A garden never stops growing
IT’S 200 years since the first RHS garden opened, not at Wisley (above), the charity’s oldest site, but in Chiswick— a 33-acre patch of fertile soil was leased from the Duke of Devonshire, whose nearby home already had one of the country’s earliest glasshouses. Cultivating new varieties of fruit, nomenclature and testing were the primary aims, with produce exhibited at Society meetings and seeds and cuttings distributed to members. By 1825, Chiswick (right) was attracting 4,000 visitors a year, but, towards the end of the century, the RHS needed a site ‘beyond the radius of the London smoke’.
A businessman, scientist and inventor named George Fergusson Wilson established the ‘Oakwood experimental garden’ for ‘difficult plants’ at the 60-acre Surrey estate he purchased in 1878—Wisley—gaining a reputation for lilies, gentians, Japanese irises, primulas and water plants. After Wilson’s death, Sir Thomas Hanbury gave Wisley to the RHS in 1903. Next came Rosemoor in 1988, a gift from Lady Anne Berry; Hyde Hall followed in 1993, a centuries-old farm that ‘featured only six trees on the top of a windswept hill’—150 are now planted every year. Harlow Carr was acquired in 2001 and, in 2021, Bridgewater opened with 154 acres and an icehouse, lake and formal terraces that once belonged to demolished Worsley New Hall—the creation of which was ‘the largest hands-on gardening project in Europe’—as did RHS Hilltop, the UK’S first dedicated horticultural scientific centre. In all, RHS gardens now receive 2.3 million visitors each year.
Gardening has changed hugely over the past 200 years, explains RHS chief horticulturalist Guy Barter. ‘Things come and go in waves due to changes in fashion, styles and the willingness of the innovative horticultural industry to support these changes.’ In 1922, for example, ‘the formal Victorian approach’ was giving way to ‘the more naturalistic look’, and, although ‘formal rose gardens persisted’, there emerged the ‘herbaceous borders of the post-war period’, followed by ‘mixed borders featuring perennials, shrubs and other plants in the late 20th century’ and ‘more recently, a trend towards near natural gardens with grasses and wildflowers is emerging, harking back to 18th-century ideas’. Mr Barter adds: ‘Bedding plants have enjoyed a resurgence… and cottage gardening with lots of colourful flowers remains very popular, too… A big change is that a lot of people garden for wildlife now, and there is increasing awareness of the environmental benefits.’