Godolphin: a Great Garden of 1580? – Steven Desmond

The guest lecturer at the CGT’s 2009 Christmas Lunch ponders over the antecedents of the old garden at Godolphin.

Growing a Career – Jennie Pina

Recipient of a CGT bursary, Jennie Pina describes how her career in horticulture has developed since May 2006.

Cornwall Gardens Trust Website – Peter Fairbank

The CGT’s webmaster records the history of the development of the Trust’s website.

Pencarrow Rounds, Egloshayle – Peter Herring

These notes on a visit made to the Iron Age hillfort early in 2010 make a valuable contribution to the history of Pencarrow and will be added as an Appendix to the CGT record in the Cornwall County Record Office.

The Sculpture Garden at Salena Stamps – Peter Boex

An account of the development of the sculpture garden in Trenear, just outside Helston

Water Features in Cornwall – Sue Pring

The different types of ponds and lakes to be found in Cornwall, with special reference to the Eagle Ponds at Trewithen

Association of Gardens Trusts: Making a Difference – Steffi Shields

A summary of the AGT’s work from its Vice-Chairman

School Reports

Reports from three of the schools supported by the CGT in 2009: Sir James Smith’s School, Camelford (by Claire Hewlett), St Newlyn East Primary School at Trerice, and St Mark’s CE School, Morwenstow (by Alison A. Newton)

Book Reviews

A Weekend in Lincoln – AGT Annual Conference 2009

During the first weekend in September, I attended the annual conference of the AGT hosted by Lincolnshire Gardens Trust.  It was a wonderful, action-packed programme successfully put together by Steffie Shields and her team.

Just under 100 Trust members from all over the country enjoyed lectures by John Harris and David Robinson OBE.  John is Curator Emeritus of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects and is an historian of architecture, gardens and architectural drawings and the author of more than 25 books and catalogues including Design of the English Country House (1985) and No Voice from the Hall, the first volume of his memoirs published in 1998.  He spoke of his experiences whilst making a survey of Lincolnshire country houses for Pevsner in 1959.

David Robinson, a geographer and retired University of Nottingham Resident Tutor is also a former editor of Lincolnshire Life and The Lincolnshire Poacher and author of 22 books on Lincolnshire landscapes, places and people.  He is a Life President of the Joseph Banks Society and spoke with authority and humour on the life of Joseph Banks, one of Lincolnshire’s famous sons.

Another famous son is, of course, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was born in the Somersby Rectory 100 years ago this year.  In his early twenties he became infatuated with Rosa Baring who was living at nearby Harrington Hall.  As a suitor, he was considered socially inferior and his attentions were discouraged.  Luckily, we were able to visit Harrington Hall Garden thought to feature in Tennyson’s poem Maud where we met a Tennyson look-alike (a member of LGT) strolling around the garden – very life-like and quite creepy.

Other visits included Doddington Hall where some members of the group became less focussed on the magnificent gardens and more interested in having their photos taken with ‘The Hairy Bikers’ who were filming a cookery programme on the front lawn.  I confess to holding back from this temptation but I did pose by one of their famous bikes!

On the final day we were privileged to be able to approach the folly which is Harlaxton Manor down the impressive rarely-used main carriage drive, to be entertained by stories of the garden being flooded at Aubourn Hall and a family member canoeing across the garden to a relative’s home nearby, and to enjoy a good tea at Easton Walled Gardens.

Thank you Lincolnshire for a great conference weekend.

NEXT YEAR the Conference moves to the Isle of Wight and takes place over the weekend of 1-3 October.  Visits will include Osborne, Northcourt (a 15-acre EH registered garden surrounding a Jacobean manor house owned by John Harrison, former Treasurer of AGT and organiser of the IofW conference, where some lucky members will be able to stay), and Ventnor Botanic Gardens.  Also on the agenda is Mottistone Manor – an NT property featuring a new garden around a C16 manor, Woodlands Vale – a Victorian coastal property designed by Samuel Teulon, Lake House – a walled garden restoration and Carisbrooke Castle to see the Princess Beatrice garden designed by Chris Beardshaw in 2009 for EH.

