Full Monty: 30 years at Longmeadow
Even the best-laid plans are subject to change, as Monty muses on his arrival at Longmeadow 30 years ago, and how the garden has evolved since
I was asked the other day, if I was to start Longmeadow again would I do anything differently? Without hesitation I said, “everything”. This is because all the really significant design plans and planting were done over a quarter of a century ago. I have no regrets at all about that, but I now have wholly different influences and factors affecting my life.
Unless you have a designer in to do it all for you, almost all gardens evolve with time. Sometimes this is because you get initial ideas a bit wrong or learn more about the place and how your desired planting fares, find new inspiration, or just get bored and want a change. Money and fashion influence all of us. When I made the series The Secret History of the British Garden, a few years back, I was surprised by the extent that fashions have always influenced design more than anything else. Also necessity is very rarely the mother of invention. It was the invention of greenhouses, and of secateurs, that transformed fruit tree pruning.
So change is built in to our gardens by human impulses as much as by seasons and growth. Gardens are less about plants than people, and people change.
When you start to make a garden, it is all hopes and dreams, buoyed by the excitement of making them into a living reality. You trust in a future where all these aspirations will meet the images in your mind. The gestation period for Longmeadow was fully 12 months and in that time I filled books and notepads with drawings, plans, measurements and plant lists. In those pre-computer days (and I still have no idea how to draw plans on a computer), I spent hours and days at a drawing board drawing up scale plans. By the time we got here I had visited hundreds of gardens, designed a few and I had spent the best part of 10 years designing jewellery – so I knew my way round plans and the process of moving from page to reality, but inevitably gardens take a life of their own once planted, however meticulous and expert your designs.
As it happens I am neither meticulous nor expert. Intuition and what I call ‘feel’ plays a huge role in everything we have done here at Longmeadow. If it feels wrong no horticultural logic will make it right – and vice versa. The other huge factor in shaping the garden still applies and that is the absolute veto that Sarah and I have over each other. Nothing is planted or made without our full agreement. It is our garden, not mine.
I cannot stress enough how little money we had when we started the garden. So all kinds of things were planted because that is all we could afford or what we already had. Nearly all our hedges and trees were bought on the same day – 3 April 1993 – at a tree sale in Hereford. That is why we have yew cones, hornbeam hedges, cherries in the coppice, field maple hedges and a lot of pleached limes. When life gives you limes you make limeade – or pleach them.
What Longmeadow represents is a late-thirtysomething man, whose world had catastrophically fallen apart, piecing his life together again from the ground up. I had lost my house, work and all our money. I was deeply depressed. The rigid lines of the garden with its straight paths and hedged rooms reflects my need for order and structure and a safe place from the world. Were I starting now, the design would be much looser and more freeflowing but back then these were luxuries my mind could not afford. The formality of the layout was a salvation.
Back in 1991 when we moved here, we decided that we would throw ourselves into making the house and garden until the turn of the millennium and then take stock and probably move on. By then the garden would have matured sufficiently to realise all those plans and drawings and it would be time to think of new projects. But life is not so neat. This coming year it will be 30 years since we bought Longmeadow and the 11th hosting Gardeners’ World from here. I now accept the garden for what it is, a changing, shifting picture that includes a past that is no longer relevant and hopes for a future that may never happen. That is life. That is gardening.
When life gives you limes you make limeade – or pleach them