It was my grandfather who dreamed of creating a lake in the valley below the house. He was a prisoner of war, and it was the vision of the lake that kept him sane during his years of captivity. In 1946, he made it a reality. When he died, the first thing I did was to return to my old room where, aged four, I would sit for hours looking at the lake. As I dwelt there once more, it became obvious what I should do.
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Surrounding the house was a huge thuja hedge that eclipsed the hilltop view on all sides. This had to go. A year later, in 1999, I enlisted the help of garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith. My brief was to bring all the views into the garden rather than exclude them, or merely glimpse vistas from a series of curated rooms. Thus, it has become a garden that is all about the landscape.
The meadow, like the garden, is 24 years old, and now covers 22 acres in three contiguous sections. For many years it was a fraction of that area, a modest foreground to the hilltop house. Now the meadow extends south, gently sloping down to the lakeside and then upwards to a hanging wood – Haile’s Wood – which is our boundary, and the first full stop in a crumpled patchwork of undulating pinks and greens
that runs towards Ross-on-Wye and the Forest of Dean.
8 of Peter's Orchids
For anyone considering creating a meadow, beware: there is no instant gratification. It’s expensive. It’s hard work. But, if you persevere, Nirvana’s greatest hits await. My meadow muse was Miriam Rothschild, once a member of Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park team, but also a wildflower expert, lepidopterist, eminent natural scientist and an expert on fleas. But it’s her writings about meadows that resonate with me. Responding to a male colleague who scoffed that it would take 1,000 years to reproduce a medieval meadow, Miriam wrote: ‘I could make a very good imitation in ten… it took me 15.’ For us, it was 12 long years before the orchids arrived.
For those who want to polish their ecological halo, orchids are the litmus test, for they prove that you have a healthy soil. They are a sign that an invisible web of goodness has arrived – something magical and divine that is out of sight and beyond most people’s cognition: the mycelial networks of mycorrhiza. These are the fungi without which the dust-like seeds of our most ‘common’ orchids cannot become plants. Orchid’s seed has no endosperm (nutrient store) and so must depend on an alternative source of food. This is what the mycorrhizal fungi provide. They lock on to the seed and their mycelia allow substrate transfer from the nutrient highway that the fungi operate. A symbiotic relationship develops. It is, however, a relationship very much biased in the orchid’s favour.
So why does it take so long before the fungi appear? In our case, it was because the meadow was planted in permanent pasture fertilised with inorganic fertiliser for nearly a century. Research has shown that nitrates and phosphates can build up in the soil and persist for years. Work by Dr Elena Arrigoni at Kew suggests that nitrate inhibits the development of fungal networks. As for phosphates, Dr Viswambharan Sarasan, also at Kew, found that the UK’s most prolific orchid sites (near Colchester in Essex, and in Cumbria) had available phosphate levels of around 4mg/kg and 7mg/kg respectively. In my meadow, the levels were 22mg/kg when we started.
The poorer your soil, the more orchids like it. Given the right conditions, fungal highways and orchids proliferate rapidly. From not having a single orchid for the first 12 years, we have become a home for ten species in the second 12; thousands of flowers, in ‘swarms’, as the botanists so provocatively call them.
Our meadow is testament to the fact that if the conditions are right, you can successfully introduce new species either by seed or by introducing individual plants. In 2016, our local church ran a new drain through a patch of ground long populated by green-winged orchids, Anacamptis morio. Opportunistically, I transplanted four green-winged refugees to the original meadow patch where marsh orchids proliferate, assuming the magical presence of mycorrhiza. The result has been extraordinary. In six years, the green-winged population grew from four plants to 1,633. Thus began my quest to see what other orchid species could be supported by the various fungi in the meadow.
The pyramidal orchid, Anacamptis pyramidalis, was a tip-off from a friend who had seen a local colony growing in builders’ rubble. Collected seed was broadcast on low-nutrient meadow where a bungalow had once stood. It proved to be the perfect spot. Swathes of quaking grass provide a soft, shifting veil of pink-purple seedheads for this most elegant of orchids – a diva intent on denying her humble history.
I knew of other orchids found locally, at Joan’s Hill Farm, a Plantlife reserve a couple of miles away, and at a newly established Coronation Meadow, even closer. The bee orchid, Ophrys apifera, appeared first, arriving on the wind, or the feet of a bird. My other new arrivals – the greater butterfly orchid, the early purple orchid and the common twayblade – came as gifts from meadow-obsessed friends. This year, their second, will give an indication of how well they have adapted; I am optimistic.
The meadow hums with hidden purpose. Nature is in her majestic pomp, showing what she can do if left to her own devices. And in the engine room is an organism that until now has been literally beneath our consideration, but one that agronomists would do well to understand and harness.
My meadow has meant more to me than I ever dreamed. I had wanted it to give me a childhood I could live vicariously. I hoped the meadow would be my children’s magic carpet: the chance to run wild down endless grassy corridors, chasing butterflies and the sun.
It is this transcendence that we gardeners ache for. Much as I enjoy all the other pieces of the garden and, as if they were my children, love everything they have become, much as I wonder at the intelligence and artifice involved in creating beautifully conceived borders, it is in my quiet times, when I need solace or a sense of wonder, that I cherish nature’s simple symphony.
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USEFUL INFORMATION
Brockhampton Cottage garden is open on Sunday 2 June, 11am-4pm, for the National Garden Scheme. ngs.org.uk