Author Archives: Abbie Jury

About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Bulbs of September

Hippeastrum aulicum – we plant it in semi shade to shaded areas because it will still flower and the dreaded narcissi fly only attack plants in sunny spots

Maybe I will do a monthly post on the bulbs in flower here during each month, I thought in August. I am pretty sure that we have bulbs, corms and tubers of one sort or another flowering twelve months of the year. But August came and went and here we are, well into September and peak spring.

Ah well, there is always some crossover. The narcissi and the Hippeastrum aulicum both started in August and are still in full bloom. The aulicums bring us great pleasure and are a significant feature as winter breaks to spring in our garden but are probably beyond the reach of most people. It is not that they are difficult to grow but they are not widely available and, purchased individually, they will be expensive. Mark’s dad probably started from one or maybe three bulbs, as was his and now our way, and the results here have been achieved over about seventy years of quietly lifting, dividing and planting around the garden, now with many hundreds of bulbs in various locations. Not every gardener has the time, patience and willingness to achieve this, let alone the longevity of stay in one garden location.

The narcissi are more achievable and will give a quicker result. We grow as many different types as we can, bar the modern hybrids (the King Alfred types) that are most commonly sold. They are better as cut flowers (the weight of the bloom often bends them over in the garden) and are better in places that don’t have issues with narcissi fly. We favour the earlier flowering dwarf narcissi. Growing a range of different species, named hybrids and seedlings raised here on site extends the season into many weeks from early August right through September.

Narcissus cyclamineus seedlings growing on one of our bulb hillsides

We use narcissi everywhere really, the major consideration of sites being that they won’t get swamped by larger growing plants and that they will star as rays of sunshine in their time each year.

The lachenalias also star through spring. It is the boldest and the brightest that bloom first. Lachenalia aloides is the common form that is widely grown. Cheap and cheerful, might be the best description. Placement is everything when it comes to this bulb. I don’t like it as a garden plant but I think it is great on the margins and in wilder areas.

I am officially giving up on trying to understand the plant classification and nomenclature of lachenalias. Last time I looked, these were all forms of the species L. aloides. I even staged a photo to support my comment that a single species can be very variable. So we have straight aloides, quadricolor (already passing over – it is even earlier), tricolor, vanzyliae and glaucina which was barely opening a week ago. Now I look and I see they have been split. Glaucina is back with L. orchiodes, while quadricolor and vanzyliae seem to have been elevated to the status of being in species classes of their own and I have no idea where tricolor sits. They can remain a mystery for me.

From a garden perspective, I always notice that it is the orange, yellow and red lachenalias that flower first (the yellow being Mark’s reflexa hybrid, the red we have is bulbifera). The most desirable so-called blues come later. I say so-called blues because that casual grouping takes in those with the faintest blue genes that are really shades of cream, pink and lilac as much as pure blue. We have gathered every one we could find over the years and by far the most reliable is the aforementioned L. glaucina.

And without writing a book on topic, I can only continue by listing bulbs that I spotted on a perfunctory wander around the rockery and areas where we have done informal swathes of different bulbs. We find the bulbs add depth and detail which we value highly.

A touch of grape hyacinth is enough. Seen here with Narcissus Tete a Tete.

We are not too snooty about the common bulbs. While the snowdrops finished last month, the undervalued snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) flower on. We are thinning out both the grape hyacinths (muscari – foliage to flower ratio too high in our climate and spreads a bit too much) and bluebells (way too invasive) but not aiming for total eradication.

Once was dipidax, then onixotis but now, apparently a wurmbea

The blue anemones seed down and have quietly naturalised in the rockery without being a problem. I once planted a couple of bags of anemones and ranunculus and they all flowered the first year. From then on the ranunculus, the double anemones and all colours except blue quietly faded away but I like the simple blue and I like even more that they are self-maintaining. The Wurmbea stricta which we used to know as an onixotis and before that was a dipidax is another common bulb but one without a widely-used common name so most often greeted with words to the effect of “Is that what it’s called? My mother used to grow that – I never knew its name.” Dutch iris are another early spring option. I like my blue ones but I am not a particular fan of the family generally.

