In the garden
People would come from far and wide to admire the largest palm forest in northern Europe, I said
IONCE tried to turn a Wiltshire village into a tropical oasis. I was very young then —it was in the 1970s—and I was asked by the parish council to recommend trees to plant to replace the elms that had fallen prey to Dutch elm disease. The village is called Seend and it’s a spur of lower greensand above the clay valley of the Bristol Avon.
Looking across to the northern escarpment of Salisbury Plain, the elms framed the fields as thickly as in the Sussex Weald. I told them to plant 10,000 hardy palm trees, Trachycarpus fortunei, so that, in years to come, people would come from far and wide to admire the largest palm forest in Northern Europe. It would do wonders for the local economy, I said.
I remembered this many years later when I first visited Chédigny in the Loire valley. This is the village whose fortunes were turned around some 20 years ago by a visionary maire who decided to plant roses all along the main streets, around the church and in other public places. Some 1,000 roses—not a great expense—were key to this enterprise, many of them climbers and ramblers.
Chédigny now receives some 20,000 visitors in the main season of flower. A restaurant, chambres d’hôtes and gîtes abound and the population of the village has bucked the national trend and swelled instead of shrinking.
I saw exactly the same effect recently in a tiny Umbrian village called Rocca Ripesena. Every spare patch along the narrow streets has been planted with tea roses, with Noisettes gracing the walls of the houses and framing the views across the hills to Orvieto. You may think that little medieval hilltop villages an hour or so from Rome don’t need tarting up; I can only reply that the effect is enchanting and gives Rocca Ripesena a distinct character and charm.
The Germans have developed a system of Rosenstädte and Rosendörfen whereby towns and villages undertake to plant roses all through their streets and, usually, to develop a dedicated rose garden in a public park. They do it with an orderly efficiency that may detract from the romance of the roses, but guarantees their good cultivation. The Royal National Rose Society (RNRS) once tried to spark a similar initiative in Britain; it failed to ignite and died away. The RNRS folded in 2017, the much-smaller Rose Society emerging from the ashes.
However, there is an excellent example of what is possible to be found in Scotland. When David Welch ran the public parks of Aberdeen in the 1980s, he asked rose growers and bulb merchants to donate their surplus stock to him. Welch had a wonderful eye for colour and theatrical effect. He believed that a degree of ostentation was desirable in an urban environment and once described himself as ‘an advocate of floral vulgarity and swaggering excesses of colour’.
As horticultural officer at Blackpool from 1959 to 1963, he’d planted half a million antirrhinums every year to ‘vie with the illuminations’ and Welch soon set to planting up Aberdeen. By the time he retired in 1992, there were more than two million rose bushes and 10 million daffodils all along the verges and embankments of the granite city.
Readers may remember the work of the Roads Beautifying Association, which was founded in 1928 to plant the verges of highways with beautiful trees and shrubs. Miles of blowsy Japanese cherries would be frowned upon now, but the interworld War years were the high days of Kanzan and thousands of them graced our trunk roads, especially in the Home Counties.
These are short-lived trees in cultivation and almost all have since disappeared, sometimes to be replaced by the current enthusiasm for planting wildflowers in roadside verges. How I would love to see it revised— we shall all need cheering up when Brexit cuts in.
Forty years on, I rather regret the lack of support that my ideas received from the sturdy parish councillors of Seend. It would be nice to go back now and see the village transformed by exotic plantings far beyond the normal expectations of English tourism.
All the smart village houses (it’s one of those places with too many chiefs and not enough Indians) would be turned into tea shops and art galleries. Goodness, how Seend would be transformed and flourish.
Meanwhile, please remember Chédigny, which shows what is possible with a little imagination and determination. Roll on a raft of similar initiatives in Britain. Charles Quest-ritson wrote the RHS Encyclopedia of Roses