This has the potential to be a very interesting weekend.

John Harrison would like to know well in advance if you are thinking of going (no commitment at this stage) so that he can estimate how much accommodation to secure.

More information from John Harrison 01983 740415 or email john@northcourt.info.  These weekends are most enjoyable and everyone is very friendly.  So maybe see you there?

Jean Marcus

When members of the Cornwall Gardens Trust are recording a garden they are frequently required to identify trees and shrubs in that garden.  In order to do this, unless one is a trained horticulturist or botanist, one usually relies on leaf shape, flowers or even fruit. Deciduous specimens are therefore likely to be particularly difficult in wintertime. This book provides an answer to the problem. It relies on a simple key system based on the properties of buds on the bare shoots. Each step of the key is illustrated by simple, but very clear, line drawings; so that following through to the correct solution is easy.  Only 70 different species are detailed, but these are from 18 different families so that an unknown specimen can probably be placed within the right family or genus. Closer identification would require resorting to a more advanced book such as Alan Mitchell’s well known, ‘Guide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe’, or waiting until the summer. However, this book is a very helpful first step along the way. Furthermore, being not too bulky, it is easy to carry with you.

Alison A Newton

Short Books are publishers who specialise in brief biographies.  Nicola Shulman’s life of Reginald Farrer – one of the last of the world’s great plant collectors – may be only 125 pages long but it paints a sympathetic and rounded portrait of this little known contributor to gardening history.

Farrer was not only a plant collector; he had his own alpine nursery and was a novelist (unsuccessful) and a garden writer.  The ‘rage for rock gardening’ grew to a great extent out of Farrer’s books.  It led to an increased demand for hardy plants and influenced the appearance of gardens and the style of garden writing for generations.

Shulman sets her biography of Farrer in the context of gardening at the time Farrer entered it, the start of the 20th century, and the political and social background that affected his plant hunting expeditions.  She includes quotes from his family and contemporaries and finishes with a few examples of horticultural writing that show Farrer’s influence.  There are eight plates, five of which depict plants discovered by Farrer (many more examples are given in the text).

I found this book to be an excellent ‘first stop’ which – despite having only a short bibliography and no index or references – has inspired me to discover more about who and what has influenced the development of gardens.

Shirley Barnes

This delightful book is a miscellany of 38 essays, many of which were written for the American magazine Horticulture.  The author is American himself, lives in London and gardens on the Welsh Marches.  He professes to be ‘no gardener’ but this book gives lie to that, being crammed with gardening insights, hints and knowledge.

Elliott mixes the history of garden plants – common nettles as well as great trees – with the adventures of well- and lesser-known plant hunters and collectors and with stories of his own gardening efforts.  Whilst I found Elliott’s denigration of his own gardening knowledge, which is obviously extensive, often grated on me, his subjects are well researched (he acknowledges his use of the horticultural libraries in London).  He gives the Latin as well as the common names for plants and there’s even a chapter on the history of plant nomenclature.  Elliott endeared himself to me by including a personal memoir about the late Geoff Hamilton amongst stories of the achievements of Reginald Farrer, Pere Delavey and other ‘unusual characters’.  In Retrospect looks at gardening ‘mistakes’, for example the introduction of Rhododendron ponticum, as well as innovations, like Wardian Cases and the discovery of how strawberries are pollinated, that have changed the face of English gardens.

This is a ‘dip into’ book, helped by its index (but I should also have welcomed a full list of references), good for bedtime reading.  At £14.99 hardback (A5 size, 192 pages) and with the paperback due out in autumn 2003, it would make a charming gift for anyone interested in garden history.