The blue moraea villosa are the most desirable but the white with blue eye are the most common

There is a large group of somewhat messy bulbs that are terrific in flower but their seasonal foliage is often dying, either just before they bloom or while they are in flower. So they are not nice, tidy, neat bulbs but they are generally showy. The Moraea villosa float like ethereal eyes of the peacock feather, moving in the breeze and they are a delight, even though I may feel irritation at their messy foliage in a few weeks’ time. The freesias (plain cream ones here), sparaxis, valotta, tritonia, Gladiolus tristis and babianas all fall into the same category and are flowering now. We grow them all, but more in the rockery for choicer ones and in meadow plantings for vigorous ones. Their foliage issues are less intrusive than in a tidy border planting.

Unlike the Dutch hybrids, Tulipa saxatilis just keeps quietly increasing and returning to bloom every year

Tulips – we don’t grow the Dutch hybrids but we are enamoured with the Cretan species Tulipa saxatilis. And we have a dainty yellow species that may be a form of T. sylvestris, or it may not. Amongst Mark’s parents’ slides, there was a photo of it in the newly constructed rockery so around 1952 or so. Amusingly, seventy years on, we still have it but only in similar quantity to that in the early photo. It is clearly not going to naturalise and reproduce much here.

We know this is a very early photo because the rocks have not a skerrick of moss or lichen on them.

Then there is the Ferraria crispa, the starfish iris which is only worth the space if you are fascinated by oddities and freaks. Erythroniums, dog’s tooth violets which prefer colder, drier winters, are a seven to ten day wonder with us but charming and dainty for that time and no bother for the rest of the year. Veltheimias in pink and in cream are a mainstay for us in both sun and shade, the pleione orchids are coming into flower and Hippeastrum papilio has opened its first blooms – I could go on.

Why did I start with the month that is probably the busiest of the year in the varied world of bulbs? There will be more that I have missed. If I end up having to retire to a very small town garden, there will be no roses, lavenders or easy-care mondo grass. I am pretty sure I will be growing bulbs.

The rockery is at its busiest at this time of year

Revisiting Le Clos du Peyronnet, but not in person

6 Replies

If I knew then what I know now, would my visit have felt different? When it comes to Le Clos du Peyronnet, the answer is probably yes. I have just finished reading ‘The Long Afternoon’ by Giles Waterfield. His late brother William and his even later Uncle Humphrey are credited with making the garden into a place of note.

I wrote about the garden after my visit in May last year in the second half of my post covering two English gardens on the French Riviera. I thoroughly enjoyed the visit. But now I would like to go back and experience it again, although that is extremely unlikely to happen. We were told a few historical facts but they were not of a compelling nature.

These were my only photos showing part of the villa, which I now know was built in 1896 by Annie Davidis, an Anglo-German artist.

We learned that the villa, purchased by the author’s grandparents in 1912, had now been divided into five apartments – but not that it was a move taken immediately after WW2 which was necessary to save both the villa and the garden. And we were told that one or more of the apartments’ occupants were hostile to William Waterfield’s widow continuing to accept and lead tour groups around the garden. Our movements around the garden were somewhat restricted and we descended from the top terrace and entirely missed the experience of the main entrance and the front of the villa. When I looked at an upper story window, I saw a figure standing there, possibly glaring. The vibes were bad, Reader. He seemed to radiate hostility so I averted my eyes and studiously avoided going close to the building, instinctively trying to minimise any further intrusion on that resident’s privacy. As a result, I have very little visual memory of the villa, just the garden

“You should read ‘The Long Afternoon’,” our Irish tour leader said to me. “It is Giles Waterfield’s account of his father and uncle growing up in the garden.” It was published in 2001 so I found a second hand copy which described it as a novel. It is sort of a novel but based on pretty accurate family history. The names have been changed. Barbara and Derick Waterfield became Helen and Henry Williamson, their sons Humphrey and Anthony became Charles and Francis. The name of the garden became Lou Paradou. The author has created the dialogue and placed his interpretations of events into various character’s minds. But the facts and events are real.

The view of Menton from the top terrace of the garden in 2025.

The garden and villa wrap around the plot, ever present – especially for me as I could visualise the garden and the setting and I have looked at that view of the Mediterranean and crossed the border to Italy to the Hanbury garden. The plot centres on the relationship between ‘Helen’ and ‘Henry’, leading lives of huge privilege in the sedate ex-pat community of British residents who had chosen to live in Menton in the first half of last century. New Zealanders may recall Menton as the place where Katherine Mansfield lived in her doomed quest to recover from tuberculosis. English people may know it as the place where Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote fame preferred to spend his time at his garden, Serre de la Madone. Both are of the same era as the Waterfields/Williamsons.

