Gardening
David Wheeler
Seven years ago, aged 83, Penelope Hobhouse considered herself too old to carry on working as a garden designer.
As she celebrates her 90th birthday on 20th November, she looks back over a gilded career which was never anticipated, nor planned or studied for.
A few weeks ago, we chatted animatedly, allowing me to remind her of the clever if somewhat underhand way she enhanced the garden at Tintinhull House in Somerset, where she lived as a National Trust tenant for 14 years. ‘I told white lies,’ she tells me. The garden was made by Phyllis Reiss and, under unwritten NT rules, tenants should be curators, not creators – meaning, ‘Leave things as they are!’
‘I knew Phyllis,’ Penelope says, ‘and I knew the plants she loved but was unable to find in nurseries before her death in 1961. During my time at Tintinhull they did become available, so I added them to the garden as she would have liked.’
That small scenario illustrates Mrs Hobhouse’s strength of will and determination – characteristics that, later, clients came to recognise and respect when paying significant sums of money for her to design gardens in both the UK and North America (the latter involving nine transatlantic flights one year).
Before Tintinhull, Penelope gardened at Hadspen House after marrying Paul Hobhouse in 1952. (Her brother was the late James Chichester-clark, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971.)
Having learnt her trade by observation and from knowledge passed on by gardening friends, she borrowed heavily an Italian style of design that flourished in the Renaissance.
‘I learnt English gardens weren’t the first and best in the world. The Italians had mastered the craft much earlier.’
Her love affair with the Italianate gave way only years later when, in her 70s, visiting Iran, she fell headlong for Islamic design. ‘The Persians had done it all before, centuries before…’
Hobhouse was succeeded at Hadspen by Canadian colourists Nori and Sandra Pope (Nori died in July this year). The house now has a new life as The Newt, a hotel – with remodelled walled parabola – which, to Penelope’s immense delight, employs some 30 local people.
Since leaving Hadspen, she has made two more gardens for herself. The present one, smaller than any before, still bears her distinctive formal signature, despite almost totally forsaking perennials in favour of less-demanding trees and shrubs.
As a revised edition of her heavyweight History of Gardening has just been published, I wanted to know which of her books she’s most proud of. She nominates her 1992 Plants in Garden History, a union of two great loves – plants and history; flames of past times fanned by a fruitful membership of the Garden History Society.
And the garden she’s most pleased with? ‘You won’t know it. It’s small, private, and occupies an isolated position on the west coast of Scotland, designed for an American couple many years ago. It wasn’t the perfect site but I enjoyed circumventing the wind, which threatened it from every direction; but the Gulf Stream meant tender trees and shrubs might thrive.’
Regrets? ‘The Queen Mother’s Garden I designed at Walmer Castle: they did not stick to my designs. I haven’t been back for years.’
Honours have rightfully been bestowed, including the RHS’S most prestigious medal, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild of Garden Writers, crowned in 2014 by the MBE.
And to what, at 90, does Mrs Hobhouse most look forward? ‘Next year in the garden and, hopefully, not being too old to look after it.’
Chapeau!