If historic gardens are those we preserve in recognition of their significance to our horticultural past,
then perhaps legacy gardens are those we value because they were conjured out of a spirit of experimentation we’d like to carry into the future. The custodians of both have an important part to play in our cultural heritage, but legacy gardeners, denied a clear road map to follow, must take up the reins with a lighter touch and intuit their way towards their destination.
Fergus Garrett is arguably the most significant legacy gardener in England today. As head gardener at Great Dixter, the East Sussex garden of the late Christopher Lloyd, he worked alongside Lloyd for the last 15 years of his life. Since 2006, Fergus has devoted himself to keeping his mentor’s legacy vibrant,
but never overly reverent. “The aim with this sort of garden is to keep the spirit of the original creator
alive, but the problem is that keeping that spirit alive can mean almost anything,” says Fergus. “Christo was always experimenting, so in theory we could turn Dixter into something completely different and still be true to his spirit. When he died we had to accept that we couldn’t replace him, and work out what strengths we should build on. At Dixter, the answers were creativity and community.”
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Taking on a legacy garden is a difficult balancing act that Fergus has given huge attention to over the years. The real challenge, he says, is to define what you should be doing in the first place. “You have to garden sensitively but without ego, and that is very hard to do. We set up the Christopher Lloyd scholarship programme after Christo died with exactly this in mind – to train young creative gardeners so that they could manage these legacy gardens.”
Jonny Bruce
One of the very first Dixter scholars was Jonny Bruce, who now, among other things, curates the garden created by Derek Jarman around Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. Jarman died in 1994, but his partner Keith Collins continued to tend the garden until his own death in 2018, and for the last eight years of his life, Jonny worked alongside him. So, as with Fergus, there was a direct line of succession from the garden’s past, although at Prospect Cottage that legacy was decidedly nebulous.
The radical aesthetic of Jarman’s anti-garden, with its flotsam sculptures of wave-worn timber and rusted metal, is set off by a planting that is predominantly ephemeral, drawing on the decorative effect of self-seeded drifts of California poppies, sea kale and centranthus. “We have to constantly edit with a light and sensitive hand,” says Jonny. “But we also tend an equally significant legacy, which is one of community.
This garden has become something of a mecca for young people coming to terms with their own queer
identity. I felt much the same when I first arrived here. It had the air of a sacred space. Keith was very good at puncturing that way of thinking, but it is an important part of the legacy.”
James Horner
Another Dixter alumnus, James Horner, is currently nearing the end of a delicate three-year revival of the garden at Benton End in Suffolk. It was created by painter Cedric Morris at his East Anglian School
of Painting, and in its time it was also a refuge for many young creatives seeking to crystallise their identity. Unlike Fergus and Jonny, James never knew Morris, who died in 1982, and, when he took over as head gardener, only the faintest trace of Morris’s garden still remained.
“Before the Garden Museum acquired the property in 2021, it had been lived in by other people for 40 years,” says James. “For me, it was an appealing challenge, because I love lost, magical gardens, and through all its entanglement, you could feel it struggling to be what it wanted to be, ready to be brought back to life.”
James searched for the spirit of the place in Morris’s glorious, flower-filled canvases, and through his legacy of special plants, most notably the Benton irises, which he developed in a rich but muted palette of colours. “I also took Cedric’s sombre canvas Landscape of Shame, depicting dead and dying birds in a landscape ravaged by pesticides, as a cue to approach the entire overhaul of the garden organically.”
Ellen Penstone-Smith
Other legacy gardeners have much less to work with. When Ellen Penstone-Smith arrived at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, once home to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Victorian poet’s beloved walled garden had been eradicated by the prefab chalets and featureless lawns of a holiday park. In search of guidance, Ellen turned to Tennyson’s poetry, including the poem Maud, which mentions many plants from the garden. Victorian watercolour artist Helen Allingham was also a regular visitor, and her paintings proved a useful additional resource.
“Allingham made many paintings of the garden. Although they were all painted in the spring, they do give an indication of Tennyson’s cottage garden aesthetic – a little unkempt and wild. And we know from his writings that he loved roses, especially moss roses, so I have included lots of those. In fact, the first thing everyone notices here in summer is the scent.”
Harry Hoblyn
In the zone between these extremes, Harry Hoblyn is keeping the spirit of the Bloomsbury set alive at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. He had a vast catalogue of pictures and writings to guide his choices when, after a scant year’s traineeship there, he suddenly found himself in sole charge of both house and garden during the pandemic in 2020. “It was a big responsibility, but a wonderful opportunity to experiment. I was very personally invested, but also had a strong awareness of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s legacy,” Harry says. “Vanessa wrote about the ‘sweet disorder’ of fruit trees with hollyhocks growing through their branches. It was never supposed to be tasteful or restrained. They
thought of it as the house spilling out into the garden; I try to keep that spirit alive.”
Lucie Willan
Lucie Willan also found herself in sole charge of a garden during lockdown. “I had gone to Greece to work in the garden at Sparoza, which is the base for the Mediterranean Plant Society,” says Lucie. “For 30-odd years it had been run pretty much single handed by a wonderful woman called Sally Razelou. When I arrived, she was 89 and still gardening but in need of a bit of help. Almost immediately, the pandemic hit and then, soon after, she died. Our relationship was brief, but rather wonderful in its intensity.”
Lucie had enough time to absorb Sally’s emphasis on organic, and the importance of Greek wildflowers to her vision, but not enough to fully understand which of the many quirky details around the garden
were creative choices, and which were the odd consequence of a lack of cash. “In every garden of this sort there is a hierarchy of priorities. The challenge is to identify the elements that are sacrosanct, and where there is creative freedom.”
Paul Smyth
Paul Smyth, meanwhile, is currently refining the Irish garden of Bellefield in a way that stays true to the vision of its creator, architect Angela Jupe, while making sense of her all-too-human impulse to plant trees and shrubs just a bit too close together. “Bellefield has a special atmosphere. You won’t muck it up with a single decision, but it can fade away,” he says. “I worked here with Angela when I was a student not knowing a thing, and she always encouraged you to ask why – it’s a good rule. Coming back as head gardener, the garden had started to slip. It still had great bones and great plants, but we were firefighting for a year and a half.”
Once a private garden, it is now owned by the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland and open to the public, so Paul is having to consider things such as widening paths for better access and locating a coffee shop. “I don’t want to rip the spirit out of it. A magical place can be ruined by an over-slick toilet block.”
Jonathan Zerr
This is a juggling act faced by many other legacy gardeners, including Jonathan Zerr, now in charge of
Bottengoms in Suffolk. This was first the home of artist John Nash, then of his friend the nature writer Ronald Blythe, and is now being developed as a flagship conservation garden for the Essex Wildlife Trust, effectively giving Jonathan responsibility for not one but multiple legacies.
“Before coming here, I had a year as a trainee at Benton End,” he says. “The two gardens are on a similar stylistic level. Both were collectors’ gardens – a reservoir of colours and shapes to draw from. I love the stories these plants tell, and they are my inspiration while developing the space for its role educating visitors in wildlife gardening. It must all be approached with an artistic mindset to stay true to the spirit of the place.”
Given how different all these gardens are, it’s interesting how much they have in common. As original creations of creative people, these gardens tend to be made up of more than botanical content. “Some people approach their gardens via a different medium than plants, soil and architectural spaces,” says James Horner. “This gives such places a unique sleight of hand which is hard to replicate. A faithful
restoration would simply miss the point. You have to take the garden forward from what its creator achieved.”