The structure and design is largely attributable to Humphrey Waterfield

William Waterfield was the first in the family to take up year-round, permanent residence (the earlier generations tended to split their time between there and England, preferring to spend summer in the cooler climate. William was a botanist and added the botanical detail to the garden, including an acclaimed bulb collection – all of which was over by the time I visited in late May.

Giles Waterfield is a good writer. Much of the book is a long, intricately drawn picture of co-dependence evolving over time between Helen and Henry, set against a backdrop of ennui and lassitude that comes with lives rich in privilege but lacking in purpose. No wonder she had plenty of time to supervise the gardeners.

There is a sharp change in writing style and tone as the inevitability of WW2 looms large, disturbing their tranquil way of life. Menton is right on the border with Italy and the fascists were already in control of that country. Life as it had been started disintegrating at a terrifying speed.

Spoiler alert: in the unlikely event that you are currently reading the book or plan to read it very soon, you may wish to skip the next three paragraphs.

I describe it as an explosive ending. In a suicide pact, they chose to end their lives together, by gunshot. A Luger, no less. In June 1940. They were only in their early sixties. The war was too much for Helen – too inconvenient, too much unknown, too much to fear and too much potential chaos. Fourteen months of retreat to Pau (still in France but near the Spanish border rather than the Italian one) was all she could cope with. The tone of the book makes it very clear that it was Helen’s decision and Henry acquiesced. Again. “She wants us to end our lives, and I still love her enough to do as she wants.” I am guessing the excerpt of the letter written to their sons which ends the book is likely the actual text from Derick Waterfield to his sons.

After the precision of an organised life that leads up to the end, those last four pages were shocking. I am with the reviewer who said of the book, ‘I can’t get it out of my head’. I had to start searching to see if the ending was true. It was. Then I became fascinated by the author whom, I suspect, took after his Uncle Humphrey (Charles, in the book). The empathy is clear.

That is the backdrop to Le Clos du Peyronnet. The garden as it is admired today, is credited to Humphrey who returned to it as soon as he could when the war ended and then to William. Humphrey was in the shadow of the war and the suicide of his parents, William was raised in a family where the deaths were not discussed at all (according to his brother Giles, in a lecture delivered to the Garden Museum Literary Festival in 2014. I told you I became fascinated.)

It was a grey and drizzly morning so it is not clear but the space around the conifer is the Mediterranean Sea. The famed ‘water staircase’ of five descending pools culminates in the borrowed view of the Med being the sixth pool, the design work of Humphrey Waterfield. That conifer may need to be removed soon.

I now know that the ‘Anduz jars’ came from Lawrence Johnston’s garden nearby but what I don’t know is whether they are the urns or the glass jars. Or both. There seems to an absence of Anduz jars in this country so my education is lacking on this matter.

Knowing what I know now, I would be staring at that villa, locating the upstairs balcony that featured so often. I now know who built the grotto that William loved, who designed and constructed the cascading pools and so much more. It is a garden conceived, created and continued in an unbroken chain of ex-pat Brits on the Riviera, which is a very particular garden genre. It seems that the grandparents provided the canvas and showed the potential (the blue irises are woven through the family history), Humphrey lifted the design and layout to a new level and William was the plantsman who set about enhancing the garden with detail. Alas, there are no more Waterfields. The garden has been accorded historic monument status by the French Ministry of Culture but what that means in the mid to longer term, I do not know.

Would it have enriched my experience to know all this when I visited? For me, yes I think it would. Private gardens are about more than pretty scenes, interesting plant combinations or good management. Their very existence is tied to their individual owners and their social context. Their stories are part of the garden’s being.

Note to self: do more research in advance of visiting gardens, especially overseas gardens that I may only get to see once.

Curiously, William Waterfield once commented in an interview that this was his favourite part of the garden – a small grotto utilising a natural spring and one of the few original parts of the garden as created by Annie Davidis, who built the villa. The silver agave was added by William.

The graveyard incident

Truly I have a terrible story for you this week. Well, maybe not terrible in the greater scheme of things but fairly astonishing. Despite its location, it does not involve death.

Does the world really divide in two groups of people? There are those who understand instinctively that pretty, seasonal floral displays in public places are there to bring pleasure to all.

And then there is the other lot. Those who think that the same pretty flowers are in fact their personal picking garden and it is their right to pick bouquets with no thought at all that they might be depriving others of pleasure. First in first served and all that.

