Woodland haven
Every plant has a story to tell in this leafy garden full of snowdrops and hellebores. Owners Nick and Jane Baker show us around
Woodland gardens always have an intimate, sheltered feel. In this enchanting example at the foot of the South Downs, the woodland f loor springs to life with snowdrops and hellebores in late winter. “We love our garden at this time of year,” says owner Jane Baker, who lives here with her husband Nick. “We didn’t believe anything would ever grow in our heavy clay, so we turned it into woodland.” The soil here is clay above chalk. “It’s wet in winter and bakes hard as concrete in summer,” says Jane. “We mulch with our own homemade compost and regularly dig in extra mushroom compost.” Fortunately, the snowdrops don’t seem to mind. “Every year we get so excited about them,” says Jane. “Our Galanthus reginaeolgae flowers as early as mid-October. A friend has 120 different kinds in her garden and she’s always pleased to announce that her first snowdrop is out before ours. Alas last year I think a squirrel must have had it... “When we first moved here 35 years ago the house and garden were in very poor condition and I got a bit despondent,” says Jane. “I remember backing up my little Volkswagen Beetle into the drive, thinking why have we done this? There’s no lighting, no heating and lots of weeds. Then I opened the car door to see a clump of snowdrops coming up through the mud, and I took some cheer from that.” The couple began planting with gusto, having brought two lorryloads of plants from their previous garden. “Our interest in winter gardening began while we were living in Brighton,” says Jane. “I was working at a school and we invited pupils to bring in a flower from their garden. It was January, and one girl brought in vast armfuls from different flowering shrubs – much to her embarrassment on the train! I asked if her dad would give me a list of the shrubs he grew, and took it from there. I still have a Chimonanthus praecox that came with us from our Brighton garden.”
The couple moved to Pembury House because the garden was bigger. “We’d always yearned to have a garden we could walk around, and Nick really wanted to plant trees,” says Jane. “Here we could do both. There’s something wonderful about putting on a pair of proper walking shoes to go out and have a good look at everything. “We started by planting an assortment of native silver birch, alders and beech for privacy along the neighbouring footpath – then blended in more ornamental Parrotia persica and silver maple (Acer saccharinum) closer to the house,” says Jane. “We made dreadful mistakes in those early days!” she remembers. “Most trees arrived here in my VW Beetle as tiny whips. We bought what we could afford and planted them straight away. Friends came round to spend a whole day helping us, but we forgot to put the tree guards on and by the next morning, rabbits had eaten the lot. “Nick then put up 3ft-high galvanised rabbit mesh around the whole garden (he abounds with achievement and effort; I’m more management!). But in drifts of snow, the rabbits can still come over the top.” Hellebores bring another flash of colour in late winter. “We first saw them 40 years ago at Margery Fish’s garden at East Lambrook Manor under the apple trees,” says Jane. “They weren’t as fashionable then as they are now, but we queued at Elizabeth Strangman’s Washfield Nursery in Kent for hours to buy some of her first picotees and doubles, and then later at Blackthorn Nursery in Hampshire, to buy some with an anemone centre. I became a bit of a hellebore junkie. However, we’re not ‘look what we’ve got’ collectors – we just buy them because we like them. “We did have a go at breeding our own hellebores, hand pollinating them and
getting terribly excited when the seed developed. We went out to gather the seed one night only to find that it had been eaten, probably by a hungry mouse! We never tried breeding them again, but natural seedlings are interesting anyway if you have a good collection of hellebores to start with. “When gardening disasters like that strike, it’s best to move on,” Jane says. “We lost a whole bed of hellebores to virus one year, and a lot of trees fell in the Great Storm of 1987. On the bright side, it opened up lots of new planting opportunities.” As you might imagine, the Bakers’ woodland garden is a leafy haven for wildlife, with visits from woodpeckers, treecreepers and nuthatches, which run up and down the tree trunks looking for insects. “We also have a rather fine bug hotel,” says Jane. “It’s a copy of one we saw at Chelsea Flower Show, which we made from salvage we found in a skip and leftover tiles from a friend’s roof renovation. We don’t know exactly what goes on inside; we don’t like to disturb them...” The garden abounds with nectar-rich blooms for early bees on the wing. “We have Cyclamen coum, winter honeysuckle, cardamines, various hamamelis cultivars, winter-f lowering Clematis urophylla ‘Winter Beauty’ and C. armandii, which often flowers before Christmas. “We also have lots of camellias,” says Jane. “My family was quite unusual; rather
When gardening disasters strike, it’s best to move on
than buy us a bunch of flowers on our birthdays or wedding anniversaries, my father would plant a camellia. He filled the garden with them so they all had a sentimental value. When he died about 30 years ago we decided to bring them all here. A camellia expert in the next village advised us that for the best chance of survival we should cut them right back in autumn and dig them up carefully. We hired a van but couldn’t get the doors shut, so Nick sawed off some of the branches. “I wasn’t sure if they would survive here in our heavy clay; my father gardened on lovely Thames-basin loam. We planted everything as soon as we got back and our camellia expert took cuttings from all of them, just in case. But they all survived and must be about 15ft tall now, including one that was my mother’s favourite. “This is what gardening is all about,” says Jane. “Memories wrapped up in the garden, stories the plants tell and the wonderful people we’ve met along the way.”