Gardening
GATHER YE ROSEBEDS
Born 110 years ago (he died aged 94 in 2003), Graham Stuart Thomas OBE VHM, rosarian, plantsman, gardener, nurseryman, scribe, artist and singer, stands honoured in the pantheon of eminent English gardeners.
A bachelor, GST (for short) was someone I revered in my years as a nascent writer and editor entering the intricate world of professional horticulture. He seemed godlike, venerated in all quarters, despite a few regrettable characteristics which marked him out to some as matronly and humourless, a single-issue fanatic (not true) and obsessed by the job in hand. He could indeed be unsmiling – solemn, even (staid, to use a word that better belongs to his generation) – and perhaps he was unloving … but not when it came to plants. Passion then proliferated.
Matronly? No. Let’s settle for ‘fastidious’. His bungalow near Woking where I interviewed him on two occasions for British and American publications was meticulously ordered. Two upright pianos bookended his sitting room where his fellow madrigal singers often rehearsed. Formica surfaces in the kitchen were cold and clean. A labelling machine left a trail of instructions around the place – one on the loo seat proclaimed that ‘lids are for closing’.
Things were different in his garden. I recall a standard rose tied with binder twine to an old plumbing pipe – a lapse, perhaps, displaying only the plant, not the wider aesthetic. I heard him once refuse the gift of a plant, saying, ‘I have nowhere to put it.’
GST’S much larger and virtually unrivalled collection of roses resides in the double-walled garden at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire, where individual varieties, meticulously labelled, allow strollers to wander as if through a living encyclopedia.
Most of GST’S 19 books remain in print but, because of the gardening fraternity’s headlong pursuit of the new and idiosyncratic, rookies now find some of them out of date. That said, no library, anywhere, should be without his Old Shrub Roses (1955), Shrub Roses of Today (1962) and Climbing Roses Old and New (1965) – three classics unlikely to be bettered in an oldie’s lifetime.
As a student at the University Botanic Garden at Cambridge, GST was taught the rigours of garden maintenance. Who, today, double-trenches and buries ‘good manure’ below? Not I. In his Perennial Garden Plants (1976), he recalls ‘making with a length of cardboard and some coloured papers an imaginary border’, following Gertrude Jekyll’s colour schemes, in preparation for a talk he gave to fellow workers. He visited the legendary 88-year-old Jekyll at Munstead Wood, her home in the Surrey hills above Godalming, a ‘privilege … more greatly appreciated when I read later that, at that time, September 1931, she had almost given up seeing visitors’. She died the following year. He described her borders as ‘glowing with a plentitude of flowers, in an effortless colour progression’, saying it was like ‘walking through a static rainbow’.
In the 1940s, after working with Jim Russell at Sunningdale Nurseries (with a design wing renowned for planting schemes that focused as much on form and foliage as it did on flowers), GST began an informal association with the National Trust (NT), working initially at Hidcote Manor. Then, as the NT’S official gardens adviser in a 20-year stint from 1955, his was the watchful eye over such luminary gardens as Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland and dozens more.
Aptly, GST’S legacy is also rooted in earth. In 1983 his name was given by David Austin to a robust yellow rose which thrives in gardens throughout the temperate world. May it and the old boy’s professional reputation continue to flourish.