The Te Henui cemetery in New Plymouth is known to many, not just locals but also from further afield. The repository of the dead going back well over a century, it is also a popular dog-walking route. But, for many of us, it is a place to visit to see the flowers.

Part of that is the designation of the cemetery which allowed for recreational use (hence the urban dog-walkers) but also the planting of trees which are less common in graveyards on account of their root systems breaking up all that concrete. But most of the credit for the current floweriness all through the year must go to a small group of dedicated volunteers who spend a large part of every week tending the detailed plantings on and around the graves.

Theft is always an issue, especially with plantings in public places. The volunteers at the cemetery have learned to deal with it but it doesn’t stop their frustration and disappointment.

Last week, one entitled woman took it to new heights. She was seen helping herself to tulips and daffodils. When challenged about her actions, she became angry. How dare anybody rain on her parade? Most of us would be embarrassed but not her. She phoned the police and claimed she was being intimidated. Two officers turned up with remarkable promptness. She was waiting for them, holding just one daffodil (having dropped the others along the way to the exit, you understand), claiming she was being harassed for picking a single flower.

No further action was taken but it is hard to believe that this woman has learned her lesson. Volunteer gardener, Susan, made sure to retrace her steps and retrieve the flowers she had thrown away, showing them to the police after the woman had left. While this woman is by no means the only person picking flowers, she is the only one who had the nerve to call the police in retaliation for being challenged.

The poor tulips, being taken before they have even opened.

Susan tells me: “We have lost 17 tulips from the grave opposite the tomb and 8 from the grave on the eastern side – so far. It doesn’t sound many but the season is not over yet and the tulips are expensive and don’t reliably re-flower in subsequent years. So tulip losses in particular are very aggravating. We pay for the tulip bulbs.

We deliberately plant the tulips by the road so that the rest home vans can drive past with residents and the residents can view them from the van (most have mobility issues).”

The moral is clear. Don’t steal flowers (or indeed plants). Especially don’t think it is okay to raid them from public places where they are tended by volunteers. Also, the police have better things to do than to be used as a back-up for some entitled, selfish person.

What is wrong with some people?

On a more positive note, the magnolias in the cemetery are looking splendid this week.

I took this photo as an illustration of a recurring theme – narcissi where the flowers are too large and heavy to hold up straight. Excellent cut flowers – but not if you are helping yourself to them in a public space – but not so good as garden plants.

The end of an era

We don’t open the garden to many groups these days but agreed when we were approached to host a visit from “the last Camellia Nationals in their current format”. That is the national conference of the NZ Camellia Society. Competitive show blooms have long been a hallmark of the camellia world, the major focus of the annual conference but a range of garden visits are also included.

A little bit of Taranaki Jury on the honours table of the International Camellia Convention in Dali, China 2016

Mark’s father Felix and his Uncle Les Jury were giants in the camellia scene back in the 1960s and 1970s, earning international reputations and breeding camellias that have become known throughout the world. To this day, Les’s Camellia ‘Jury’s Yellow’ remains a market standard and Felix is probably best remembered for his camellias ‘Dreamboat’ and ‘Waterlily’.

When Mark and I returned to Taranaki at the end of 1979, Les was elderly. But before he died in the early 1980s, he was particularly encouraging and generous with advice to Mark, who was taking his own first steps in plant breeding, starting with camellias. Felix didn’t die until 1997 so the camellia influence was strong.

Conferences past. I recently found some homemade posters – I am guessing Mimosa’s work – for a conference that was likely in the 1960s. The flowers have been cut out from magazines and glued on and, unless I am mistaken, the lettering is from Letraset and only oldies will remember the days before accessible printing, let alone photocopy machines!

It was to respect that family connection to camellias that we agreed to the visit last weekend. Times are changing and many horticultural groups are struggling to continue as members die off – literally – and younger generations are not signing up to replace them. That is why this was to be last national camellia show and conference in the current format. I have no idea what new format is planned.

Camellia conferences in days of yore were a little larger and a little different. If the labelling on Mark’s parents’ slides was correct, this seems to be Whakatane 1964.

In times past, the camellia conference was huge. In the heady boom times through until the early 1990s, my recollection is that the conference tours around gardens involved six coaches and countless cars – several hundred people. It was bigger than the rhododendron conference which only required four coaches plus cars. Mark attended several conferences as his parents’ driver and was in awe at the scale of the event and the depth of expertise in the attendees. I went to one – I think it was Whakatane ‘82 and I can date it because I had our first-born with us and she was small. Even back then, Mark and I were a good decade or three younger than most of those who went. We continued to host conference visits here in the times since so last Sunday felt something like the end of an era. Conference attendance was down to 63, so one coach, a minibus and a couple of cars.

