several good Dahlias were on show; this is D. ‘Magenta
Star’ |
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| The green patch at the centre is newly planted (August)
Cosmos bipinnatus ‘Candy Stripe’ which has been utilised to revive an area
that had ‘gone over’, and will now flower until the frosts in late-October or possibly
November. This method of replanting is applied freely throughout the Flower Garden,
ensuring consistent colour and an ever-changing display |
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| Umbellifers play a large role in the planting, from
the flat-heads of the Fennel, Foenicium vulgare, to the more rounded flowers of
the large Angelica archangelica |
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| Clambering upon Robinson’s porch, the magnificent Clematis
‘Alba Luxurians’ |
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| An important climber in this garden; Clematis texensis
‘Gravetye Beauty’, named by Old Bill himself in 1914 |
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| A pleasing stand of Helenium ‘Sahin's Early Flowerer’,
with the white speckles of Erigeron annua behind. The white wispy chap to the
left is in the pea family but currently unknown (familiar to anybody? calling all cars), but the
umbellifer surrounding it is more of the Selinum wallichianum |
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| In the Kitchen Garden one of the greatest sights of
the summer; Verbascum olympicum (smothered in honey bees) |
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| A one acre walled Kitchen Garden provides food and
flowers for the house, and naturally the cut flower patch is a thing of great
beauty! Lupinus regalis ‘Morello Cherry’ has been dead-headed rigorously so
continues in full flower all the way to August. The edging is provided by the
herb Pot Marjoram, Origanum vulgare, which extends for several metres and was
covered in insect friends |
More from Gravetye to follow!