Shirley Barnes

In his introduction, Dr Mowl states that ‘Gentlemen  & Players ’ should be read ‘as an attempt to do horticultural justice to the English upper classes’, by evaluating the relative contributions of the patrons and the professional gardeners (respectively the ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ of the title) to the shaping of English Arcadian garden-parks.

Dr Mowl submits, in alternate chapters, that the stimulus for change – from the early 18th-century layout of parterres and terraces to the informality of classical elements in an idealised, picturesque, but artfully ‘natural’ landscape – is to be attributed to cultivated amateurs like John Evelyn, the Temple family at Stowe, Alexander Pope, Lord Burlington, William Shenstone and Richard Payne Knight.  (This reviewer believes that Thomas Pitt, created first Baron Camelford in 1784, belongs to this pantheon. Among other projects, his work for his second cousin Richard, Lord Temple, included the Corinthian and Doric arches in the landscape garden at Stowe, and for Pitt’s own estate in Cornwall, an obelisk and carriage drives around the landscape features at Boconnoc.)

In between the chapters on ‘gentlemen’, Dr Mowl has inserted others to the professional ‘players’: Inigo Jones, William Kent, George London, Henry Wise, ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton. Here he perhaps overstates his case in contending that the latter were ‘blinkered conformists’, whose contributions were mainly confined to importing foreign styles. He does soften his stance in the introduction, where he concedes that ‘there was an interchange between the patrons and the paid, a productive uncertainty and a pulling in two directions’. ‘Gentlemen & Players’ does not purport to be an even-handed, or a complete account of the history of English garden design of the period.  It is, on the other hand, an entertainingly well-written and thoughtfully argued case (with excellent illustrations and a good bibliography) for re-examining our preconceptions.

Tim Mowl unquestionably scores in articulating his enthusiasm for the people and gardens he describes. He points out that in learning about a garden ‘there is still no substitute for the ‘green wellie’ approach, for walking the grounds, not once but often and in every revealing season’. The garden walks in each chapter are both a substitute for real experience and an inducement to tempt readers into repeating them.

Mowl is co-director of the MA programme in garden history in the Department of Art History at Bristol University. He acknowledges Tom Williamson (see the report on the Hengrave Study Day, page 13) and Williamson’s Polite Landscapes (Stroud 1995) as a prime reference in writing his book.  In future this reader will consult Gentlemen & Players and Pevsner before visiting, recording, photographing or otherwise enjoying, a landscape garden of the Georgian period.

Pamela Dodds

With detailed tables listing hundreds of plants, plus diagrams, this book explains how to propagate by means of seed, cuttings and division and which methods are best for which plant.  I found it easy to follow without being condescending and it has already saved me much more than its price.

S Barnes.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ludgvan Horticultural Society, the residents of the village have got together to produce a 48-page illustrated booklet on the history of the Society and an insight into the development of horticulture in the Parish over the period.
Situated on the south coast at Mounts Bay, Ludgvan is noted for its intensive cropping of early vegetables and flowers aided by the mild winter climate and the ideal soils of the ‘Golden Mile’. In this booklet we get a first hand account of life on the farm, details of the productive allotments and of course details of the Horticultural Society over the years.

An account of the farm at Varfell, once the home of Humphry Davey’s parents, gives us a fascinating insight into the traditional horticulture of Ludgvan from 1903 to the present as one of the largest daffodil farms in the country and now home to the National Collection of Dahlias.  No chronicle of Ludgvan would be complete without details of Canon Boscawen’s famous Rectory garden and Ray Fordham provides detailed information on the planting and historical facts. Also detailed is the not quite so famous, but of equal importance, garden at Eden Valley laid out by Percy Waterer in 1907 where Agapetes Ludgvan Cross originated.

In Spring 2002, the residents of Ludgvan opened their gardens to the public and an exhibition displayed many old and interesting photographs. The 100th annual flower show of Ludgvan Horticultural Society took place on August 2nd 2003 when hundreds of people were able to see an exhibition of the history of Ludgvan as well as talk to residents who had shaped that history.

David Pearce