The group arrives last Sunday afternoon.

It rained but the camellia enthusiasts were very enthusiastic and appreciative

In earlier times, pretty much every camellia we grew put on a mass display of blooms. These days it is a rarer sight which makes this little row of Mark’s ‘Pearly Cascade’ more special. But even this would have had many more blooms in the days before petal blight.

Of course, camellias have changed over that time, too. Back in those days, camellias were ranked the second largest-selling product line. Roses were top. And the vast majority of camellias being produced were japonicas and hybrids. Camellia petal blight changed everything. The mass display of flowers all over the bush, the efforts Felix and Les both went to in creating varieties that were self-grooming (dropping spent blooms to avoid the need to pick over the plant), the perfection of formal blooms like ‘Dreamboat’, ‘Mimosa Jury’ or ‘Desire’, the purity of bushes with perfect white blooms, the quest for ever larger blooms – these are but distant memories. Petal blight has largely destroyed the displays that made camellias so loved. It made the Camellia Society shows problematic because the blooms no longer stood up to travel and display over several days. Picked as perfect, they too often became blotched with brown by the next morning and sludge the day after.

We still have hundreds of camellias here in our garden and right across our property. I set out to pick one off each bush where I could reach a flower and gave up after covering just a fraction of the garden. A few are named varieties but many are just seedlings from the breeding programme.

I think of camellias like the cast of a stage-show musical. In times gone by, the entire front row of the chorus and some significant soloists were camellias. Nowadays, they play a valuable but less acclaimed role, filling out the back rows of the chorus with a few of them getting to step forward to sing a few solo lines from time to time. They used to be grown primarily for their flowers. Now we value them more for their potential form – we clip and shape key specimens – as well as their obligingly resilient and healthy nature and their adaptability.

We use camellias differently now. The undulating hedge in the foreground is Camellia *microphylla.* The clipped hedge running across the middle of the photograph is Mark’s Camellia ‘Fairy Blush’. The two white topped lower plants in front of it are Camellia *yuhsienensis*.

I set up a few sprays of Camellia *nitidissima* on the table by the visitor loos because I thought the visitors might not be accustomed to seeing them growing outdoors as garden plants – but nobody commented on them, to me at least. At the time when Les and Felix were breeding camellias, nobody in the west even knew about the yellow camellias in China and Vietnam. Les created ‘Jury’s Yellow’ from white camellias.

Preserving a period of time

Can a garden ever be frozen in time?

This train of thought came back to mind as I was sorting through the old slides of our garden dating back in its early days. We first came across the concept of freezing a garden in time when we encountered the Florence Charter being quoted twenty years ago, in the context of what are now referred to as the regional gardens here, particularly Tupare and Hollards.

I see the Florence Charter of 1981 built upon the earlier Venice Charter of 1964 and I can’t quite get my head past the glorious locations of these think-tank conferences on preserving historic monuments. Still, I doubt that the wise heads behind these charters were thinking about preserving gardens from the 1940s and 1950s. Only in colonial New Zealand do we think of 70 to 80 years warranting the descriptor of *historic*.

But how realistic is it to freeze a garden in time? For starters, it is probably limited to bulbs, herbaceous perennials or roses. Trees and shrubs grow. They can’t be lifted, divided, thinned, pruned and replanted in their original configuration. That rules out 99% of all gardens in this country; I cannot recall seeing any gardens here with no trees or shrubs in them.

Topiary at Levens Hall by Peter Jeffery (via Wiki Commons)

What about topiary, I hear somebody ask. Even they evolve over time. Covid robbed us of the opportunity to visit Levens Hall in the Lakes District of the UK. That garden dates back to 1690 and is claimed to be the oldest known topiary garden. Some of the yew topiaries could well be original but I doubt they look the same now as they did in 1700. Even topiary and bonsai grow, mature and evolve over time.

Topiary in the garden at Levens by Simon Palmer (via Wiki Commons). That unbalanced, leaning, cake-plate topiary is an example of serendipity over time, adding quirkiness that would not have been there at the start.

