Garden of the Week
Despite having a garden for all seasons, Margaret Arnott’s passion lies with the 75 varieties she grows of this delightful spring stunner
Margaret Arnott is besotted with snowdrops and grows about 75 named varieties in her beautiful Cobham garden, skilfully aided by her partner Terry Bartholomew.
When she moved in there wasn’t a great deal in the garden, but the bungalow stood on a wide plot. She says: “The top part was given over to vegetables and the grass was in a terrible mess, so there was lots of work to do. My first job was to get rid of a very large clump of dead bamboo and I had to dig it out a little bit at a time. I also had mare’s tail and ground elder running riot.”
It was a labour of love, however, because as a child Margaret was given her own tiny plot by her parents, who were both keen gardeners. “I got to do fun things, like sowing packets of seeds, not the weeding,” she says. “Looking back, I wish I’d gone into horticulture, instead of working for an airline as cabin crew,” she adds rather wistfully.
Once Margaret got on top of the weeds and cleared the garden of weedy, unhappy rhododendrons, she planted two slow growing conifers, Thuja
occidentalis ‘Holmstrup’. “They’re tall and thin and now they look absolutely gorgeous, particularly in winter.”
Evergreens for structure are very important here and Margaret has planted 10 pittosporums especially for winter interest. “I also use photinias and a lot of topiarised box. If it has got bobbles or pompoms, I love it!”
This year, the box has suffered from box caterpillar for the first time so Margaret won’t be buying any more. “I’ve just acquired a cloud-pruned Japanese holly, Ilex crenata, and nothing seems to have attacked that.”
The beds in the garden are curved and there are two round ponds and a couple of water features created by Terry, plus a large central island bed devoted to her best snowdrops and hardy ferns. “I was brought up to believe you mustn’t have a straight path, so it’s curvy, curvy, curvy here!” Margaret explains.
“You must have a bit of ‘what’s up there?’ though, so there’s a central lawn to break things up.”
The garden opened under the National Garden Scheme in 2000 and Margaret, who has just taken on the responsibility of being Surrey’s County Organiser for the NGS, noticed that there were no gardens open in August, so they’ve decided to open in July and August when the dahlias and salvias are looking at their best.
When visitors arrive they’re drawn to one particular plant, a beautiful monkey puzzle tree. “It’s the only survivor from the old garden and it’s an absolute delight when the seed pods are on the tree. I get lots of questions and if I had 10p for each one I’d be a rich woman!”
Although it’s a garden for all seasons, it’s the large island bed, or the woodland garden, that shines in spring and her passion for snowdrops comes to the fore. “I got into them because my surname is Arnott and there’s a famous variety called ‘S.Arnott’. My mother was obsessed by it and always grew some.”
Margaret, who describes herself as nerdy, has a spreadsheet for recording the number of flowers every year, and ‘S.Arnott’ is going backwards at the moment. “It’s a bit like the stock market. Numbers increase, then go down and then they rally and bounce back again.”
Margaret, who acquired many
of her snowdrops from Louise Vockins of Foxgrove Plants, near Newbury (www.foxgroveplants. co.uk), adores a pixie-hatted snowdrop called ‘Trym’, while ‘Three Ships’, another favourite, always flowers at Christmas.
Once the snowdrops have finished there’s a green tapestry of hardy ferns that keeps the show going. “I tend to go for dryopteris because they survive in our light, sandy soil.” Their new fiddle-back fronds emerge in early May, covering up any fading snowdrop foliage and the attractive brown knuckles shine in winter.
Margaret’s also fond of the glossy, finely cut fronds of the Japanese lace fern, Polystichum
polyblepharum. There are also Oriental hellebores ( H. hybridus), erythroniums, omphalodes and pulmonarias and these flower in March and April.
This garden has hours of care lavished on it because Margaret spends every spare minute on her ‘labour of love’.