AGT Weekend Conference September 2007, Cornwall

"The Tides Of Change"

It may have been a long journey but the superb conference hosted by Cornwall Gardens Trust at the Victorian Falmouth Hotel made it more than worth the effort. I was sorry not to get there in enough time to go on a tour of the public parks with Jon James, the Principal Parks Manager, Carrick DC . Looking out of my bedroom window, the display of carpet bedding, palms and cannas looked perfectly stunning in the sunshine. Clearly the ethos of taking pride in town floral displays and colourful pleasure gardens lives on in the southwest.

Sir Ferrers Vyvyan, Chairman of Cornwall GT welcomed us. Just as we were unwinding (nodding off) after the meet and greet supper, Dr Timothy Mowl woke us, with his first words “Don’t you just hate hydrangeas?!!“ followed by a stimulating mix of provocative ideas about the public’s attitude to today’s gardens and their development. He feels the history of gardens, and the all important views out, get lost among the tea and souvenir shops, and these critical aspects are certainly not marketed on garden websites. He recommended Bonythan, the honesty box at Penjerrick, Gothic Trelowarren and undeveloped Godolphin. I now understand why his books on the history of gardens in various counties have been contentious. (He has not arrived at Lincolnshire yet.) But underneath it all, there lurks a genuine desire to share the joys of worthwhile design, be it historic or contemporary with a much wider audience.

Saturday, Charles Fox stepped in at short notice to give us a talk to explain how and why Cornwall is so blessed with garden gems – and plants from all over the whole world - thanks to climate, past prosperity and some remarkable plant hunters, collectors and hybridisers. Falmouth was the premier port in the northern hemisphere, where the sea–captains brought back many exotics from their voyages. Tree-ferns came in as ballast! Penjerrick is both a horticultural and historical repository. Several archetypical “valley gardens”, helped in replanting since 1995 by lottery money, are no longer “ Lost Gardens ”!

Our coach then took the narrow roads to Godolphin, at the back of beyond near Helston. In 1690 Francs Godolphin wrote to his eminent godfather John Evelyn, the passionate tree man of Sylva fame:

“it stands on the side of a hill and is a very good seat….tis a large old house built upon stone, the front upon pillars with flat arches both within and without…........... an abundance of trees about it and a great deal of garden not walled but fenced with Hedges”

This is still as true today, after more than three centuries! In the seventeenth century Godolphin was the most modern, innovative house west of Wilton , and the garden would have matched it. Although wooden garden statues have long since disappeared, there is a quite magical feel enhanced by our entrance to the walled courtyard through a narrow stone stile with stone seats, (repeated opposite on the way into the west garden). I would not have been surprised to have come across a round table with King Arthur and his knights in the inner court. Godolphin’s wall walks have experienced neglect from the eighteenth century onwards, but thanks to the current owners’ rescue, this is a garden experience like no other. I know now that time really can stand still.

The next privilege was to visit Trelowarren, home to Sir Ferrers, a remodelled house in the mid 18^th century in classic Gothic style that forms a court with the early seventeenth chapel which was ornamented with Strawberry Hill Gothic plasterwork. The setting dates from this period, and with little between it and America, is being carefully restored after storm loss of four hundred trees, though the settlement goes back thousands of years, and there was a deer park since Elizabethan times. In the walled garden there is a charming old seed house built on saddle stones to keep out vermin. Sir Ferrers is so dedicated that, unusually for a historic garden owner, he embarked on an Architectural Association Diploma in the Conservation of Garden and Historical Landscapes before starting work on restoring the grounds. We retreated from the hot sun and stood in the cool of the wilderness walks to admire the new avenues of Tilia europea a rod apart. The 16 foot “Task Force Trees” were grown on from cuttings, all taken from one lime tree in Holland He now takes great satisfaction in viewing the canopy with its varying light and shade, and different greens. And oh, the best Cornish cream tea!

Sunday morning bright and early, who better to give a lecture on 21^st century design, than award winning landscape architect/TV presenter who also teaches garden design at Falmouth College? Richard Sneesby began by saying that designers can look to the future but they cannot control it. He feels that students today have very different points of reference in what has become an extremely visual world, where media, “image” and celebrity are writ large. Site surveys are followed by a layered semi-scientific and instant digital approach, with creative leaps to design solutions, and imaginative software to involve the client. Where people have different psychological needs, computers have increased the awareness of pattern, borrowed landscape, and plant technology as well as prompting technical risk-taking such as a “harp and sound box” garden with musical experience or a therapeutic, healing spa garden displaying a white garden for liver disease and red hot borders for depression! Of course the biggest issues are environmental, social sustainability, space and resource efficiency. He praised the Potager Garden at High Cross as important nationally, where there are daily papers and sporting toys and families can come for the whole day, (obviously for those who no longer have gardens of their own – depressing thought). And then Caervallack St Martin – a garden for local crafts and local jobs, where artistic cob buildings of sustainable local materials give positive effects in mind and mood and to re-engage with the notion of community and representation. All the same, Richard recognised that aesthetic satisfaction is unpredictable and transient, and stressed that we should “draw from the wisdom of the ages without being shackled by history”. He left me wondering if we are being shackled with political gardens but, unlike grand eighteenth century allegory, with a small p, the “People’s Gardens”. Bring on the red hot borders.

The coach driver made us laugh. In one village he told us all to look right. We all craned our necks trying to spot the view he was pointing out, as he heaved a sigh of relief and said “whew, that’s got you gardeners past my garden which is a right mess!!” We were on the way to “the house at the head of the valley” a very special landscape garden that must be spectacular at rhododendron time. Tregothnan was visited in 1695 by Celia Fiennes, and improved by Humphry Repton in the early nineteenth century, with the views framed and the approach made beautiful and sublime. Many plants in the South American collection are associated with William Lobb. How Alan Titchmarsh would swoon seeing the Tree Fern avenue. We were shown the very first spiky green pine Wolemmia nobilis bought in this country into a private collection. Affectionately known as the “Pinosaur”, it is an extraordinary survivor from Jurassic times in a single isolated Australian grove. (Coincidentally, we had presented Val Hepworth, outgoing AGT Chairman, with a smaller specimen of this rare tree in gratitude for her hard work.) For once I felt more moved by an avenue. The long, romantic Myrtle Avenue has fairyland trees of hazy cream blossom interspersed with high Scots Pine.

Our final port of call was Ray and Shirley Clemo’s twentieth century Pine Lodge Gardens, St Austell, 12 ½ hectares of colour and texture still being developed, most recently with a Japanese Garden, a Winter Garden and the Slave Garden. A true labour of love. Shirley is a plants woman with a remarkable eye for colour. In the nursery, I treated myself to a myrtle, Myrtus ugni, to keep Tregothnan in my mind. Thank you Cornwall GT, this has only been a snap-shot of a multi-faceted garden feast in every sense of the word, through several centuries as if in the Tardis. Some gardens were by a man, some by a woman, and some gardens for a woman! Discuss!

Steffie Shields