Farewell to the garden of a lifetime Christian Lamb
Christian Lamb helped plan D-day. Now, as she turns 100, she leaves a beloved garden
There is something about big, wide, busy rivers that makes one long to live beside them. During the Second World War, I had the luck to work down near East Tilbury, where Henry VIII built blockhouses on both banks.
At Coalhouse Fort, one of these blockhouses, I worked as a 20-year-old Leading Wren – a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. I’d given up a place at Oxford in 1939 to become a Wren.
After a year of this, I again found myself beside the Thames, doing the officers’ training course, living under the white Palladian colonnades and domes of Greenwich Palace, arriving by ferry at the pier frequented by kings, queens, Drake, Raleigh and Pepys.
I met my husband, Lt John Lamb DSC, in Belfast when his ship, HMS Oribi, was sent there for repairs. I was a Plotting Officer there for the Battle of the Atlantic. We married in 1943. That was the year HMS Oribi famously rammed a U-boat.
Then, in 1944, I worked in Whitehall on the maps of the D-day landings. We dealt with individual pieces of the enormous jigsaw. None of us knew or discussed what the others were doing.
My brief was to delineate everything that could be seen on every compass bearing from each landing position visible from the bridge of an approaching landing craft. Big-scale Ordnance Survey maps were spread out on the wall, showing railways, roads, churches, castles and every possible feature visible to an incoming invader and from every angle.
When D-day happened, on 6th June 1944, I heard the announcement on the radio at 6am. I was thrilled to know that, at last, we’d managed to carry out the plans, envisaged for so long by so many brilliant brains. We were there! It was the beginning of our campaign to help get back France for the French.
Seventy years later, when I was dining with a lucky friend whose London flat overlooked the Thames, the thought suddenly occurred to me, ‘Why don’t I leave Cornwall and move up to London?’ My second thought was, ‘How can I possibly live without my garden?’
It had taken me 50 years to decorate a rather undistinguished patch in Cornwall with a much-loved collection of plants.
We came to Cornwall when the Royal Navy was cut in half, as frequently happens. A harbourmaster was required at the tiny port of Par. My husband was offered the job. We were well-used to travelling the world with our three children. Cornwall seemed no different from Malta or Singapore as a next stop.
It wasn’t until the children had flown the nest and stopped littering the garden with old bangers and bits of boats that I had the time and inclination to indulge my own passion for growing the plants I’d enjoyed in favourable climes.
The big conker tree at one end of the property provided a splendid shady area. Part of the garden was walled and the remaining boundaries I marked with camellia hedges. There are very many suitable, fastigiate varieties for this
purpose and, by placing the spreading kinds in corners and niches, I managed, with the help of the autumn-flowering sasanquas, to have most of my favourite varieties of camellia in bloom from October to May.
I wanted many small-flowering trees and shrubs to fit in, evergreen if possible. I like my plants to have many virtues – beautiful leaves, flowers of course, attractive new growth, fruit and seeds, autumn colour and even attractive bark.
Eventually I became so obsessed by my garden that I wrote a book about it. It took me five years of enormous fun and research.
And now I’ve sold my Cornwall house and my beloved garden – and moved into a Battersea flat by the Thames. I often think about what I miss most in my garden.
I loved September, when I divided up my dactylorhizas. These wild orchids have delicate brittle roots. It’s a pleasure to separate them with a neat little shake and a tweak.
Repotting my Vireya rhododendrons was satisfying, too. They can’t bear to have soil round their roots, which makes it a challenge to stand them in their pots.
They spent their winters in the cold greenhouse where they flowered the most sensational colours; for their summer hols, I put them outside on the terrace, where they continue to dazzle.
In their native home of Indonesia, they seed themselves in the tops of trees, which they ornament brilliantly, germinating in the apex of branches.
The bare spaces left between the shrubs were covered in a mixture of ground-cover plants, including: Anemone blanda, species geraniums, hellebores, Omphalodes cappadocica, with edging of Convolvulus sabatius and Mitraria coccinea, all disliked by slugs and snails.
I loved sitting on my terrace in the sun – or very occasionally in the shade when it was too hot – from where I criticised my handiwork and saw how it could be improved. I watched my birds hop about in the birdbath or make their nests with the hairy stuff off the palm-tree bark.
All this is just as well because quite a few jobs are beyond me – I turn 100 on 19th July. I keep having to remind myself how old I am and not to climb to the top of ladders in case I fall off.
I enjoyed the extraordinary variety of members of the human race the agents sent to view my house and garden.
One lady could not bear my bottle brushes: ‘Those must go,’ she said. How odd to despise the lovely yellow Callestemon sieberi. One man thought about fitting his baby grand piano into my little office. Another man was interested if he could squeeze his vintage Bentley into my garage.
My favourite family wanted only four bedrooms, closeness to the sea and magnolias – all of which I provided: M grandiflora, M stellata and the climbing Schisandra grandiflora var rubrifolia with heavenly little scarlet flowers, which climbed up the M stellata, covering the canopy with its brilliant blooms.
The small children enjoyed rushing up and down behind my biggest camellia hedge, now 14ft high. They liked the garden best for its ‘lovely hiding places’. The littlest girl hid behind Hydrangea ayesha, peering out between the blooms like a little pink hydrangea herself.
Many of them admired my different foliages, particularly the Podocarpus chinensis, whose new growth is especially striking, being very pale, and the Euchryphia cordifolia, which obligingly flowers in August, covering itself with little, scented, white blooms.
The ginger lilies – Hedychium gardnerianum and the white one, probably spicatum – also came in for praise. None of them had ever seen the very late Bomaria caldasii, covered in blossoms, or the climbing alstroemeria, which has to be tightly wrapped in fleece against the frost.
Now that I’m luxuriating in the riverside flat of my dreams, revelling in the activities on the Thames, I pick up the book I wrote about my much-loved garden, and wonder what terrible destruction is taking place there.
One thing is certain: I shall never go back and see!