Mario Bautista
Gardens never stand still. By now, gardeners who began during the lockdowns in 2020 will have learnt this truth. Older gardeners live with it. While time passes, we go with the flow or intervene to reshape it. As we are washed down the river of time, I recommend reshaping. I have just visited a fascinating example.
Up in Shropshire, near Market Drayton, the 4-acre garden at Wollerton Old Hall attracts thousands of visitors yearly for its subtle planting and thoughtful design. It has even been honoured with a rose, Wollerton Old Hall, named by David Austin, a great admirer. Its plans and planting are the work of Lesley Jenkins, an artist and art teacher in her professional life. For more than 40 years, she has been assisted by her husband John, whose career included being a health and safety inspector in factories.
In the early 1980s they embarked on transforming a field into a plan of colour-themed enclosures, or garden “rooms” in the then-fashionable style. The rooms are linked by longer vistas, some of them straight views through, others across each “room”: Lesley planned them from the house’s upper windows. Many of these rooms, 15 in all, were planted with flowers of selected colours, but a main avenue, placed off centre, remained mainly green, a passage with clipped trees.
The style has won Wollerton many accolades, but it was not devised for big parties of visitors, each up to 40 people at a time. Like the intimacy of the great garden at Sissinghurst, Wollerton’s pattern of rooms, much visited, has become a victim of its fame and success.
When I last visited, an important room focused on four tall perpendicular yew trees. It looked inwards, not outwards, accentuated by the placing of inward-facing garden seats. Its planting centred on blue and yellow flowers, but on entering it, I felt shut in.
Of course, Lesley had already grasped the problem. Seven decades of life and three challenging bouts of ill health have not deterred her from changing the plants and design this spring. When I received an invitation to inaugurate her scheme, I seized the chance. How would her eye have reshaped the space in only four months?
Her new plan opens up the space and returns its planting to whites and greens, her original scheme for it. The yews are still central and two fine old trees, one a halesia, or white-flowered snowdrop tree, the other a big flowering cherry, Prunus Shirotae, stand out more effectively in the space’s two main boundaries.
A garden is both a project and a process. Garden designers are most attracted to a garden as a project, whereas gardeners are most concerned with it as a developing process, in which one idea suggests another in ways that cannot be defined on a plan. The new space at Wollerton is project and process at once.
To realise it, Lesley worked with an assistant designer, someone, however, who had absorbed her style and wishes. Philip Smith (hello@pipsmith.co.uk) was head gardener at Wollerton for five years until he left to start his own business as a landscaper in 2020. He talked me through the formal ground plan and its restful squares and rectangles: they set off the clever planting among gravel edged with granite setts and paving stones of Welsh limestone. Like the best plans, this one flows easily without obtruding. I thought how good a use Smith would make of other enclosed spaces, especially town gardens, as he is unusual in bringing years of practical skill as a working gardener to a meticulous eye for proportion and shapes.
At Wollerton in August, I have previously admired a section planted with fiery reds, yellows and oranges. The soil in the garden is surprisingly sandy, but even after a dry fortnight this virtuoso grouping of hot colours was again at its best. I noted some of the special ingredients in order to fire you up: dark red dahlia Sam Hopkins, orange red Helenium Sahin’s Early Flowerer and an unusual heliopsis, whose little sunflowers of orange and red are Bleeding Heart, a star of the show that I have taken home as a rooted cutting and will use in a patch in my own border. Dark red and yellow blended daylilies and fiery red alstroemerias are among the plants that widen the hot palette.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, how would the new scheme of white and green turn out? In a rectangular bed by its entrance, flowers with a blue shade have been included, especially an excellent newish agapanthus called Fireworks: its lily-like flowers combine a blue base with white petals. It is hardy to at least -10C. In May I planted Agapanthus Twister, similar but less hardy. My Twister is half the size of Wollerton’s finer Fireworks, which is already set with several heads of flower. A new scheme can benefit from new soil, making plants outperform mine.
Down one side of the new space, a flower bed combines green grassy hakenochloa with a well-chosen hydrangea, the white-flowered paniculata Unique. This fine variety has never caught on widely in Britain but it is hardy and most impressive. Its pointed panicles of white flowers and florets are wide and long. It originated from the great Belgian arboretum of the de Belder family in the 1950s. I hope Wollerton’s use of it revives its fame.
On tall metal frames, a notable white clematis left me battling to name it. Its flowers are purer and bigger than those on the usual white viticella alba variety. It is Clematis Forever Friends, whose starry flowers have pinkish anthers at the centre. Thorncroft, the gold medal-winning specialist, now based near Evesham, helped its Dutch breeder to introduce it to England and change its name for the new market. Friends Forever is a superb plant, hardy and long flowering. It is plainly suited to life on a tall metal frame, as Wollerton’s clever use of it exemplifies. I want it too.
Beneath its frames, the plan had been to use white Dahlia Ashpire Marie, but slugs ruined the young plants in spring. A white-flowered lavender is substituting for them. In another corner of the design, my beloved Philadelphus Belle Etoile is growing above leathery green leaves of Bergenia Bressingham White, a fine choice with white flowers in spring. In another pair of rectangular beds, Hydrangea Lanarth White is set off by the green leaves of Hosta Devon Green, a glossy variety, and tall white Agapanthus albus. Down the other long wall of the design, bushes of Rose Desdemona are mixed with yet more clematis, Iris White City and white hardy geraniums. The floweriness is toned down by low groups of green box.
The new design opens this space outwards, as intended. White and green are a calm combination, befitting Lesley Jenkins’ eye as a painter. They show up beautifully on a summer evening but they are not to be confused with dabs from a paint tube. Gardens, ever changing, are an art form, but they lack paint’s stability and obedience.
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