A CUT ABOVE
The garden at Cherrytrees is awash with gorgeous flowers, offering a source of both joy and knowledge for its growers and beyond, says Antoinette Galbraith
The garden at Cherrytrees is a source of both joy and knowledge for its growers
We organised the bunches just to make people smile’
In June, during British Flowers Week, Amanda Barnes makes up bunches of flowers from her garden at Cherrytrees near Kelso to place on benches in nearby villages for people to find and enjoy. Delicious smelling pink and white roses, sweet peas, delicate clouds of Ammi majus and Antirrhinum combine with young, fuzzy lime green heads of Sweet William or perhaps some blue Nigella damascena. ‘It’s a way of promoting British flowers,’ Amanda says, ‘and I get some wonderful stories back. We organised the bunches just to make people smile.’
Few are aware the anonymous bouquets come from Cherrytrees, the late 18th-century Georgian house Amanda and her husband James fell in love with 11 years ago when they ‘were not looking to move to the Borders’. Like everyone familiar with the remote countryside north of Morebattle the couple fell in love with both the house and its dreamy raised position overlooking the Cheviot Hills.
For Amanda and James, who both spring from gardening traditions, the walled garden, built in 1812, was a particular bonus. James ran Dobbies Garden Centres for 23 years and both sets of grandparents ran garden nurseries. Presided over by an elegant Gothic style conservatory, the space is laid out in a cruciform style with rich, romantically planted paths and borders. Height comes from rope and pole trellises festooned with Rosa Paul’s Himalayan musk and pale pink ‘New Dawn’. More roses scramble up the walls, a row of agapanthus line the top terrace, while the Greek daisy, Erigeron karvinskianus, runs riot between the paving cracks surrounding the