Garden designer Isabel Bannerman: ‘Romance has to be worked at’
As her and her husband Julian’s new online course goes live on Create Academy, the designer shares lessons from a lifetime of cultivation
The garden my husband, Julian, and I have here in Somerset is romantic in the broadest sense. It is an assemblage of what we like, of favourite and fitting plants such as daphnes and mock oranges, spaces, objects, vistas, shelters and places to work. Practicality is paramount; romance, after all, is not just fantasy, it has to be worked at, and unlike gardens we have designed to be open to the public — such as Arundel Castle or Asthall Manor — here it has to work with not very much help. Of course, rules apply, gardening is a craft and very hard work; to achieve beauty, usefulness and a relaxed comfort in the garden is not easy.
Everyone who had the luck of knowing and playing outdoors when young, in granny’s garden or an allotment, carries inside their heads a prelapsarian enchanted world. This was enhanced by the books we read, Great Expectations or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, where “lost” worlds of innocence and immortality were safely girdled and emotionally entangled.
Abandonment in these spaces is key, and we long to go back to a place, where nature is untrammelled, turned up to 11. This belies our lordly intentions of course; as gardeners we can never resist the urge to imprint the garden with the essence of “us”.
But our own aim is to get away with something which is not beholden to fashion, or hidebound by comparison with others, and if we are honest, not too tidy, because we don’t have much time. So, we plant things we love such as Salvia uliginosa or Alcalthaea suffrutescens ‘Parkallee’, plants we know will “do” and maybe cause one to say “ooh” — the giant cardiocrinum lily perhaps. And we nurture, but we also let it “do” its thing. For this is so often full of delight and surprise. Plants are better planters than we are, and that is why years of toil have taught us to love the simpler things, to encourage what works, and, in our case, usually lots of it. You don’t need rarity for romance. Honesty, Lunaria annua, is a most romantic, ruralist plant.
When we moved to Ashington Manor six years ago, leaving a ruined castle in Cornwall we swamped with rambling roses, it had not been lived in for more than a decade, let alone gardened. A huge sprawl of modern farm buildings had been razed; it was a flat landscape with few trees. The former you cannot alter, and the latter only with time. On the upside, we found deep soil and a bit of a microclimate that seemed to add sunshine to the already honeyed gothic of the Ham stone walls of the house and the little church that overlooks the garden. A cider orchard sold the place, to me at least.
And what did we do with this unprepossessing set-up? Before we put forward an offer, we agreed that we would set aside a fund for the purchase of mature plants and trees. At this stage of life (I’m 63 and Julian is 74), we don’t have all that much time, and we wanted to make some instant marks on the canvas. As for the rest — the pictures here give a clue.
Confusingly, while we call for letting go, we surreptitiously love a formal plan. We planned the garden round the north/south axis to the ancient church bell coop and two perpendicular paths out from the house that take you west to the orchard. Within that grid, we carved two places to sit and eat: the corner under an old wisteria and beside the house where the last sun rays hit. Repetition, rectangles and quadrangles linked by portals, paths and topiary, stitching and tethering the whole, leading the eye where we want it to go. The manipulations of “romance” are devious and many.
This intense burgeoning garden around the house is girdled with increasingly wilder long grass, bulbs, wildflowers, wild plum. Here flourish birds, bugs, amphibians, voles and moles, essential to the “romance” of a place. We are less keen on rabbits, deer (not a problem here) and hateful grey squirrels, because they destroy one’s tree planting efforts.
In the flower gardens we embrace a “live-and-let-live” ethos that shortage of time and labour necessitate, allowing plants to wander and colonise the paths. People who come seem to find the freedom of the planting (and the smell bath of the whole thing) relaxing, mood-altering. Our friend the writer Raffaella Barker said of our garden that it was where she would imagine a proposal scene in a film or a novel. That is quite old-fashioned, but maybe that’s key to that nostalgia?
If we could sum up our gardening ethos, it is simply to do what you like with gusto and passion, follow your heart and a few rules. There are underlying laws, horticultural science cannot be ignored, design too, but we wish to remain anarchists, and not to pressurise ourselves or others. Do the thing you like with conviction, and it is bound to work in the garden.
My kind of romance is immediate, intense, intimate, and heightened by smells. Essential is the “chatty corner”, somewhere to sit with a drink and a friend. Sadly the word “chat” has becomes dangerously associated with “bot”, but language, like gardens, changes and runs away from us to good and bad effect. The garden is a story, with luck it will take you out of yourself and to happier places.
We love abundant saturated colour, for which we have no rules, no colour “theories”. This is not to say we don’t have our prejudices. While we cannot cope with purple leaves of any sort, we like ferns and dark yews, dank mysterious places garlanded with rambling roses, which are not demanding. Roses like ‘La Mortola’, ‘The Garland’, ‘Sir Cedric Morris’ and Rosa moschata autumnalis, which flowers later and lovelier than all the rest. Roses up trees and bushes, roses over gates, and roses such as Rosa californica Plena and Rosa spinosissima ‘Single Cherry’ in long grass.
Gardens are about times of year and times of day. When in July the gloaming brings the moths to the phlox, stocks, lilies and narcotic Brugmansias in pots, and the Himalayan cow parsley shines like the Milky Way, then we idle, work done, in the perfumed lagoon of our English country garden.
Creating a Romantic English Country Garden with Isabel & Julian Bannerman, an online course, is available on createacademy.com
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