Wealden Times | WT185 | July 2017 | Interiors supplement inside

Garden
The makings
of a garden
Sue Whigham talks about the evolution of her own
garden and perfect plant combinations
It was 1996 when we first saw the garden, and it
was love at first sight. There was a paddock for our
donkeys and an orchard behind the house with old
lichen covered apple trees. And many of them are still here,
looking a little elderly and some of which have become
climbing frames for roses. We’re eternally grateful to Miss
Richards who planted the orchard in 1952 and who left
us a now very faded hand written plan of her trees. What
wonderful varieties she sourced. A row of Peasgood’s
Nonsuch is still standing as well as the old Yorkshire
variety, Ribston Pippin, grown since the 18th Century,
and one of my favourites, the robust and delicious cooker,
M. ‘Arthur Turner’, still laden with fruit every autumn.
We’re trying to remember what we did first apart
from taking down some of the hurdles around the
orchard which housed a few pet sheep here and there
and rather foolishly buying a few tiny grass and ghost
carp to control the water lilies that had become triffid
like in the dew pond to the east of the house.
We think it must have been some of the
climbing and rambling roses that went in first.
One mistake was to plant a couple of climbers
up two of the Peasgood’s Nonsuch and whilst
they are still very much there, their nature
doesn’t really suit being trained up trees. We
didn’t really know then that ramblers are so
much better suited for the job whilst climbers
have a rather more complicated pruning regime
which is so difficult to carry out when they are
clambering around in their host’s branches.
We’d been reading Robin Lane Fox’s book,
Better Gardening, which we think might have
been the only gardening book we had then.
So taking his advice and reading what he said about Rosa
‘Blairii No. 2’ we started with that, seduced by his description
of a rose whose petals are so ‘tightly packed that the scent,
too, is doubled, like the fruit of a sweet white German
wine’. And it is true except that much of the bloom is now
too high to do anything but admire from ground level.
Rosa ‘Paul Transon’ was another early arrival and we can’t
“We’d been
reading Robin
Lane Fox’s book,
Better Gardening,
which we think
might have been
the only gardening
book we had then”
Hypericum and ‘Fox and Cubs’
recommend it more. We’d worked out by then that a rambler
was more suitable for the trees so this went in. It’s a repeat
flowerer, a rich salmon with ‘coppery overtones’ but the best
thing about it is its unusual and rich scent.
And then there were ramblers like Rosa
‘Phyllis Bide’ first spotted whilst on a bus
driving through Odiham, R. ‘Rambling
Rector’, too vigorous for its host, but showy,
and the delicate R. ‘Cecile Brunner’ which is
just coming out now and which uses a rather
decrepit old prunus as a climbing frame, the
soft pink of the rose combining with the
purple foliage. Later additions include R.
‘Wedding Day’ and two less vigorous roses,
R. ‘Apple Blossom’ and R. ‘Open Arms’,
both charming. Then Peter Beales sent us
a few shrub roses with delectable names
and these went in between the apple trees. R. ‘Madame
Hardy’ is lovely; white with a green eye but alas, no scent.
A few trees arrived, perhaps two or three a year, from Robert
Vernon’s Bluebell Nursery. These were bought as small plants
but soon grew on and we had few fatalities. I think it is a
good idea to start small if you feel you have the time to wait.
The trunk of the beautiful birch, B. ermanii split and
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