I went to see a Yellow Book open garden today, and catch up with a friend from my Writtle days. She lives in a small village outside Sudbury, another of those spread out settlements where there doesn't seem to be a there when you get there, and the open garden was just down the lane from her house. I've driven past it many times on the way to visit her, and wondered what was going on behind the elegant walls being painstakingly and expensively repaired, and the new fences, so when I saw that it was opening for the NGS I was curious to go.
It turned out to be a testament to how much can be achieved in a decade, given the will and the money. A display in one of several rather smart garden buildings outlined the development of the current garden. The owners have been there since 2005, and as well as sorting out the garden had to demolish and substantially rebuild most of the house, which turned out to be suffering from incurable subsidence.
I was probably not concentrating quite as much as I should have been, because my friend and I were catching up with getting on for a year's worth of news, and it was raining quite a lot, so I am not so precise as I should have been about the footprint of the demolished house, and how it related to the current walled garden. Still, there was a walled garden, with raised vegetable beds demonstrating how vegetables should be done, and a handsome greenhouse used entirely for display with pots of geraniums, succulents and tender bulbs. I'd been wondering how to support protective mesh over our beds, and imagining having to build frames, but the solution in this garden was to knock stakes in fairly close together then drape the mesh over, weighting the edges down with plenty of bricks. Given how long it took me to mend the woodshed door, I'd sooner not have to make frames unless I had to, and the matrix of stakes method had the advantage that I could use any old stakes we had lying around, rather than having to buy wood specially, so I filed that idea away for future reference.
Some of the walls were covered with climbing roses that were smothered in flowers. We must have caught them at their absolute peak. The bog plantings around the series of ponds were looking pretty good as well. Some of the other plantings still needed time to mature, for shrubs to grow up and the owner to do the last stage of tweaking and adjusting that raises schemes from the competent to the superlative, but they had already done a remarkable amount in ten years. Fullers Mill at West Stow, a privately created garden I admire immensely, had been over forty years in the making when I saw it, so ten years is merely the starting phase.
The garden had come with two great natural advantages that might have provided the new owners with some consolation for discovering that most of the house they had just bought was unsalvageable. One was the presence of some good, really large, mature trees. I know that Capability Brown moved full sized oaks on occasion, but the best one can realistically hope for nowadays, even if money is no object, is to buy heavy standards from a specialist like Barcham Trees. They will get you so far towards an instant garden, if that's what you want, but are no match for the likes of the huge horse chestnut we saw today, with a bole so fat that my friend and I together would have come nowhere near to spanning it with arms outstretched.
Another great natural advantage was the view out over the rolling Suffolk countryside to Sudbury, a moment of pure Gainsborough. The owners had very sensibly kept that side of the site as a meadow, separated from the formal area next to the house by traditional park style railings, with the new specimen shrub plantings and borders concentrated on the other side of the house, where they were anyway more sheltered from the wind. Actually, a third natural advantage was the presence of water on site in the form of a string of ponds, assuming the water source was natural. I wished afterwards I'd asked, but I'd have thought they must have been spring fed. It would be a huge volume of water to take out of the mains.
I felt sorry for the owner and all her helpers, getting such rubbish weather. Rain was forecast, which always puts people off, and it did rain, a lot. We went anyway, since neither of us mind rain that much. We've walked around gardens in the rain before now, and we hadn't seen each other for ages. But there weren't many people there, compared to what the owner might have expected on a good day, and it was sad to see the carefully picked posy of flowers on each of the rain drenched and uninhabited tables outside the garden studio where the teas were being served.
We visited the Open Garden first partly because they had a closing time, but afterwards my friend gave me a tour of her own garden, including the small field next to their house that she and her husband ended up buying to prevent any risk of somebody else building a house on it. They have turned the field into a nature reserve, sowing it with a mixture of native grasses and wildlflowers, planting trees, and planting up the gaps in the hedges where Dutch elm disease took its toll. As we walked around I was excited to see a hare, but my friend was quite blase about it. They lived in the field, she said. We certainly don't have any hares living on the lettuce farm, and I was thrilled to see one. I'd have been pleased with the little owl they had in their owl box as well, but I think they are hoping for barn owls next time.
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