Roses and maybe some other small deciduous shrubs can be kept to the required size and shape. Besides, you could grow on replacement plants out the back somewhere and bring them in as instant substitution when needed.

Herbaceous perennials and bulbs can certainly be lifted, thinned and replanted in exactly the same configuration, although why you would want to do so eludes me.

But, and it is a big but, you can have a perennial, bulb or rose bed and dedicate your gardening life to keeping it static in display but make sure it is in the middle of open space which will stay open. As soon as a bed or border is encircled in hedging, other gardens, trees, orchard or anything else, the time-clock of change starts ticking. The micro-climate you started with will change over time as other plants grow and may no longer be hospitable at all to the initial plant selections.

Mark’s mother’s rose garden in its heyday

And how the area looks today. The line of rimu trees behind were planted in the 1870s and continue to grow with root systems spreading extensively.

We worked this out when our best efforts failed entirely to restore the sunken garden to the glory days when Mimosa had it looking lush, abundant and flowery. In the decades since it was first planted, the rimu trees that bound it on one side have pretty much doubled in size and their fibrous root systems have spread throughout much of the area. The trees and shrubs Felix and Mimosa planted on two other sides have grown like Topsy and the garden in the middle has long since stopped being sunny and open; the area once suitable for roses is now semi-shaded, very sheltered and filled with roots from surrounding trees sucking up all the moisture and fertility. We changed tack entirely.

Freshly planted azaleas on the sunken garden side of the rimu trees, probably in the early to mid 1960s

Looking back towards the sunken garden, these are the surviving azaleas from that original planting today. Now underplanted with Cyclamen coum and hederafolium as it is too shaded for the original narcissi.

All of this begs the question of why anyone would want to freeze a garden in time. Times change and with that, expectations and gardening values change. I was going to add in changing fashions, but long term gardens are about more than fickle fashion. The mark of good gardening, in my book, is the ability to adapt an existing garden, keeping it appropriate, relevant and in tune with current values while accommodating issues of changing microclimates and external conditions. Personally, I don’t see the value of trying to freeze even historic gardens to a particular point in their development.

Stourhead, we think. Our memories are a little hazy now, given we visited in 1996.

Never have Mark and I forgotten our early visit to Stourhead in Wiltshire. The garden at Stourhead was created in the style of Capability Brown – sweeping landscapes and dearie me, is that a village located just where we want to put the lake? Move the peasants out now. So, a statement of wealth, power and privilege. Visiting in spring, the magnificent display of rhododendrons and azaleas delighted the modern hoi polloi amongst the vistas and the garden follies of past grandeur.

But there was a problem. Historically, the garden at Stourhead pre-dated the introduction of rhododendrons to the UK. The original lakeside plantings were, apparently, laurel and mass-planted laurel is never going to delight anybody, really. There was a purist, historical lobby group who wanted to pull out all the glorious rhododendrons and replant with laurels, in the interests of historical accuracy, you understand.

I admit we didn’t think to look closely enough back in 1994 to determine whether this host of golden daffodils were native narcissi species and not more recent hybrids.

I am assuming the historical purists did not win but we haven’t been back to see. It does illustrate the downside of picking an arbitrary time frame to freeze for the long term. You can do it with buildings and monuments but gardens? Gardens, by their very essence, change over time and we gardeners need to adapt to and enhance that change, not constantly try to wind the clock back.

Postscript: Theoretically, a rockery largely given over to bulbs and small perennials could be maintained as a static feature. It is clear that from the very start, Mark’s parents set out to plant in a mixed style.

The house was built around 1949 and 1950 and the rockery must have been the first area of the garden to be created and then planted because this is as early as 1954 and many trees and shrubs are looking remarkably well established. That is a Wheeney Grapefruit which was moved out soon after.

We can date this to 1954 accurately because that is wee Marky at the red arrow on the right. Mark’s mum is above the red arrow on the left but the circle is what I wanted to highlight. You won’t be able to see much on a small screen but the circle is around a very small blue conifer. It was Abies procera glauca and you can read it’s story here.

We felled it in 2019. It had been moved out of the rockery at some point in the later 1960s and by the time we dropped it for safety reasons, it looked like this.

The rockery is the the area where there has been the least change in structure and design. We have carried out a few running repairs but otherwise it is pretty much as constructed by Felix around 1951. The plant material, however, is something else. The turnover of plant material won’t be quite 100% but there is very, very little left that is original.

Freezing a garden in time seems a fruitless folly, really.

About Abbie Jury

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: