Newby Hall, Nymans, Bodnant. Was this the kind of thing we had a hope of getting into? And how on earth had such a scheme come about?
A little research revealed that the National Gardens Scheme was an institution that could have evolved nowhere but Britain. The inspiration arrived in 1926 at a committee meeting of the Queen’s Nursing Institute. In those pre-NHS days, the QNI was a charity that raised money to pay for district nurses and to provide for the retirement of existing ones. Ideas for fundraising were being batted to and fro before the steely gaze of the committee chairman, the Duke of Portland, when one of the committee members, a Miss Elsie Wagg, piped up. What a shame it was, she said, that Britain had so many marvellous gardens, yet most were seen by nobody except their owners and a few friends. Why not ask those owners to open for the appeal one day next year?
It was genius. If the idea could be implemented, here was a way to tap into one of Britain’s great hidden resources. But it was a big ‘if’, for the idea was presumptuous, impertinent, socially revolutionary even. Post-war Britain was still class bound. Garden-visiting was common enough, but only among a tiny minority. The thought of asking owners of large private houses to fling wide their wrought-iron gates to, well, anyone was outrageous. It smacked of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism or any of the otherisms which had been filling the papers recently. However, and this was the real genius, because the idea was to raise money for charity, and because it was approved by a duke, it looked mean-spirited to refuse. So suddenly, whether you were interested in gardens or just wanted a snoop behind the park wall, an irresistible opportunity presented itself. The Scheme licensed nosiness. It also sanctioned repressed British amateur gardeners to show off their efforts.
But what a feat of organisation. The idea lived or died by the contacts and persuasive powers of those setting up the Scheme. So, to be on the safe side, the first chairman of the new ‘National Gardens Scheme’ was a duchess (of Richmond and Gordon), who recruited a committee of well-connected county ladies, all with suitably fat little black books. And so was born the County Organiser: an imperious, horticultural version of the Pony Club’s District Commissioner.
As I read on about the history of the Scheme, a picture began to emerge of a type. A handful of retired senior servicemen notwithstanding, most were women with names like Daphne or Phyllida or Veronica, who soon became the grandes dames of the gardening world. The County Organiser tended to be someone who’d grown up within, and now kept, a large walled garden, the kind whose obituary—and County Organisers, it became clear, were the kind of people who got obituaries—said things like ‘could be impatient’, ‘fearsomely smocked and gaitered’, or ‘had a knack for engineering spectacular fallings-out, a process she thoroughly enjoyed’. She needed no reassurance about her place in the world, and had little time to spend reassuring those who did. As virtues, energy, efficiency and effectiveness took precedence over charm and humour; as a result, County Organisers were entirely immune to the latter. But in an imperial, ancien régime way, she Got Things Done. She was, in fact, my mother.
In 2002, to celebrate its seventy-fifth birthday, the NGS published a short history of the Scheme. There, on page 28, clustered around the Queen Mother on a staircase at St James’s Palace, fifty-four of these Lady Bracknells stare out from beneath their hats, with gimlet eyes and don’t-mess-with-me smiles—fifty-four iterations of the woman I knew best.
Under the organisation of these forces of nature, the Scheme triumphed from the start. In the summer of 1927 a printed list was included free with Country Life, detailing 349 gardens that would open in June ‘between the hours of 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ for ‘a shilling a head’. The ‘Women’s National Committee’ responsible had done their work well. The list included the King’s gardens at Sandringham, the Duke of Marlborough’s at Blenheim Palace, those of such contemporary gardening giants as Norah Lindsay, and William Robinson’s Gravetye Manor, not to mention ‘the best of modern gardening’ such as Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll’s garden at Hestercombe. Such was the success of that first June opening that the Scheme was continued into September, by which time 609 gardens had opened, visited by more than 164,000 people. The hitherto undreamt-of sum of £8,191 was raised for district nursing. Indeed, the Scheme was such a triumph that King George V wrote to the Gardens Subcommittee of the Queen’s Nursing Institute requesting the event should become a permanent way of raising money.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, hardly a great garden hadn’t been recruited. Chatsworth, Hatfield, Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote, Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst—they were all there. So, too, were the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George’s garden Bron-y-de, and Winston Churchill’s Chartwell, and even the Welsh garden where Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. In 1949 the guide acquired its distinctive yellow livery, and the NGS found its mascot. In no time, the slightly cumbrous Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity had become affectionately known as ‘the yellow book’.
Then, in the mid-eighties, Britain went gardening crazy, and a strange thing happened. Where the County Organisers had traditionally had to plead, persuade or order grudging friends, relations, earls, spiky industrialists and absent-minded bishops to do their duty, suddenly they found themselves inundated with applications. From worthy institution, the National Gardens Scheme overnight became an elite club, to which a new class of Capability Browns, Smiths and Joneses all wanted admission. At last there was a formal goal towards which the ambitious amateur gardener could aspire. And as the only official horticultural yardstick available, the Yellow Book naturally became the gold standard. Applications tripled and the County Organisers found themselves in the eminently more in-character role of laying down the law. Numbers of gardens in the Scheme more than doubled between 1980 and 1990 (from 1,400 to 3,000*) and, for the first time, formal selection—and rejection—criteria had to be laid down. Getting into the Yellow Book became a whole lot harder, whether you lived in the Home Counties or on top of a Welsh mountain.
To be considered for the National Gardens Scheme, a garden must:
1 Offer ‘45 minutes of interest’.
2 Be a good example of its type (cottage, alpine, herb, etc.)—if it is a type.
3 Have something of special interest (the view, a water feature, a national collection of plants, etc.).
This information was heartening. Forty-five minutes wasn’t so long. The type of garden? Well, there was plenty of time to figure that out. As for having something of special interest, Tair-Ffynnon’s setting and views must be as good as anywhere’s. Yes, on the whole there was room for optimism. All I had to do was learn how to garden.
There was, of course, one other small matter. Would anything grow so high up? But here again, I was inclined to optimism. We already had evidence that potatoes, mangelwurzels and hay had been grown on Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky policies, as that’s what many of its previous inhabitants had lived on. If they could survive, no doubt other things could too. Derek Jarman had coaxed life out of shingle, by the sea, with all that that implied in terms of wind and salt.* Stuff must grow on mountains, too; it was just a matter of finding out what. In fact, in the circumstances, my course of action was obvious: ask Uncle William.
Uncle William was the great gardener of the family, and my mother’s half-brother. He and my Aunt Jeanette lived in a secluded nook of the Dorset Downs not far from Sherborne. Ranged around a seventeenth-century chalk and flint cottage (its thatched roof pulled well down over its eyebrows, at home in any book of idyllic English country cottages) was a garden that even I couldn’t fail to notice was a plantsman’s delight.