Garden of the Week
Massed informal plantings radiate around an historic greenhouse situated at the core of this atmospheric hillside garden in Fife
Irene Thomson is a rule breaker. She moved to historic Glassmount House with her family in 1975 and for the next three decades she maintained the surrounding woodland and huge stately walled garden as it was – “an easy-care 1950s’ style,
mainly laid to lawn with a few trees and hedges”. Then, when she retired in 2005, she set to work – and the transformation started!
The garden contains a magnificent MacKenzie and Moncur ‘Category A’ listed greenhouse, built more than 100 years ago by those pioneering hothouse engineers who created glasshouses for Queen Victoria. It has been renovated three times and contains a large main growing area filled with tender plants and two tunnels used for figs and grapes.
But Irene decided against designing a formal garden that might have been in keeping with the period greenhouse. After taking tentative steps to bring in colour by training clematis and climbing roses through the trees on the edges of the garden, she decided to chop down several leylandii to open it right up and created a network of five radiating paths. She then began filling the intersections between them with herbaceous plants to give a succession of colour throughout the year.
There was a huge amount of space to fill, so Irene didn’t want to be restricted by colour-themed
planting schemes or set plant lists. “I just used whatever plants I was given or could buy cheaply or grow from seed, and mixed and matched them at will,” she says.
She dotted Betula utilis jacquemontii around for its graceful habit and glowing white bark and gradually learned what worked well in her damp clay soil, becoming more knowledgeable over time.
“I really wanted tall plants to take the eye upwards, so I focused on things that grew to six feet, but then they swamped out the more expensive lower-growing plants, so I had to rework it a bit,” she says. “Also, with my soil they tended to grow higher than usual, so I had to bear that in mind.”
Irene finds that backdrop of evergreen hedges and trees such as thuja conifers, some of which are topiaried, provides a degree of formality and solidity to the rampant planting, together with traditional stone urns and the iconic
garden buildings. In addition to the greenhouse, her son Peter has created a stylish teahouse, pavilions, summerhouse, studio and pool house from salvaged materials. Many of these are elevated in order to enjoy views over the shelterbelt trees towards the sea.
In her quest to achieve yearround colour, Irene has planted spring displays of hundreds of bulbs, including many snowdrops and daffodils, with candelabra primulas, cowslips, meconopsis and hemerocallis. The borders overflow in summer with clematis, rambling roses and a host of tall, colourful flowers, including foxgloves, lupins, aquilegias, campanula, lilies with anemones and Shasta and yellow daisies providing late-season interest. Hostas and gunnera revel in damp, shady corners and elegant silver birch and cornus provide winter colour.
Even now Irene hasn’t finished. “I’ve really run out of room to fit any more plants in my garden, so I’m extending beyond the walls and experimenting with naturalistic planting on the boundary between the garden and the woodland!”