Penelope Hobhouse at Walmer in 1997; a view of the castle, below
A lesser woman would have rested on her laurels and got on with tending her garden, which still engages her for at least five hours a day, come rain or shine. However, it was precisely the lure of new learning that tempted Girton-educated Hobhouse. She would do it, she resolved, but she needed an elf to assist her. That lucky elf was me.
They say you should never meet your heroes – but I’d met Hobhouse already. We had lived in neighbouring valleys in rural west Dorset, and every year she would open her garden in Bettiscombe to hoi polloi in aid of village funds. The garden had been made from scratch on each side of an 18th-century coach-house: a stately green garden in front, framing a magnificent view to the hills, and a walled gravel garden behind, a cornucopia of rare and fragrant Mediterranean plants. Surveying the crowds with ill-concealed anxiety, Hobhouse presented a somewhat terrifying figure – stern of feature, headmistress-like in her deportment, clad always in sensible country clothes with her iron-grey hair tugged off her forehead with a Kirby grip. But she was also kind, willing to discuss the malevolent habits of sawfly grubs with my nine-year-old son without the slightest show of impatience; naming that same rare euphorbia or jewel-coloured salvia over and over again for everyone who arrived with notebook in hand.
She showed the same generosity when I arrived at her house to start work. By this time she had moved to her present home near Bruton in Somerset, to a long, low converted dairy, wrapped round two sides of a densely planted courtyard garden. It was, she declared, a garden for her old age – no lawn, just one broad path leading to the house, flanked by two skinnier ones giving access to her plantings. “It’s not really a garden at all,” she insisted, “it’s just a collection of plants.” But what plants – glossy-leaved phillyreas, silvery olearias, elegant evergreen Hoheria angustifolia, a pair of “unbelievably beautiful” katsura trees (Cercidiphyllum japonicum), exotic pineapple guava, Acca sellowiana. Colour comes from enormous pots of nicotiana and intensely coloured salvias, most of which survive the winter – cerise Salvia involucrata, purple ‘Amistad’, and gorgeous lapis-blue, Pernod-scented S. guaranitica ‘Black and Bloom’.
She needed me for the book, she said, because her memory wasn’t what it was. Indeed she feared she was losing her marbles. She would often stand in front of a plant and entirely forget its name. (Did I dare confess this often happened to me – and countless other gardeners half her age?)
What became – and remained – apparent, was that Penelope Hobhouse with even 50 per cent of her marbles is a good deal more acute than 99 per cent of us.
Her energy is prodigious, and the concept of slacking – even for a 10-minute break for a cup of tea – is untenable. No fact was ever too arcane to check. (Two whole rooms in her house are given over to her gardening library.) A specious argument by an ill-advised academic would be identified and dispatched within minutes. An improperly rendered plant name was a source of pain. She is also physically tough. Even in midwinter, the doors and windows remain open so that Poppy, her beloved cat, can come and go unhindered. While I sat huddled in layers of clothing, Hobhouse was indifferent to the cold. Perhaps this resilience is bred in the bone when you are brought up in a stately home: in her case, Moyola Park in Co Londonderry, ancestral home of the distinguished political family of Chichester-Clark. In the Sixties, another 18th-century mansion, Hadspen in Somer
“Unlike penny-pinching English landowners, Americans seem to be happier the more they spend on their gardens! One of the nicest of them was Steve Jobs. I didn’t know who he was until my son explained to me. We had fascinating conversations about design.”
“Harder to please was the Queen Mother. When English
Heritage asked me to design a garden for her at Walmer Castle, they told me she preferred pastel pink and blue flowers. I thought it was all a bit insipid, so I planted up some tubs with vivid red and yellow blooms.
“She was far too polite to comment, of course, but there was no missing that curl of the royal lip…”
Garden History. flower garden at Aberglasney in Carmarthenshire is founded on circles – but they all have an underlying strength, simplicity and clarity – much like the woman herself.
Hobhouse continued her design work well into her 80s, increasingly drawing on a new source of inspiration – the gardens of Islam, on which she became an authority. She regrets that the symmetry and harmony of Italian and Islamic gardens (and she believes the Renaissance garden drew on Islamic models far more than is generally recognised), are somewhat out of fashion now, with our current passion for naturalistic planting – though she applauds designers like Fernando Caruncho who manage to unite the two.
“When I first started designing, nobody really cared about ecology. That has changed completely. When Ian McHarg, a professor at Philadelphia University, first started teaching ecological planning in landscape, he told his students to consider only climate, soil, hydrology and so on. And he said, if you do that, beauty will look after itself. But it doesn’t. That is why I so admired Beth Chatto. She showed that we could bring environmental awareness to gardening, without sacrificing the garden as a fine art.
“Of course we should take account of ecological issues – you can’t garden successfully if you don’t. I discovered that in America – every state
‘I worry that things have gone too far – that we are embracing a kind of non-gardening’
‘Unlike the British, Americans seem to be happier the more they spend on their gardens’
had a different climate, different soil, different altitude, and I had to learn about that and work with it. I learned from great gardeners like Rick Darke and James van Sweden, and their creative use of native plants. But now I worry that things have gone too far – that we are embracing a kind of non-gardening.”
That, she thinks, would be a pity. Last Wednesday she turned 90, and is certain that her remarkable fitness of both body and mind can be ascribed to working daily in the garden. She’d hate to have a garden she couldn’t be busy in – however good it was for the planet. And with that she’s off outside again, to wrap up some tender treasure in fleece. There’s no stopping Penelope Hobhouse.
The Story of Gardening, Penelope Hobhouse and Ambra Edwards (Pavilion, £35)